7.1 The Evolution of Urbanization and Sustainability Thinking

Following Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s (Reference Carson1962) landmark study of the effects of excessive pesticide use on bird life and food webs in the United States, international concern for humans’ impact on the environment and the unsustainability of resource-intensive, consumerist lifestyles increased steadily. This concern was spurred by a series of industrial and shipping accidents that caused major pollution disasters, as well as other disparate strands in the 1960s. Consequently, the United Nations convened its landmark Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, for which three other classic texts in the sustainability canon were published from rather different perspectives on the need to live within resource constraints and in harmony with ecological principles. These were the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. Reference Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens1972), Barbara Ward and René Dubos’ Only One Earth (Reference Ward and Dubos1972), and The Ecologist magazine’s A Blueprint for Survival (1972). A key outcome of the Stockholm summit was the establishment of two specialist agencies, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Centre for Human Settlements (now the UN Human Settlements Programme, or UN-Habitat), to address environmental conservation and sustainability concerns in general and the complex challenges of urban development and sustainability, respectively.

Stockholm was also the first in what has become established as a regular series of global environmental sustainability summits, most notably the UN Conference on Environment and Development, or UNCED, in Rio de Janeiro in 1992; the World Summit on Sustainable Development, also called WSSD or “Rio+10” in Johannesburg in 2002; and the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, also called UNCSD or “Rio+20,” held again in Rio in 2012. In parallel, the more specific annual UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conferences of the Parties, and equivalent initiatives on other conventions and treaties have helped to focus attention and political negotiations, not always very successfully, on issues of sustainability. In addition, innumerable NGOs and other agencies operating at all spatial scales and from diverse philosophical and theoretical positions have emerged to create an immensely diverse ecosystem of environmentalisms, some of which advocate particular versions of sustainable development, while others argue for “deep” or other ecological environmentalism that is implicitly or explicitly antidevelopmental (compare with Giddens Reference Giddens2011; Bond Reference Bond2012; Middleton et al. Reference Middleton, O’Keefe and Moyo1993; Death Reference Death2010).

Essentially, therefore, sustainable development has become successfully mainstreamed, to the stage that world political and religious leaders across the spectrum profess at least rhetorical commitment to the objective at summits and in policy statements, even if their actions are less than fully aligned with or even directly contradictory to this aim. Having become a “sloganized” concept, for want of a better term – and with which all wish to be associated, since it is universally considered to be a good thing – sustainability has inevitably lost its original progressive (or even radical and subaltern) purchase in relation to poverty reduction, redistribution, and environmental justice, for instance. The Brundtland Report’s popularization of sustainable development came in response to a concern about limits to economic growth and associated environmental problems (WCED 1987), but there has always been disagreement over interpretation of the concept, including the extent to which it could be both a goal and a process, and how the economic, social, and environmental dimensions could be reconciled (WCED 1987; Simon Reference Simon1989). Even now, most official policies and programmes constitute examples of “weak” sustainable development, comprising modest reform or regulatory measures, accompanied by much “greenwashing” to ensure minimal change to business as usual. “Strong” sustainable development initiatives involving more substantive changes to current practices and lifestyles are generally associated with radical or progressive NGOs, grassroots movements, and the like, although some private firms are perhaps emerging as strong pioneers now that the green economy is seen increasingly to make business sense (for example, Zorrilla Reference Zorrilla2002; Simon Reference Simon2003; Weiss and Burke Reference Weiss and Burke2012).

Although it had earlier origins – and, indeed, one can usefully understand sustainability in the context of the longer perspective of urban history (Lumley and Armstrong Reference Lumley and Armstrong2004; Douglas Reference Douglas2013) – direct concern with applying sustainability principles to urban contexts gained rapid momentum after the UNCED summit in Rio in 1992. The specific instrument of urban sustainability intervention has been Local Agenda 21 (LA21), the urban component of Agenda 21, one of the two principal outcomes of the UNCED summit. Local Agenda 21 required local governments worldwide to formulate a sustainability plan for their towns and cities via a consultative process. The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (now known as ICLEI- Local Governments for Sustainability), an international NGO established in 1990, was commissioned to oversee implementation of LA21.

Inevitably, progress in urbanizing the sustainability agenda has varied greatly by world region and even within individual countries. Even in high-income countries, it initially proved quite challenging to gain the political will of elected councillors and to engage citizens beyond small, environmentally aware and already engaged minorities, while town planners and engineers grappled with the necessary revisions of planning and building codes and materials, infrastructural provision, and even funding models. Initially, at least, the geographical concentration of wealth; industry; energy-intensive, elite lifestyles; and emissions – and the vested interests they represent – in large urban areas were widely perceived to provide formidable obstacles to major change (for example, see Pugh Reference Pugh1996).

The international community also recognized that urban areas in low- and lower-middle income countries would be unable to implement LA21 unaided. Local resource and revenue constraints, a lack of perceived relevance, the immediate basic needs deficits that demanded priority attention, and the rural orientation of official development assistance programmes at the time represented a severe combination of constraints (see Pugh Reference Pugh2000). Consequently, ICLEI came to focus much of its attention on devising specific measures that would be appropriate and acceptable in such countries. The Human Settlements Programme of the London-based International Institute of Environment and Development, long headed by David Satterthwaite, has also played a consistent and invaluable role in engaged thinking, writing, and advocacy around urban sustainability challenges in the Global South, not least in influencing policy within UN-Habitat (for examples, see Satterthwaite Reference Satterthwaite1993, Reference Satterthwaite1997; Parnell Reference Parnell2016; see also Chapter 9). Satterthwaite’s (Reference Satterthwaite1997) paper remains important for clearly highlighting the fallacy that cities could become sustainable as urban islands, without sustainability in the wider territories and societies of which they form integral parts.

Programmes, organizations, and agendas developed under the banner of sustainability have grown steadily in number since the late twentieth century, and also across world regions and at multiple scales – from the level of the city or neighborhood to much broader global initiatives (Du Pisani Reference Du Pisani2007). UN-Habitat’s twin series of biennial publications, Global Report on Human Settlements, and State of the World’s Cities (and the latter’s continental companion reports) reflect how that agency’s thinking and programming on urban sustainability have evolved since the 1990s. Since its establishment in its current form in 2004, United Cities and Local Governments, the global association of subnational governments, has also played a prominent role in galvanizing urban sustainability actions, not least on climate change and the Urban Sustainable Development Goal, by its membership.

7.2 Urban Resilience: Evolution, Scope, Application, and Challenges

As with its counterpart term, “sustainability,” the application of the term “resilience” to socioecological systems gained prominence in relation to discussions of broader issues of conservation (Folke Reference Folke2006); both have been relatively recently applied to urban systems. Originally developed for application in fields as diverse as mathematics, engineering, materials science, and psychology (Olsson et al. Reference Olsson, Jerneck, Thoren, Persson and O’Byrne2015), researchers later applied resilience to ecological systems theory via mathematical models of population ecology (Bodin and Wiman Reference Bodin and Wiman2004). People later broadened the concept of resilience to include issues of human drivers and responses to ecological change, and eventually to the consideration of the adaptive management of coupled social-ecological systems. In contrast to sustainability, the idea of resilience places greater emphasis on issues of coupled system dynamics that can lead to nonlinear feedbacks and to slow, as well as abrupt, system changes. Resilience keeps at its core the acceptance and management of constant change, uncertainty, and “unknowability,” that is, the impossibility of achieving definite knowledge about system trajectories in complex social-ecological systems.

With the rapid acceleration of urban growth and its associated challenges, exacerbated by global environmental and climate change, resilience has become an increasingly visible term in discussions of urban planning and policy (Meerow et al. Reference Meerow, Newell and Stults2016). Resilience has found favor among widely divergent groups of actors, in large part because of the fuzziness and malleability of the term that enables it to act as a “boundary object” (Brand and Jax Reference Brand and Jax2007), representing different things to different sets of players. Yet the fuzziness of the term also generates challenges for operationalization of resilience planning, making it difficult to develop clear metrics and indicators of resilience that can be monitored over time. For instance, resilience, in the urban planning context, has been defined variously as a goal, as a desired outcome, and as a process, making progress difficult to grasp or measure.

Like sustainability, resilience is fundamentally a normative concept (Strunz Reference Strunz2012), although not always explicitly defined as such. Most discussions around urban sustainability implicitly assume resilience to be a desirable property, although this has been increasingly criticized by research that addresses problems such as urban inequity (such as Vale and Campanella Reference Vale and Campanella2005). In contrast to sustainability, the concept of resilience (and its counterpart, vulnerability) implies a greater emphasis on urban processes, including adaptive capacity to maintain dynamic equilibria and transformation to alternative desired social-ecological states. The goal of such planning has typically been geared towards achieving specific outcomes in response to global challenges, such as climate change (Romero-Lankao and Dodman Reference Romero-Lankao and Dodman2011). Some critics (for example, Olsson et al. Reference Olsson, Jerneck, Thoren, Persson and O’Byrne2015) argue that a fundamental dissonance exists in the way resilience is framed in the natural sciences, as a desirable system property, and in the social sciences, where the resilience of certain sociocultural norms that perpetuate inequity and power imbalances may be inherently problematic, requiring transformation and system change rather than resilience and the perpetuation of the status quo.

In recent years, the importance of resilience planning in an era of increased uncertainty has also gained ground, leading some scholars to propose the idea of cities that accept concepts of disturbance and change as fundamental to urban planning (Ahern Reference Ahern2011). Planning for resilience in an era of change requires the effective incorporation of typical characteristics of twenty-first century urban centers, including challenges of social, ecological, and economic diversity; balancing modularity with teleconnected networks (Seto et al. Reference Seto, Reenberg, Boone, Fragkias, Haase and Langanke2012); and redundancy with efficiency. A city with a diverse economy and reduced socioeconomic inequities can be expected to rebound more quickly from disasters as compared to a city with a specialized, narrow economic base with strong economic and social hierarchies, for example (Campanella Reference Campanella2006).

Finally, the protection and restoration of urban ecosystems is a historically neglected component of resilience planning that is now gaining significant traction across the globe (McPhearson et al. Reference McPhearson, Andersson, Elmqvist and Frantzeskaki2015). Cities with functioning, diverse, interconnected, multifunctional ecosystems exhibit greater resilience to natural disasters such as tornadoes and floods (Ahern Reference Ahern2011). Urban ecosystems thus provide cost-effective approaches to increasing the capacity of urban landscapes to deal with uncertainties and shocks that are typically more robust compared to anthropogenic, engineered solutions (Ernstson et al. Reference 160Ernstson, van der Leeuw, Redman, Meffert, Davis, Alfsen and Elmqvist2010). Further, given their multifunctionality, urban ecosystems provide diverse services in cities, acting to increase human well-being. Urban green and blue spaces constitute public goods that increase the quality of the environment (including air and water) and, as commons, provide food, fodder, and fuel wood to many urban residents, particularly in cities of the Global South. Thus, urban ecosystems increase the resilience of residents to food shortages in times of crisis, providing common pool resources accessed by all, but in particular used by disadvantaged sections of society, such as practitioners of ecosystem-based livelihoods and urban migrant laborers (Colding and Barthel Reference Colding and Barthel2013; Nagendra Reference Nagendra2016). Urban social movements, drawing on a wide base of urban cultural and social diversity, can be especially important in acting as a buffer against the problematic trends of privatization of urban green spaces witnessed in many cities. In this context, urban ecosystems connect the social and the ecological, providing an important motivation for social and community action that cuts across sociocultural and economic barriers, facilitates social entrepreneurship, and maintains feedback loops that contribute to the renewal of social capital in cities from Bogotá – where a gradient of ecological networks has been suggested as a way to connect wild habitats to built spaces (Andrade et al. Reference Andrade, Remolina and Wiesner2013) – to Cape Town, where a proposed urban biosphere reserve has the potential to address ecological goals of biodiversity conservation as well as social goals of inclusion and poverty alleviation (Krasny et al. Reference Krasny, Lundholm, Shava, Lee, Kobori, Elmqvist, Fragkias, Goodness, Güneralp, Marcotullio and McDonald2013).

7.3 Global Sustainability through Urbanization and Environmental Change

Whether or not it is an oxymoronic concept, as often claimed, sustainability pervades today’s politics, research, and practice in efforts to meet human development goals without compromising the resources and environment that sustain the economic goods and services needed to support them (see Section 7.1). However, in reality, the three pillars that underpin traditional sustainability thought (economic, social, and environmental) are rarely approached together, resulting in fragmented research perspectives and policies. Efforts have tended to focus on economic and environmental dimensions, with less focus on the social; however, more holistic interpretations of sustainability are emerging that focus on urbanization and cities as key components of this process (see Bina Reference Bina2013; Seto et al. Reference Seto, Reenberg, Boone, Fragkias, Haase and Langanke2012, Pickett et al. Reference 161Pickett, Cadenasso and McGrath2013; Steele et al. Reference Steele, Mata and Fuenfgeld2015). “Ecosystem services,” “well-being,” and “low-carbon” are just some of the new ideas and concepts that have moved the sustainable development discourse forward (Bina Reference Bina2013), increasingly in the urban context.

Moreover, the importance of a better understanding of urbanization processes, interactions, and feedbacks with other systems for global sustainability has become increasingly clear over the last decade. Urban environmental change research has expanded the place-based approach associated with traditional urban studies to address the temporal and spatial interactions that urbanization, a social-ecological process itself, has with other biophysical systems (Sánchez-Rodríguez et al. Reference Sánchez-Rodríguez, Seto, Simon, Solecki, Kraas and Laumann2005; Seto et al. Reference Seto, Solecki and Griffith2016). Knowledge and actions that deal with these interactions are critical for a modern agenda towards a more equitable and healthy world. Any hope of achieving global sustainability in holistic terms requires that we understand the connections between urban processes, natural resources, land change, human migration, financial flows, and technology transfers and innovation with environmental change in this broader context (Seto et al. Reference Seto, Reenberg, Boone, Fragkias, Haase and Langanke2012; Pincetl Reference Pincetl, Seto, Solecki and Griffith2016).

The next section briefly reviews salient areas within urbanization and global environmental change (GEC) research and practice that have added to sustainability and resilience thinking over the last decade.

7.4 Urban Adaptation and Mitigation within Sustainability and Resilience

The connections between urbanization and GECs, including the more frequent consequences of climate-related disasters and greater climate uncertainty, have increased the need to climate-proof and adapt urban areas to potential risks (Richards and Bradbury Reference Richards and Bradbury2007; Thornbush et al. Reference Thornbush, Golubchikov and Bouzarovski2013). Concerned parties have traditionally focused on the impacts in rural areas, since damage therein was often more extreme, causing concern over potential damage to natural resources and disruption of agricultural systems (Birkmann et al. Reference Birkmann, Garschagen, Kraas and Quang2010). However, attention to urban areas grew rapidly following numerous weather extremes and reports thereafter, highlighting existing gaps in our understanding of the unique urban challenges related to adaptation (Commission on Climate Change and Development 2009). These challenges are attributed to cities’ regional and global connectivity and their diverse characteristics, including their population size and density, stage within their respective development processes, and variances in hard and soft infrastructure. Particularly within low- and middle-income countries, where cities are often rapidly urbanizing, exposure to disease and other health problems became cause for deep concern and inquiry into urban coping capacity in the context of nonexistent or substandard development infrastructure, such as weak water and sanitation systems; high concentrations of urban poverty, including slums and informal settlements; and weak social and political institutions (Birkmann et al. Reference Birkmann, Garschagen, Kraas and Quang2010).

In the last decade, as more frequent and often more severe occurrences of extreme events – including intense rains and flooding, hurricanes and storm surges, and heat waves – persisted, so did the emergence of urban adaptation responses, prompting research on multiscale responses within urban areas (that is, at the individual, neighborhood, community, or city levels) (Bicknell et al. Reference Bicknell, Dodman and Satterthwaite2009). A number of research advancements followed, including the identification and assessment of the diversity of actions and comprehensive adaptation strategies in cities across regions (Carmin et al. Reference Carmin, Nadkarni and Rhie2012), the urban governance and institutional capacities to pursue adaptation (Anguelovski and Carmin Reference 159Anguelovski and Carmin2011; Aylett Reference Aylett2015), and more nuanced understandings of drivers of vulnerability and risk in various urban populations (Garschagen and Romero Lankao Reference Garschagen and Romero Lankao2015). In the latter case, resilience theory has provided a lens or tool to approach climate change adaptation and to manage social-ecological systems (Garschagen Reference Garschagen2011; Section 7.2). Today, “resilience” is often used in the same manner as “adaptation”; that is, building urban resilience often implies building urban adaptive capacity to stresses and shocks from climatic events. Efforts to create urban resilience “toolkits” through disciplinary integration have grown in recent years, along with attempts to codesign comprehensive city strategies with the involvement of multiple stakeholders (Solecki et al. Reference 162Solecki, Leichenko and O’Brien2011).

On the other side of the coin, mitigation actions, like adaptive actions, are often implemented locally in cities as part of national efforts to reduce GHG emissions. In aggregate, aggressive urban mitigation actions could have profound global impacts (Seto et al. Reference Seto, Dhakal, Bigio, Blanco, Delgado, Dewar, Edenhofer, Pichs-Madruga, Sokona, Farahani, Kadner and Seyboth2014). Since the 1992 Kyoto Protocol and events thereafter, such as Rio+20 and the 2015 UNFCCC summit in Paris (COP 21) (see Section 7.1), many nations have committed to reducing their emissions footprints as part of broader sustainability efforts. This has translated given impetus to cities, where the majority of emissions occur and where the majority of efforts to curb them are undertaken. Many cities have created baseline GHG emissions inventories and sustainability portfolios that include consumption- and production-based efforts to reduce emissions. Some of these efforts include municipal and residential emissions reductions through improving energy efficiencies in built infrastructure, encouraging alternative modes of transportation, and increasing efficiencies in water treatment and distribution; promoting urban food production, composting and recycling, and reduction in water use; and integrating green infrastructure and tree planting into the urban landscape for carbon sequestration. These and myriad other efforts and innovations have been tailored to cities’ individual needs and cultural, geographical, and economic characteristics (Seto et al. Reference Seto, Dhakal, Bigio, Blanco, Delgado, Dewar, Edenhofer, Pichs-Madruga, Sokona, Farahani, Kadner and Seyboth2014; Simon Reference Simon and Simon2016 ). “Low-carbon” cities are a new trend found in the discourse of mitigation that people are employing in urban environments worldwide. Such cities are increasingly being touted as having capabilities to transform sociotechnical and governance systems (Bulkeley et al. Reference Bulkeley, Castán Broto, Hodson and Marvin2011) through the redesign and reconfiguration of energy infrastructures. Personnel at ICLEI, the World Bank, and the World Wildlife Fund in China, among others, for example, are pursuing a low-carbon agenda wherein “a low-carbon city recognizes its responsibility to act. It pursues a step-by-step approach towards carbon neutrality, urban resilience and energy security, supporting an active green economy and stable green infrastructure” (ICLEI 2016). Such actions represent what some refer to as the emergence of a low-carbon urban transition. However, both actual progress and the extent to which urban adaptation or resilience and carbon reduction efforts are integrated with broader development goals are unclear and remain in need of further research.

7.5 Integrating Adaptation, Mitigation, and Urban Development for an Equitable Future

Urban system complexity and dynamics across scales are not new to the understanding of urban sustainability, but approaches often continue to oversimplify the interactions of urban systems with other socioeconomic, geopolitical, and environmental processes. Urbanization and GEC research foster multidimensional perspectives that transcend the short term and cross spatial scales, but they would benefit from further disciplinary integration to build new theories and methods. Such knowledge, for example, would be useful for cities to better operationalize adaptation to and mitigation of the negative impacts of climate and other environmental change, and could strengthen the social dimension in the sustainability narrative (Sánchez-Rodríguez Reference Sánchez-Rodríguez, Martine, McGranahan, Montgomery and Fernández-Castilla2008).

As a term, sustainability has often been used to bridge mitigation and adaptation; it has been well documented that to achieve long-term urban sustainability, efforts to promote urban resilience to climate change that are inclusive of both adaptation and mitigation strategies must be bundled with broader development policies and plans (Leichenko Reference Leichenko2011). Research continues to stress the importance of integrating the two often conceptually distinct strands of sustainability and mitigation/adaptation (Golubchikov Reference Golubchikov2011; Dodman Reference Dodman2009; Thornbush et al. Reference Thornbush, Golubchikov and Bouzarovski2013), as findings show that adaptation actions (such as greater use of air conditioning as urban temperatures rise) can sometimes have an inverse effect on mitigation (a proportional higher energy use and GHG emissions) – known as maladaptation.

The idea that integral components of long-term urban sustainability and global sustainability include justice and equity is emerging within urban responses to climate change. This shift arises from our recognition that, first, the responsibility for climate change is not equally distributed, meaning that some nations and cities are doing more with respect to mitigation and reducing emissions than others. Second, climate change does not affect all people equally or in the same ways, as some populations, and groups within populations, are more vulnerable due to historically rooted, political-economic relationships and processes that are not beneficial for all (Steele et al. Reference Steele, Mata and Fuenfgeld2015). Recent inquiry into the relationship between climate justice principles in urban policy development has found remarkable differences in both mitigation and adaptation policies in terms of distributional and procedural justice in cities of both the Global North and South (Bulkeley et al. 2012).

Further research into vulnerability, equity, and social justice could help frame policies with fair or just outcomes through a greater understanding of existing inequality or where/how future inequality might occur. Resilience theory that incorporates governance, institutional processes, and organizational structures could add to the understanding of the existing strengths and constraints of governments, institutions, and organizations in different sociocultural contexts, yielding more successful integration of concepts of resilience and transformation in sectoral policies, urban planning, and design (Garschagen Reference Garschagen2011). Emerging eco-social justice perspectives are also broadening the sustainability agenda by increasing attention to the needed integration between environmental change, social change, human vulnerability or resilience, and biodiversity loss in the city (Steele et al. Reference Steele, Mata and Fuenfgeld2015).

Ultimately, the call to transform our cities and to push the “urbanization transition” along more sustainable trajectories is urgent, but challenging. To be successful, it requires understanding context and leverage points for change, which will require continued analysis of urbanization processes (including drivers, interactions, and outcomes) that occur at multiple scales (see Part III, “Urban Transformations to Sustainability”). Research approaches that frame urbanization as an opportunity for global sustainability, wherein principles of equity and justice are centralized, hold promise for achieving such transformations.

8.1 Introduction

Due to the unprecedented growth and emergence of urban areas around the world, urbanization is one of the most significant trends of the twenty-first century. By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in cities, and by 2050, nearly 70 percent (UN-Habitat 2015). The acceleration of the urban phenomenon poses unexpected and motley challenges for contemporary societies, which are in need of new metrics to measure the dimensions circumscribing today’s urbanization.

Urban indicators offer an overall snapshot of the city in order to determine intra-urban variations and areas that require greater attention from policy-makers. In terms of policy use and analysis, urban indicators play a key role in creating good policies for three main reasons: first, they highlight relevant issues that should be considered throughout the design and implementation of public policies; second, they are effective tools for policy-makers to set concrete targets for urban policies (OECD 2000); and third, they can help to assess the performance of the policies implemented by local, regional, and national authorities.

New metrics require a shift in the conceptualization and understanding of city progress, moving well beyond traditional economic metrics towards more comprehensive and holistic perspectives that position both human and environmental well-being at their cores. The shortcomings and inadequacies of conventional economic indicators as development standards reveal that urban well-being can no longer be equated with economic progress. Thus, a paradigmatic transformation that moves away from this traditional perspective towards new measurements of development becomes fundamental.

This chapter addresses the importance and value of urban indicators and their contribution to the design of better informed, sound policies. It briefly reviews the evolution of different developments in measuring and understanding cities, demonstrating that models based on classical economics have been insufficient. The New Urban Agenda, the Paris Agreement, and the 2030 Development Agenda – embodied in the urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 (see Chapters 7 and 9) – require the introduction of new and innovative sets of indicators. We must use such tools in analyzing current urbanization patterns through multidimensional approaches to improve the difficult task of managing cities and to refine policy-making in accordance with the SDGs. This work seeks to demonstrate the value of urban data as an essential tool for the formulation of better informed policies at local, national, and international levels. Such data provide useful information that allows for strategic decision-making oriented towards the mitigation of both direct and indirect consequences of urbanization in diverse contexts and city sectors.

The next section presents the evolution of measurement tools, emphasizing the main characteristics and contributions of each generation of indicators. Thereafter, the chapter provides a discussion of the importance of local and regional government empowerment for meeting the 2030 Development Agenda and concludes by emphasizing the need for greater efforts to design better measurement instruments to fill the gaps in existing sets of urban indicators.

8.2 The Need for Urban Indicators

In many parts of the world, urban phenomena and processes of urbanization remain poorly documented, understood, and measured. Many cities around the world are suffering from inadequate urban data, leading to an information crisis that is undermining their capacity to develop effective urban policies (Muhammad Reference Muhammad, Pereira and Komoo2001). Too often, the existing data that cities have are not adequately detailed, documented, or harmonized, or are not available and accessible for critical issues relating to urban growth and development.

Further, numerous cities lack a sustained or systematic appraisal of urban problems, such as loss of public space, environmental impact, and land consumption. Due to the inadequacy of existing measurement tools along with urban data deficiencies in these cities, there is little internal appreciation of what their own policies and programs are achieving (Muhammad Reference Muhammad, Pereira and Komoo2001). This impedes appropriate monitoring and assessment, as well as an accurate formulation of public policies. Even in countries with a strong monitoring culture and data collection practices, the development of a coherent and reliable set of indicators for urban areas is not a simple task (Wong Reference Wong2006).

The arrival of the 2030 Development Agenda, along with the SDGs, marks a turning point with great potential to fill the urban data vacuum in the upcoming years. According to the monitoring framework proposed by the “Urban SDG,” embodied in SDG 11, which calls on us to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable,” accurate urban data and metrics enable cities to make decisions about the best policies and means to track urban progress, while also documenting a city’s performance in terms of policy outcomes and achievements (UN-Habitat 2015). The assessment and monitoring of the effects of urban dynamics are frequently used as tools in urban planning for guaranteeing a more sustainable development path. Therefore, a monitoring framework oriented towards improving the difficult task of administering and managing cities in accordance with the 2030 Development Agenda is a fundamental precondition to meeting the SDG targets.

Furthermore, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, “Indicators are needed to monitor and evaluate the impact of compact city policies. They will make it possible to benchmark progress and establish future goals. In particular, internationally comparable indicators can help policy makers analyze their policy performance from a wider perspective and improve their policy actions” (OECD 2012: 80). In this regard, urban indicators are crucial tools for providing objective evidence of prevailing conditions and changes over time (Muhammad Reference Muhammad, Pereira and Komoo2001) associated with complex urban phenomena, yet they must also be able to evolve as the world becomes more urbanized. It will become increasingly important to develop a greater amount of meaningful urban indicators that aim for a broader depiction of urban dynamics.

8.3 The Evolution of Measuring and Monitoring Cities: What Has Been Done?

To date, there have been several attempts to measure a city’s progress towards sustainable urban development. Diverse actors and stakeholders working at different scales have immersed themselves in the difficult task of defining a set of indicators covering the totality of the urban picture in order to assess the state of urban development across nations. However, due to the increasing need to measure a broader conception of human and societal well-being, both global and local efforts to develop urban indicators have moved beyond economic growth as a metric for progress towards a comprehensive and integral understanding of human and ecological welfare. This has meant a change from a national income accounting system to a more localized and people-centered approach (Wong Reference Wong2014).

The initial attempts to measure and assess urban development through standardized metrics were carried out by supranational organizations such as the World Bank, the UN, and the OECD, among others. They focused on developing isolated and sectoral indicators that would monitor and collect information from the national level, leading to an incomplete depiction of urban dynamics. More recently, national efforts through domestic statistical agencies have also collected data at the national and subnational levels within certain countries. Both public and private subnational and local efforts have also collected data in a decentralized fashion, which, under certain circumstances, could be more reliable.

In the context of the Post-2015 Development Agenda, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pointed out that we need to “look beyond the confines of economic growth that have dominated development policy and agendas for many years” (UN-Habitat 2013: iii). Current urban indicators should “examine how cities can generate and equitably distribute the benefits and opportunities associated with prosperity, ensuring economic well-being, social cohesion, environmental sustainability, and a better quality of life in general” (ibid.). In addition, the OECD has emphasized that “the measurement of sustainable development requires drawing together indicators from the three dimensions of sustainable development, the economy, the environment and society. The two primary aims are to form a coherent picture of sustainable development trends and to provide information that is relevant to policy questions” (OECD 2000: 7).

In this spirit, during the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, the leaders of international organizations and institutions that have traditionally relied on economic metrics to measure development argued that GDP is not a good way to assess national economic health and that a new measure is urgently required which better assesses the dynamics that have emerged as a result of urbanization processes. (Thomson Reference Thomson2016). This echoes longstanding critiques by social activists, progressive economists, and some international agencies. The current GDP-based approach emerged as the result of a long process of empirical and conceptual evolution, which began early in the twentieth century when Simon Kuznets introduced GDP in the 1930s. Since then, the design and the development of concepts, metrics, and monitoring frameworks have been a constant around the world.

After analyzing the main urban indicators, one can distinguish three main generations in their evolution over time. These generations attempt to quantify a greater number of urban dynamics components in order to better measure and understand complex urban phenomena, each conceived from diverse contexts, frameworks, and international consensus regarding the conceptualization of development. The first generation is based on classical economic indicators as a metric for city progress; the second generation is characterized by the use and design of thematic indicators based on a broader understanding of development, which is embodied in the Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs; the third generation corresponds to the current set of indicators that address more holistically and comprehensively the new conceptualization of city prosperity contained in the 2030 Development Agenda and the SDGs (Figure 8.1).

Figure 8.1 The evolution of urban indicators

It is important to emphasize that their evolution through successive generations does not mean that indicators from the first and second generations are now useless, obsolete, or invalid due to their antiquity. What this evolution demonstrates is ongoing progress in the increasing complexity and improvement of urban indicators to offer a broader approach to urban dynamics. Indeed, first-generation indicators continue to be used in different contexts, not least as updates to long time series, and demand remains for some data used in them. Not all are amenable to incorporation into newer generation indicators, but having some basic data is preferable to none. In Sections 8.3–8.5, we will explain in further detail each generation of indicators and their respective main characteristics. We will also provide some examples of urban indicators that best illustrate each generation.

8.4 First Generation of Urban Indicators

Over most of the past century, our understanding of city dynamics was very limited, due in part to data sparseness and deficiencies. The main indicators to measure progress and development were economic metrics with a macro-perspective, which only addressed three main dimensions of the city: the economic dimension, through GDP; the demographic dimension, through population count; and the size dimension, through city sprawl. In this manner, people measured cities using isolated indicators that reflected only a small piece of the city puzzle. Even basic attempts to understand urban dynamics through population size are problematic, in part because of the diverse institutions carrying them out. Urban indicators that emerged within this first generation illustrate the urban reality with an atomistic, unidimensional, and simplistic approach. Because these indicators were based on economics, they were not useful for explaining subjective urban issues such as well-being in terms of quality of life. Furthermore, the monitoring frameworks of this generation lack local contextualization. They have a generic and objective quantitative nature, and they serve only for comparative exercises.

The first attempt to develop urban indicator sets by a supranational organization occurred during the 1960s when the World Bank launched the first World Development Indicators Series, which aimed to monitor city achievements by the international development goals of that time (Wong Reference Wong2006, Reference Wong2014). These series continue to be published annually, with each year’s report focusing on a specific aspect of development (World Bank 2016) to reflect development’s increasing breadth and complexity.

8.5 Second Generation of Urban Indicators

The arrival of the new millennium marked a watershed moment in assessing cities. As the world became increasingly urbanized and global challenges more complex – or, at least, were becoming recognized as such – the year 2000 provided a unique opportunity to reverse the unsustainable evolution of cities. Great enthusiasm and optimism surrounded the introduction of the MDGs, a suite of eight goals that established measurable, universally agreed-upon objectives oriented towards the achievement of progress in “developing countries” in areas such as income, poverty, access to improved sources of water, primary school enrollment, and child mortality (UNDP 2016).

However, the arrival of the second generation of urban indicators in 1992, the year when Agenda 21 was launched at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, or UNCED (see Chapter 7), preceded the MDG innovation. Authors of the Agenda stressed that as “the need for information arises at all levels, from that of senior decision-makers at the national and international levels to the grass-roots and individual levels” (UN 1992), it is crucial to bridge data gaps and improve information availability in order to ensure better decision-making based on increasingly sound information. As a result, the sectoralization of indicator sets, linked to the narrowing of aims to target specific policy questions (OECD 2000), and the application of greater attention to local dimension of cities became the most visible trends among the second generation of urban indicators. These trends necessitated a shift from the conventional macroeconomic perspective towards a broader approach to urban dynamics that included new dimensions, themes, and methods to measure and assess city performance.

During this period, people realized that cities could no longer be measured and understood as the sum of income, population, and city sprawl; the accelerated urbanization phenomenon required the introduction of new dimensions into the city equation in order to obtain a broader picture of urban dynamics. Thus, the indicator sets that emerged paid greater attention to human and ecological well-being. Some examples of international urban indicator sets that clearly illustrate the main characteristics and the approach of this generation are The Global City Indicators Program, designed by the World Bank; The Cities Data Book, developed by the Asian Development Bank; and Global Urban Indicators and Urban Governance Index, both created by UN-Habitat (Box 8.1).

8.6 Third Generation of Urban Indicators

Since the 2030 Development Agenda launched in September 2015, a strong commitment to achieving a more holistic form of urban prosperity and development emerged among the majority of nations around the world (Wong Reference Wong2014). A shift in the paradigms of development, subjective well-being, and city prosperity towards a broader, multidimensional understanding of these aspects led to the arrival of a third generation of urban indicators. The publication of the State of the World’s Cities 2012/2013: Prosperity of Cities (UN-Habitat 2013) marked an inflection point between the second and third generations. It triggered significant discussion among the international community that translated into the introduction of a new, multidimensional conceptualization of city prosperity, materialized in the City Prosperity Index, or CPI.

The conception of the CPI comes with a strong assertion of the vitality and transformative dynamics of cities, and thus their importance in what is now the urban age (UN-Habitat 2013, cited in Wong Reference Wong2014), for new types of cities that achieve a sustainable path of development. In this regard, SDG 11 recognizes urbanization as a transformative force for development which, if effectively steered and deployed, can help the world to overcome many of its major global challenges (UN-Habitat 2015). City prosperity is currently understood in terms of a more integrated and holistic approach than in the past, which seeks to promote collective well-being, public goods, and overcoming the dangers posed to cities in a context of rapid urbanization. The CPI estimates prosperity through different interlinked dimensions: productivity, infrastructure development, quality of life, equity and social inclusiveness, environmental sustainability, and governance. Arriving at a third generation of urban indicators such as the CPI meant

The introduction of a third generation of urban indicators also meant the emergence and immersion of new actors and stakeholders in the difficult task of designing and developing innovative, holistic, and integral sets of indicators to measure and assess urban dynamics. Such diversification of actors implied a fundamental change in the structure of the conventional architecture of the global monitoring framework of our century (see Box 8.2). An example that clearly illustrates the emergence of this trend is the appearance of the World Council on City Data (WCCD) an independent international organization that hosts a network of innovative cities committed to improving services and quality of life using open-city data. It also provides a consistent and comprehensive platform for standardized urban metrics (WCCD 2016). Currently, the WCCD offers a new set of 100 urban indicators that comprise 17 dimensions of urban dynamics based on the first international standard on city data, ISO 37120.

The recent adoption of the Social Progress Index at the local level among some cities around the world is another example that clearly demonstrates the diversification of sources of urban data as well as the broadening of the dimensions measured during the current generation of urban indicators. The Social Progress Index is a framework designed to measure the diverse elements of social progress, to document progress, and to encourage interventions to enhance human well-being (Social Progress Index 2015).

8.7 Towards a Fourth Generation of Urban Indicators

Despite efforts to measure and assess urban dynamics through more holistic indicators, our understanding of cities is still limited in four different ways: most reports tend to have partial global geographical coverage of specific regions; many tend to focus on measurement at the national level; they often provide a small depiction of a particular aspect of urban dynamics (Wong Reference Wong2014); and most lack a territorial, “geo-localized” approach.

Although we have witnessed huge progress in the development of urban data, as of 2017, there is no single set of indicators or monitoring frameworks that covers the full range of issues included in the broad agenda of urban dynamics. In fact, despite progress in many Western countries, even the economic output of cities remains elusive, as data collection for this information is lacking in most countries. These limits to our current measurement tools affect our ability to assess trade-offs among alternative policy choices accurately (OECD 2000). For this reason, the increasing necessity of relying on more robust, coherent, and flexible frameworks of indicators to analyze the performance of cities has been placed at the core of the global agenda. The current version of the CPI is a useful starting point (Sands Reference Sands2014), but it is not enough. For instance, even though the CPI theoretically accepts the importance of governance, there is no clear definition of what CPI means with regards to urban and land governance, or how to measure it. The prevailing limitations of currently available sets of urban indicators remind us that we need to keep moving forward towards a fourth generation. As Wong says, “There are still significant knowledge gaps in the framing and operationalization of prosperity” (Reference Wong2014).

A fourth generation of urban indicators should provide a broader, people-centered approach; alongside the existing monitoring frameworks, this generation of indicators should also include a strong territorial dimension into city analysis as a key factor that could enhance the accuracy in estimating urban governance. This means the adoption of a more localized approach of development at the city level, in order to provide a more contextualized interpretation of urban dynamics.

8.8 What We Have Learned from Monitoring Cities

A significant lesson we have learned is that most governments and stakeholders involved in the design of monitoring frameworks for urban dynamics adopt a citywide approach by finding synergies among indicators. The implementation of “isolated targets without a comprehensive approach to the city may undermine the very basic principle of sustainability” (UN-Habitat 2015: 5). Given that cities are immensely diverse, measuring accurately and, even more so, using data comparatively in the contexts of global indicators and indices, is extremely difficult. The challenges – and burdens – of data collection and reporting are also greater in smaller cities and towns than in their larger counterparts. Therefore, urban indicators need to be scale- and context-sensitive to accommodate smaller urban areas, not just large cities and metropolises.

Experience has shown us the importance of paying special attention to the local level, which is closest to the population. Local governments and administrations are “essential institutional building blocks … mechanisms, and process, through which public goods and services are delivered to citizens and through which citizens can articulate their interests and needs, mediate their differences, and exercise their rights and obligations” (UNDP 2009: 5). Thus, building and strengthening institutional capabilities at international, national, and local levels are crucial requirements for contemporary societies. Meeting these needs should be addressed with greater impetus since “decentralized governance, carefully planned, effectively implemented and appropriate managed, can lead to significant improvement in the welfare of people at the local level, the cumulative effect of which can lead to enhanced human development” (UNDP 2004: 2).

In the context of the 2030 Development Agenda, cities and metropolises play a key role since urbanization and city growth have been recognized internationally as transformative forces for development. Thus, the empowerment of local and regional authorities becomes essential for meeting SDG 11. The implementation of the urban SDG should lead to greater coordination among national and local stakeholders, providing higher levels of participation for local authorities in the difficult task of collecting, analyzing, and validating data and information for better urban governance.

8.9 Localizing the 2030 Development Agenda: The Empowerment of Local and Regional GovernmentsFootnote ¹

Alongside communities and private sector actors, the essential role that local and regional governments (LRGs) play in delivering the 2030 Development Agenda has been recognized during a number of official events throughout the recent transition from the MDGs to the SDGs. It has been noted on several occasions that the achievement of the SDGs depends heavily on coordination among local governments and other stakeholders involved; global challenges have to be met with local responses (Wong Reference Wong2014; Simon et al. Reference Simon, Arfvidsson, Anand, Bazaaz, Fenna and Foster2016). The localization of the 2030 Development Agenda should not be seen solely as a technical agenda of implementation at the local level, but also as a political agenda that empowers local actors and puts decision-making, data production, and analysis and solutions provision at levels closer to the citizens. This would imply not only gathering different types of data, but also doing things differently, providing diverse sets of competences and resources to different actors and administrations.

This agenda is most clearly embodied in SDG 11, which is local by design – that is, meant to be embraced and delivered by subnational urban governments. The inclusion of an explicitly urban goal in the SDGs is an important achievement and is a testament to the successful advocacy, throughout 2013–2014 of, among others, the Global Taskforce of Local and Regional Governments and its partners, which is a coordination mechanism bringing together the major international networks of local governments to undertake joint advocacy relating to international policy processes.Footnote ² As argued during the #Urban SDG Campaign, an urban goal should mobilize and empower LRGs and urban actors, contribute to integrating the different dimensions of sustainable development (economic, social, environmental) and the spatial design of cities, strengthening the linkages between urban and rural areas, and transforming urban challenges into opportunities. However, SDG 11 does not take a holistic approach to urban development. Key urban concerns, including local governance, are not addressed, while other key urban responsibilities are partially included under other goals.

More generally, to be achievable, a majority of the goals and targets will need strong involvement of LRGs in both urban and rural areas (see Simon et al. Reference Simon, Arfvidsson, Anand, Bazaaz, Fenna and Foster2016). This is why it is important to discuss what we mean by “localization.” Localizing the 2030 Development Agenda often refers to at least two dimensions: 1) the definition and implementation of the targets and indicators at the local level and 2) the monitoring and evaluation process.

With respect to the first dimension, it is obvious that subnational governments have responsibilities (either direct responsibilities or those shared with central government or in partnership with other stakeholders) for achieving targets and service provision in the majority of the areas related to the SDGs (Cities Alliance 2015; González et al. Reference González, Donnelly, Jones, Klostermann, Groot and Breil2011; UCLG 2014). The scope of subnational governments’ work is clearly linked to alleviating poverty; securing nutrition; ensuring health and education; promoting gender equality; managing water, sanitation, urban planning, public transport, waste, and energy resources; promoting local economic development and decent jobs; fighting climate change; and increasing communities’ resilience.

However, localizing the Post-2015 Agenda can also refer to monitoring progress at the subnational level (irrespective of whether LRGs have competency in that specific area). This can help to assess inequalities within countries and support better decision-making and resource allocation at all levels, as well as enabling local communities and civil society organizations to hold their governments accountable. In this spirit, the UN’s Inter-Agency and Expert Group (IAEG) reports out of the UN made suggestions for geographical disaggregation of data for most outcome-based targets (United Nations 2013). This should include, for example, urban/rural and regional breakdowns and, where possible disaggregation at lower levels, such as municipalities, urban agglomerations, or marginal areas, such as slums.

These two approaches to localization are complementary. Ideally, subnational governments should define a specific subset of goals and targets where they have direct responsibilities and set up the level of indicators, contributing to their delivery and achievement. But this will also require stronger coordination and partnership between different levels of government, as is required for effective, multilevel governance. National governments should encourage local authorities to identify and adopt concrete commitments that might help to achieve the SDGs. When it comes to monitoring progress at subnational levels, local and regional governments could focus on monitoring for vulnerable areas and communities. They could even focus on the gaps in performance within their respective areas of jurisdiction – for example, in slums versus in the local average – to clearly identify spatial inequalities. However, data constraints are generally more pronounced at local levels than at the national level. In many cases, where data are based on survey information, it is difficult to disaggregate indicators beyond rural/urban and regional breakdowns. It is particularly difficult to have adequate source data for vulnerable populations (such as slum dwellers). This has obvious resource and capacity implications in terms of data collection, and would require the support of national statistics offices.

There is consensus that local and regional governments should play a crucial role in implementing and monitoring most of Agenda 2030. Localizing the SDGs means providing adequate targets and indicators to measure their impact at the territorial level, and proposing strategies and tools to facilitate the efficient involvement of LRGs in the implementation process. However, besides the need to improve mechanisms to obtain reliable local data, the implementation process needs strong and empowered local and regional governments. Thus, processes oriented to facilitate enabling environments for LRGs should be prioritized. Supporting decentralization processes, both political and fiscal, through strengthening institutional and operational capacities to deliver basic services and sound public policies; developing new forms of governance that enable multilevel partnerships; and insisting on multi-stakeholder approaches, are important conditions for allowing the localization of the development agenda.

8.10 Conclusions

Our analysis demonstrates that as the world moves into the urban age, new challenges and opportunities regarding the current monitoring frameworks for cities have emerged (UN-Habitat 2013). For instance, urban indicators offer a useful tool that contributes in several ways to mitigating the negative effects of urbanization on contemporary societies. We have also demonstrated the evolution of attempts to develop better urban indicators and monitoring frameworks. The elastic nature of the main characteristics and sets of indicators that comprise each generation illustrates that urban indicators have evolved in parallel with conceptualizations of development, well-being, and prosperity. Empirical evidence over the years has demonstrated that classical economic metrics are insufficient standards with which to measure and understand current urban dynamics.

However, we have not yet reached the finishing line; at present, we are undergoing a transitional process towards a fourth generation of more comprehensive and holistic sets of urban indicators in which several stakeholders are involved. The emerging monitoring frameworks do somehow respond to the urgent need to fill the urban information vacuum through a broader and multidimensional understanding of city prosperity. Yet, important limitations still prevail among such attempts to measure and understand urban dynamics. Cities need to keep moving forward in the difficult task of designing better measurement instruments. In the context of increasing urbanization, it is crucial to incur the costs of developing such measurement instruments as an investment in better understanding cities, and hence becoming capable of mitigating the problems and challenges that harm our planet. In this regard, the development of better and new urban indicators should be at the core of the urban agenda. This effort must include a focus on how data to support such indicators will be collected to build global datasets and by whom – city networks, researchers, or others – particularly in light of shifting political realities or other barriers that might complicate such efforts, thereby creating gaps in the process.

Building and strengthening institutional capabilities of cities is also an essential task that must be addressed in every single society. Local and regional authorities have a central role to play in meeting the 2030 Development Agenda and in “contributing to national and global recovery” (Ban Ki-moon, quoted in UN-Habitat 2013: iii). A fourth generation of more people-centered and territorialized indicators will provide the necessary means to creating better-informed policies and designing sound development plans for the future.

9.1 Evolving International Conceptions of the Urban

Since its establishment 70 years ago in the ashes of World War II, the international multilateral system’s conception of “the urban” has evolved significantly. This reflects both the maturation of the original United Nations (UN) and Bretton Woods institutions and the subsequent establishment of new, more specialized institutions in the 1970s to respond to the rise of environmental and human settlements challenges on international agendas and priorities. Of particular relevance in this context are the UN Environment Programme, or UNEP, and the UN Human Settlements Programme, or UN-Habitat (formerly the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, or UNCHS). Both of these programs are symbolically headquartered in Nairobi as part of an initiative to give the UN a more global physical footprint.

The importance of having a UN agency devoted entirely to human settlements issues, albeit focused on what the UN vocabulary still resolutely refers to as “developing countries,” should not be underestimated. UN-Habitat’s orientation was expanded to include the transitional economies of Eastern and Central Europe after the end of the Cold War, and though its governing council and reporting cover all five UN regions, its policy advice and capacity development are only now becoming more global. Initially, its effectiveness was hampered by its classification as a “Centre” – without the status of a UN implementing agency, it had to work through UNEP for strategic and budgetary purposes. This constraint was eased when it achieved programme status in 2002 (UN-Habitat 2015). Nevertheless, rather than leading such innovations, the UN’s urban conceptions and approaches to tackling the principal problems of fast-growing cities in poor countries have generally lagged behind changes fomented on the ground, in NGO thinking, and in the research literature.

To wit, notwithstanding numerous dramatic demographic shocks with important and often long-term urban consequences, such as the mass displacements of World War II and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, as well as accelerating rural-urban migration and growing refugee settlements in decolonizing and newly independent states during the 1950s and 1960s, the dominant conception of urbanization by governments and international agencies was as a temporary, largely negative phenomenon. This perspective was strongly influenced by erstwhile colonial policy in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European settlement colonies, which maintained that indigenous populations had been predominantly rural before the European conquest, and where urban areas were established to serve the settler populations and imperial purposes rather than indigenous needs. The reality of longstanding, large-scale, and sophisticated indigenous urban cultures in many previously conquered indigenous polities from Meso-America through North and West Africa and the Middle East to South and Southeast Asia was somehow erased from such constructs.

The policy response to this perception comprised concerted efforts to keep rural dwellers in rural areas and agriculturally productive, while passively seeking to lessen cities’ impact on the environment. This proved ineffective almost everywhere, and rapid net migration continued. The conventional solution of state-funded mass housing in high-density apartment blocks in Latin America and a mixture of single-sex worker “hostels” and small “matchbox” family houses in East and southern Africa became increasingly unaffordable to city authorities and national governments, many of which ceased such practices after independence.Footnote ¹ Moreover, residents found them alienating (and often alien) social environments, with many sociocultural problems and considerable un- and underemployment where industrialization was not occurring or was expanding only slowly. This resulted in a widespread spatial mismatch between need and availability of housing, services, and employment (Gilbert and Gugler Reference 195Gilbert and Gugler1992).Footnote ²

Innovative research, pioneered by Walter Mangin and John Turner in Latin American cities in the 1960s, demonstrated that working with the urban poor to address their housing and livelihood needs was far more effective in facilitating urban integration than large-scale, top-down public sector housing delivery. Despite opposition from many quarters, especially among governments and national elites, such work spawned a sea change in attitudes, with the first World Bank-funded site-and-service scheme launched in Dakar, Senegal, in 1970, and a veritable flourishing of various self-help and aided self-help experiments and programs through the 1970s and 1980s (see Turner Reference 196Turner1980; Moser and Peake Reference Moser and Peake1987; Rodwin Reference Rodwin1987; Amis and Lloyd Reference Amis and Lloyd1990; Gilbert and Gugler Reference 195Gilbert and Gugler1992; Aldrich and Sandhu Reference Aldrich and Sandhu1995). In many cases, these schemes were peripherally located and poorly integrated into the overall urban fabric – though, in retrospect, they were surprisingly resilient to changing urban environments. Despite their varied success, they ultimately did little to address the ongoing urbanization pressures, which became increasingly differentiated in space and time at different scales – both subnational and regional – in accordance with economic cycles and official policies.

Reflecting the changing perceptions, Habitat I, the first global summit on the topic in Vancouver in 1976, was far more positive about urbanization. Its outcome document is often even bullish on the prospects of human settlements. Nevertheless, it states that “[r]ural backwardness … contribute[s] to uncontrolled urban growth,” leading ultimately to “intolerable psychological tensions due to overcrowding and chaos.” As a consequence, it urges the UN to “give priority to improving the rural habitat.” This was said to “enable the greatest possible number of scattered and dispersed rural settlements to derive the benefit from basic services” which would “help to reduce the migration to urban areas” (United Nations 1976).

In 1996, Habitat II, the second major global housing and shelter convention, held in Istanbul, posed participatory planning and management as a solution to these persistent processes and failed official policies (UN-Habitat 1996). That it took over 25 years from the first World Bank site-and-service scheme to gain prime position in the global agenda demonstrates the duration of policy lag. Nevertheless, this, too, was a limited response that failed to get to grips with rapid urban growth and the turmoil caused by the financial crisis just two years later. This change in the economy saw rising unemployment and government fiscal deficits, which in turn precipitated reduced subsidies for housing and other basic needs and social provisions (see, for example, Satterthwaite Reference Satterthwaite1997).

As evidence of the human cost and development reverses of the economic crisis mounted, world leaders adopted the eight Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, at a special UN summit in late 2000. Heralded as another landmark by recognizing poverty as the principal impediment to development and committing resources to tackling it via a series of annually reportable targets and indicators, they applied only to poor countries. Although no MDG addressed urban issues directly, a few targets and indicators on slums and water and sanitation had urban relevance and implications. However, the underlying framing of urbanization amounted to a reversion to mid-twentieth century perspectives, in terms of which it is defined principally as a housing crisis, and the UN’s role is thus restricted to treating its primary symptom: the slum.

UN-Habitat (2010a: 16) defines slums as comprising households “lacking one or more of the following: improved water; improved sanitation; sufficient living area; durable housing; and secure tenure.” Hence, the proportion of an urban area’s population living in slums constitutes the proportion of such slum households. This definition has been widely criticized as too limiting, pejorative, and prone to statistical misrepresentation. This critique arises because when one or more of the “urban deprivations” is relieved, the house(hold) in question is recorded as having been lifted out of slum conditions – which is often not the case, despite the improvements. Nor does such an improvement address the actual drivers of slum formation. However, the human rights-based definition of “adequate housing” is broader, and adds the key dimension of location (vis-à-vis employment, hence mobility) and cultural adequacy.

The recent adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development thus represents a decisive shift in approach, from reactive to ambitiously proactive. The New Urban Agenda was adopted by the UN heads of government at Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2016, symbolizing the UN’s recognition of urbanization as a permanent driver of development with potentially positive impacts on people and the planet. How the 2030 Agenda is ultimately linked to the New Urban Agenda – particularly in terms of monitoring and indicators – during their simultaneous implementation remains to be seen, since the two documents have no appreciable formal connection.

It is worth pointing out that, amid the inevitable focus on evolving institutional perspectives, the examples cited above of Turner and Mangin in relation to low-income housing policy remind us that the roles of key individuals in shaping international institutions and their agendas should not be overlooked (compare with Weiss et al. Reference Weiss, Carayannis, Emmerij and Jolly2005; Parnell Reference Parnell2016).

In September 2015, after an unprecedented consultative process geared towards designing the successor to the MDGsFootnote ³, the 193 nations of the UN unanimously adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Figure 9.1)Footnote ⁴. At its core are 17 global Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, and their 169 targets. The SDGs are much more ambitious than the MDGs in that they address the challenges of the entire world, not just low- and middle-income countries. The inclusion of SDG 11 represents broad international consensus to legitimize sustainable urban development as a transformational driver for human development.

Figure 9.1 UN Summit Adopts Post-2015 Development Agenda. A view of the General Assembly Hall following the adoption of the post-2015 development agenda by the UN summit convened for that purpose.

Source: UN Photo/Cia Pak, New York, 2015

SDG 11 is no minor victory for urban sustainability stakeholders – including practitioners, local and regional governments, and their networks, as well as national governments, science and academia, philanthropy, and the private sector – that actively engaged in the three-year intergovernmental process that produced the Agenda. Throughout this time, they confronted the possibility that the urban dimension might be merged with other goal areas, such as infrastructure or sustainable consumption and production, or simply become mainstreamed across other SDGs (with the likely diminution or disappearance of its spatial aspect). It is worth highlighting that 2015 saw the adoption not only of the 2030 Agenda, but also of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030,Footnote ⁵ the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on financing for development,Footnote ⁶ and the Paris Agreement on Climate ChangeFootnote ⁷; these three acknowledge the potential, consequences, and responsibilities, respectively, that are inherent in urban development.

With its fate now secure, SDG 11 has renewed the MDG imperative of ensuring basic living conditions for human dignity (Target 11.1) but has also raised a host of new, twenty-first-century issues. Target 11.2 is a call to action on urban transport provision, which has major implications for access to economic opportunities, household expenditures, greenhouse gas emissions, and health. SDG 11 also addresses air pollution and waste as key challenges to be tackled at the urban scale (11.6) and emphasizes the improvement of community resilience to disaster (11.5). Moreover, cities and human settlements are recognized as worthy of cultural and natural heritage safeguarding. Among the targets that address means of implementation for SDG 11, we find a clarion call for the use of integrated policy and planning (11.b), as well as a focus on building sustainable and resilient buildings in least-developed countries (11.c).

Three other targets under SDG 11 merit special attention. The unprecedented focus of SDG 11 on urban planning and land use (Target 11.3), public and green space (Target 11.7), and national and regional development planning (11.a) make SDG 11 uniquely spatial compared to all other SDGs. These three essential enablers of development are largely unaddressed in the other, predominantly space-blind SDGs. By contrast, the focus of SDG 11 on the wider built environment gives long-overdue attention to the preeminently path-determinant role of physical configuration.

Target 11.3 represents broad international consensus that spontaneous, unplanned urban expansion too often yields inefficiency, increased emissions, and segregation. Nevertheless, it is still difficult for governments to fully apprehend the far-reaching impacts of spatial planning and its numerous benefits and co-benefits, including higher-level outcomes such as efficiency, productivity, amenity, and resilience. Favorable settlement patterns enable these; unfavorable ones not only do not enable them, but ultimately lock a city into rigid, inefficient patterns that are often very expensive and difficult to retrofit. Good spatial planning will likely have positive spillover effects outside of SDG 11, including strengthened food systems and expanded access to services and utilities. Target 11.3 also qualifies planning as a discipline that must be participatory. It can help governments and citizens alike understand the far-reaching impacts of urban form, so that they can engage in the planning process more meaningfully (Rudd et al. Reference Rudd, Malone, Bartlett, Russ and Krasny2017). In so doing, they can address a number of critical questions: Where should development be located? Which pattern(s) will it embody? How will it balance process and outcome to yield both social and environmental sustainability?

Target 11.7 responds to research that shows public and green space disappearing in unplanned cities. At the same time, existing public space in planned cities is being commercialized, exacerbating socioeconomic fragmentation (UN-Habitat 2013, 2015). Both situations are weakening cities’ capacities to provide basic services equitably and efficiently, suggesting the need for both a qualitative and quantitative approach: cities, particularly fast-growing ones, should first secure an adequate proportion of public space; additionally, cities can take measures to improve the amenities, accessibility, greenness, and safety of existing public space. Scholars and practitioners are left with crucial open questions, such as: How can policy-makers optimally use the information provided by geospatial technology? How to best influence the norms that regulate the private ownership of land?

SDG 11 also acknowledges cities as developmental drivers beyond their administrative boundaries. The goal’s promotion of urban-rural linkages (Target 11.a) signals a reinvigorated desire from the international community to move from a dichotomous conception of urban and rural development to one of mutually reinforcing, synergistic development across the rural-urban continuum. However, such a concept remains quite difficult to translate into tangible policies at all levels of government. Cities still require concrete legislative, spatial, and financing solutions that extend beyond the provision of agricultural goods to urban centers and the control of urban expansion into rural areas.

The 2030 Agenda pledges that no one should be left behind in any nation. This universality leaves us with the corollary challenge of being sufficiently specific for relevance and impact in diverse local contexts. Significantly different levels of development, governance structures, and capacities among the world’s cities mean that some SDG 11 targets appear to be much more applicable to certain urban contexts than others. A “locally relevant” policy-science interface may help translate the universal SDG 11 targets into national and subnational action programs (Simon et al. Reference Simon, Arfvidsson, Anand, Bazaaz, Fenna and Foster2016).

The universality of the 2030 Agenda, achieved through intergovernmental negotiations, has meant a trade-off with ambition as well as some glaring omissions. SDG 11 does not even pay lip service to cities’ status as engines of economic development, innovation, and job creation. It also avoids the issue of governance, including decentralization and access to finance at subnational levels. Achieving sustainable cities will surely require strategic frameworks and plans that are integrated into all levels of government and policy-making. UN language speaks of the integrated character of the 2030 Agenda, particularly the way it targets the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability on equal footing. If the implementation of SDG 11 succeeds in integrating all three dimensions, it can accelerate the pace of achievement of many other SDGs. Conversely, if SDG 11 implementation is interlinked with other urban-critical SDGs – especially poverty (SDG 1), health (SDG 3), and inequality (SDG 10); water and sanitation (SDG6) and energy (SDG7); employment and economic growth (SDG8) and infrastructure (SDG9); sustainable consumption and production (SDG12) and climate change (SDG13); and accountable and inclusive institutions (SDG16) – their achievement can help overcome some of the omissions within SDG 11 itself.

Maximizing balanced gains across all three dimensions of sustainability will depend on effective interlinkages. This notion is familiar to urbanists and many local and regional governments that are accountable to the public and accustomed to integrated planning and management, but governments have not put it into practice widely, nor have developing institutional frameworks commonly embedded it into their thinking. This is why national urban policies are a twenty-first century “must-have” (UN-Habitat 2014; Parnell and Simon Reference Parnell, Simon, Parnell and Pieterse2014). Such policies can integrate long-term visions with strategic approaches, and, when crafted in collaboration with all levels of government, can reflect the needs and assets of a country, its regions, and its cities. Progress has been slow: only nine countries have implemented national urban policies to date (UN-Habitat 2016). Nevertheless, SDG 11 and the New Urban Agenda offer unparalleled opportunities for countries to adopt them.

In multilateralism, technical rigor is not immune to political negotiation, but that should not tarnish the historic milestone that is the adoption of SDG 11. It is a powerful plan of action that will certainly promote and incentivize urban sustainability all over the world. Undoubtedly, the task ahead is complex and the solutions are not always clear. Nonetheless, that which three years ago was little more than the dream of a few fringe urbanists is now an undeniable victory that must be leveraged to create a global implementation plan across stakeholders and disciplines. The SDGs represent a common denominator, but one that is a floor for urban action, not a ceiling.

9.2 Metrics and the Impact of the Urban SDG

Determining the impact of SDG 11 and the urban dimension of other SDGs relies heavily on the choice of metrics to assess their implementation. Experts generally adopt a conceptual framework to guide and anchor the choices underlying a set of performance metrics. Such a framework helps define and refine a common vision, encourages the creation and regular updating of information, underlines and reinforces progress (or demonstrates the weaknesses, failings, and false assumptions) of a given policy or program, and supports a wider public understanding of the enterprise under consideration (Hak et al. Reference Hak, Moldan and Dahl2007). Although many evaluation techniques exist (such as quasi-randomized studies, case studies, benchmarks, surveys, and questionnaires), the use of indicators has become the commonly accepted approach in assessing sustainable development (Hak et al. Reference Hak, Moldan and Dahl2007; Bell and Morse Reference Bell and Morse2008; Chapter 8, this volume).

To review: An indicator is a simple measure that signals whether a policy or program is on target to reach a predetermined goal. By contrast, benchmarks, while related, are predetermined milestoness. Many types of indicators exist. They range from a single figures derived from several inputs (as in the broadly accepted gross national product, or GDP) to systems of multiple indicators (as in the approach employed by the MDGs, which associated 48 indicators with its 8 goals and 18 targets). The monitoring of the SDGs will implicitly use the goals and their targets as a conceptual framework and will take the multiple indicator system approach, such that there are indicators under consideration.

Figure 9.2 illustrates the place of indicators in public policy. Employed correctly, indicators not only serve to gauge progress, but are valuable tools with which to communicate to the public. While indicators have limitations, scholars and practitioners in policy areas continue to advance the work of testing selected indicators against policy goals and actual behavior, consulting users about indicator improvement, and sharpening the data that underlie indicators to achieve uniformity and comparability (Birch et al. Reference Birch, Lynch, Andreason, Eisenman, Robinson and Steif2011).

Figure 9.2 The place of indicators in public policy

In the case of SDG 11, the agreed upon conceptual framework holds that cities are systems of systems (for example, housing, transportation, and environment), places of agglomeration (that is, clustering of people and their activities), and nexuses of sustainable development. The underlying assumption is that the transformational potential of cities lies in the equitable and efficient planning and managing of land to foster the provision of urban systems that maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of agglomeration. Current knowledge holds that certain techniques tend to support this approach. They include mixing land uses, adaptively reusing buildings, crafting walkable neighborhoods linked to each other and beyond with public transportation, and reinforcing ecosystem services with green and blue patches and corridors.

According to the conceptual framework of SDG 11, achieving sustainable urban development suggests the use of a series of indicators premised on the advantages of agglomeration (United Nations, Economic and Social Council 2015). Such a series starts with a base figure that measures the alignment of land consumption with population growth to mark necessary and sufficient conditions for equitable and efficient service provision and to support agglomeration. This land efficiency indicator, or LES, is most simply expressed as a ratio: the rate of land consumption to the rate of population growth. While the LES is a new type of indicator that calls for the use of geographic information systems in tandem with traditional demographic data collection methods, the technology is now sufficiently developed to be employed widely.

A land-use efficiency ratio is diagnostic rather than prescriptive; desirable ratios should be determined locally, based on the cost of services, customs, and land availability. However, a baseline of 1:1 would indicate that the growth rates for land use and population are in equilibrium. A baseline of 2:1 would signal that a place is becoming less dense because land consumption would have occurred at twice the rate of population increase. Conversely, a 1:2 ratio would indicate more dense land development with less land being used to accommodate a growing population. Notably, the corrective in places where land is viewed as a seemingly limitless resource would be to address uncontrolled, fragmented, and/or sprawling development patterns; the remedy in places where land supply is constrained would be to release, allocate, and/or prepare sufficient land to accommodate growth (see Atlas of Urban Expansion 2016). Thus, this indicator is a gross measure that “takes the temperature” of a place, showing an overall trend. It warns decision-makers of potential issues – issues that would require more nuanced analysis to inform policy-making. Nevertheless, global trends all point to a general decline in land-use efficiency – that is, a movement towards sprawl – which tends, overall, to correlate with undesirable socioeconomic and environmental effects.

At a minimum, then, the LES alerts decision-makers to the general nature of growth in their communities, which can guide deeper probes to explore the location, direction, and character of land consumption. These issues include ascertaining whether developments are on disaster-prone or vulnerable land; whether they are contiguous or fragmented; whether they are moving towards existing nearby centers; and whether metropolitan mobility is increasing or decreasing. Answers to these and other questions will enable decision-makers to craft policies to affect the place and timing of future development. Such answers might also help urban residents better understand the short- and long-term trade-offs involved in configuration-based planning and contribute to more educated decision-making (Rudd et al. Reference Rudd, Malone, Bartlett, Russ and Krasny2017).

The LES also works with other indicators associated with the SDG 11 targets to expose interrelated policy choices, especially those addressing housing (proportion of people living in slums), transportation (proportion of people having access to public transportation), public space (the average share of the built-up area of cities that is open space for public use), and the environment (percentage of urban solid waste regularly collected). Working in tandem with related policy choices is useful because of the thresholds of socioeconomic viability that urban agglomeration can help other sectors meet. If, for example, the LES demonstrates less dense settlement patterns, instituting a citywide, technologically advanced waste management system may be economically unfeasible until the municipality employs land-use policies to promote the required density for such a management system to work. Conversely, if the LES shows excessive density, then looking into instituting corrective policy for public space provisions would likely be in order.

Finally, decision-makers can employ the LES and the other indicators for SDG 11 to assist in the achievement of the total suite of SDGs. For example, with its focus on the provision of public transport infrastructure, the indicator for Target 11.2 will almost certainly result in lower per capita rates of energy use and emissions production, thus accelerating the achievement of SDG 7 and SDG 13 on energy and climate. Likewise, the indicator for Target 11.1, which addresses slums, indirectly calls for dwellings composed of durable materials and with access to water and sanitation, which will contribute to the achievement of SDG 3 on health. Similarly, the land-use efficiency measure adds to an understanding of land-use patterns and thus could serve efforts to protect peri-urban agriculture and habitat, consequently supporting SDGs 2 and 15, which are concerned with food and biodiversity.

While a clear conceptual framework must underlie the metrics of any effective indicator system, such a framework is critical to the measurement of equitable and efficient planning and managing of land. This is particularly the case if cities aim to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of agglomeration. Urban spatial configuration plays a highly deterministic role and portends many spillover effects in the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of urban sustainability. In connection with this the LES is the fundamental indicator because it gauges the relationships between land consumption and population. The LES and other associated SDG 11 indicators on housing, transportation, resilience, cultural and environmental heritage, environment, and public space form a holistic approach to implementing SDG 11 and are ultimately supportive of other SDGs in important ways.

9.3 Implementation and the Future

Much of the world is currently underprepared to implement SDG 11, be it at the city, provincial, national, or global scale. This is a serious challenge facing the global urban community. Except for a handful of countries and a somewhat larger cohort of cities, the constitutional and legal mandates; institutional capacities; and human and financial resources required to implement these universal goals are at best weak, and – at worst – confused and contradictory. Moreover, such parameters are often missing at the city level. These shortcomings will need to be addressed by the early 2020s if the SDGs are to be delivered by 2030.

Even more challenging for many countries is the prospect of having to implement all the SDGs in urban areas, from poverty; health and education; basic services; employment; and prosperity to safety; rule of law and institutional strengthening; and partnerships (Kanuri et al. Reference Kanuri, Revi, Espey and Kuhle2016). The first step in enabling the achievement of the SDGS is the recognition that most countries – and almost all cities, even in high-income countries or countries scoring highly on the Human Development Index – are “developing,” in that they are far from achieving many of the universal economic, social, and environmental targets agreed in the 2030 Agenda (Sachs et al. Reference Sachs, Schmidt-Traub, Kroll, Durand-Delacre and Teksoz2016; Revi Reference Revi2016). There is much to be done over the next few years to improve the coverage and quality of the SDG goals, targets, and indicators through an iterative process of innovation and testing, capacity building, financing, monitoring, and evaluation. Once this process is undertaken, rapid, flexible, and multi-stakeholder problem solving will ultimately be required to implement them (Kanuri et al. Reference Kanuri, Revi, Espey and Kuhle2016; Simon et al. Reference Simon, Arfvidsson, Anand, Bazaaz, Fenna and Foster2016). In short, this will be an interlinked local, national, and global effort.

However, sectorally organized national governments are generally not only unwilling to share power and resources with cities, but even struggle simply to imagine integrated, cross-sectoral planning and delivery (Parnell Reference Parnell2016). In stark contrast, joint planning and delivery are parts of the daily lives of most mayors, as well as local and regional urban leaders, who are naturally able to see the value of the SDGs clearly (New School 2015). A local-to-national convergence along these lines will require active dialogue between cities, a partnership among various levels of government, and the recognition that citizens lie at the heart of the implementation agenda. The New Urban Agenda outlines the need to address integrated action across all the SDGs, sectors, and levels of governance if we are to ensure that no one and no place is left behind (Revi Reference Revi2016; UN-Habitat 2016). The reality of the Habitat III process – and that it happens only once every two decades – has provided a fillip to a clear agreement on these foundational questions (United Nations 2016).

Since the answers to these questions have political implications, they require high-level approval by UN member states, similar to that required for the SDGs; this approval occurred in December 2017, when the General Assembly endorsed the New Urban Agenda after its adoption in QuitoFootnote ⁸. Its implementation will proceed in a series of processes that will extend to 2018 and beyond. The New Urban Agenda confirms the linkages between its implementation and that of the SDGs.Footnote ⁹ On the international stage, important next steps for the SDGs are (1) agreeing on national and subnational monitoring systems that will ultimately move through the High-level Political Forum, thereby providing a formal role for local and regional governments, (2) committing to a reimagined global, regional, and national architecture for financing urban infrastructure, (3) delineating a clear operational division of labor among key UN agencies and stakeholders – including UN-Habitat, other UN and multilateral agencies, development finance institutions, bilateral aid agencies, and new private sector and other nongovernmental players, (4) continuing the mobilization of local and regional governments – in partnership with the enterprise sector; universities and knowledge institutions; movements; and trade unions – towards the implementation of SDG 11, and (5) engaging citizens (especially youth) so that they take charge of key choices and actions (Kanuri et al. Reference Kanuri, Revi, Espey and Kuhle2016).

Effective SDG implementation depends on a set of five minimum enabling conditions (Kanuri et al. Reference Kanuri, Revi, Espey and Kuhle2016). First, a facilitatory constitutional, legal, and regulatory environment must exist to enable local and regional governmental stakeholders to contribute to implementation. Second, a multilevel national urban and settlements policy framework must be in place to permit planning, implementation, and monitoring at multiple levels (see Section 9.1). Third, the institutional capacities of stakeholders – and of agents of change at the appropriate levels of subsidiarity to the country and regional context – must be commensurate to the task. Fourth, appropriate mechanisms of local and domestic financing (linked to regulatory and institutional capacities) must be available to direct financial flows into infrastructure, services, housing, and buildings at both regional and city levels. Fifth, an open and flexible institutional environment must exist to enable key stakeholders from community groups, private enterprises, media, and research organizations to interact, focus on problem solving and implementation, and learn from one another.

These five minimum conditions will require nurturing in a variety of contexts related to history, culture, political economy, and the spatial specificity of urban systems. A clear definition and partitioning across the rural-urban continuum may help provide clarity on roles, institutional jurisdictions, policy frameworks, and financing, so that implementation can take center stage. Subsidiarity may not be possible until city, regional, and national governments and other stakeholders build a culture of trust and partnership. This is a complex and often contentious process of political and economic discovery, as new institutional structures, interest groups, and blocks of winners and losers will emerge. Addressing both horizontal (that is, across sectors) and vertical (that is, across levels) governance could have constitutional, legal, and regulatory implications, depending on the national context.

In many contexts, implementation will also hinge on strengthening and developing urban economic systems. This will likely include reducing the risk of lending to cities, increasing municipal authorities’ local revenue generation capacities, and addressing employment, informality, worker skills, and productivity. Preemptively addressing land and labor market concerns and building integrative and participatory planning processes will pay off over the medium- and long run. All the same, the capacity to address emergent shocks – ranging from conflict and economic cycles to disasters and climate change – remains low, and this will require a concerted effort to build resilience. Ultimately, the monitoring and evaluation frameworks for both the SDGs and New Urban Agenda will need to enable the localization of action, the tracking of impact using citizen participation and open big data, and the aggregation of results for reporting at the national level.

In spite of the considerable enthusiasm that the SDG, COP 21, and Habitat III processes have generated, it is important to remember that the global urban community is still in its adolescence in terms of local and collective action (Parnell Reference Parnell2016). It would do well to learn from the experience of more mature global constituencies, such as those of health, education, and agriculture, to avoid disciplinary fragmentation and enable the localization of the entire 2030 Agenda. Indeed, localization concerns more SDGs than SDG 11. But the inverse is also true: urbanization is also about more than localization in two key ways. First, as the 20 years between Habitat II and Habitat III have taught us, urbanization is more than governance. Space- and place-based strategies must underpin all of our efforts to shape cities and human settlements. Second, urbanization is wider than the local scale. A focus on the subnational and national scales – as units of spatial inquiry and as levels of governmental intervention – are as important as the local in delivering urban outcomes.

That the 2030 Agenda, Sendai Framework, Addis Ababa Action Agenda, Paris Agreement, and now the New Urban Agenda have happened under UN auspices represents a noteworthy breakthrough. These agreements indicate a validation by the UN of a more universal, proactive approach to sustainable development in general, and urban development in particular. While this approach and the various frameworks and agendas supporting it implicate a much wider range of actors than the UN itself, a full discussion of those actors is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that for these agendas’ aims to be realized, the UN will increasingly have to embrace this full range of actors. As the UN is inherently constrained by its accountability to national governments – and, thus, by competing national interests – this expanded configuration is particularly important. Promisingly, the unprecedented level of consultation with non-UN entities in the formulation of the 2030 Agenda suggests a major shift in modality.

As the world implements the 2030 Agenda, immediate results may be rare and difficult to sustain. However, there are positive signs from some countries – and a moderate number of cities and towns – that are ready to take the plunge to test and further SDG implementation (GLTF et al. 2016; Simon et al. Reference Simon, Arfvidsson, Anand, Bazaaz, Fenna and Foster2016). Building trust, sharing, resources and experiences sharing, and deepening the sense of solidarity and common purpose of key actors and stakeholders at local, regional, national, and global scales will be essential.

10.1 Introduction

Cities have long been recognized as potential hubs of knowledge, social and cultural diversity, jobs, education, public services, and infrastructure (see Scott Reference Scott1997; Kong Reference Kong2007; Sassen Reference Sassen2011). Alongside these opportunities, however, cities also face a changing climate, reduced availability of raw materials and natural resources, and dwindling physical space for the built environment. These challenges are accompanied by increasing disparities in income and resultant social inequalities; mounting threats to human health, well-being, and food security; growing refugee and migration influxes; and demographic changes (for example, Coutard et al. Reference Coutard, Finnveden, Kabisch, Kitchin, Matos and Nijkamp2014; Zhou Reference Zhou2000). These concerns and associated governance challenges increase the urgency for new socially, ecologically, and culturally sensitive approaches to urban development. Such approaches need not only to reduce human vulnerability and environmental footprints, but also to build social cohesion and support ecological sustainability, cultural integration, and the establishment of a shared identity between citizens within a just system of distribution and access to urban resources and wealth (Duxbury et al. Reference Duxbury, Hosagrahar and Pascual2016).

Conventional public sector models for urban governance are often unexpected or too overstretched to adequately respond to the severity, urgency, and complexity of the outlined challenges (Kieboom Reference Kieboom2014). Against this framework and a growing movement for citizen participation in governance processes (for example, Lowndes et al. Reference Lowndes, Pratchett and Stoker2001; Bai et al. Reference Bai, McAllister, Beaty and Taylor2010; Rosol Reference Rosol2010), many actors are working to transform urban governance to ensure that a greater diversity of voices are accounted for in decision-making processes and urban initiatives. One of the many ways in which urban actors have begun to (re)organize is via the creation of “urban living laboratories,” or simply “urban living labs.” Such labs exist across North and South America, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Europe, many of which are connected through an open network organized by the European Network of Living Labs, or ENoLL (see http://openlivinglabs.eu/).

While a shared definition of urban living labs has not yet been agreed upon, they are generally understood to involve collaborative research and urban development activities undertaken alongside the intended end users, exploiting experimental platforms and/or approaches in real time. This both fosters the generation of social and technical innovations and allows for ongoing, continuous analysis to take place so that the lessons learned throughout can be applied to the relevant initiative, as well as to other urban contexts (Voytenko et al. Reference Voytenko, McCormick, Evans and Schliwa2016; Mulder Reference Mulder2012; Schliwa and McCormick Reference 217Schliwa, McCormick, Evans, Karvonen and Raven2016). In the urban context and in relation to this chapter, urban living labs enable citizens and urban actors to create experimental spaces and arenas outside the prevailing governance system as a means to generate novel solutions and engage new actors, collaborations, ideas, and funds.

This chapter explores the role of urban living labs in supporting social and governance innovations that are the subject of social innovation scholarship. That is, this exploration considers how well the practice of creating urban governance innovation aligns with the surrounding theory on the topic. Although different strands of literature have emerged around the concept of social innovation and have varying perspectives and definitions of the term, we draw on a definition rooted in complex systems thinking (see, for example, Westley et al. Reference Westley, Zimmerman and Patton2006; Westley Reference Westley2013). We understand social innovation to be any initiative (including products, processes, programs, projects, policies, or platforms) that challenges and – ultimately – fundamentally alters the defining routines, resource and authority flows, or beliefs of the broader social system in which it was introduced (Westley and Antadze Reference Westley and Antadze2010). In the urban governance sphere, social innovations could entail, for example, innovative social-ecological programs or policies, social finance models, new governance modes, and/or novel forms of cooperation, participation, and partnerships that alter the distribution of authority or knowledge and resource flows (Gonzaléz and Healey Reference González and Healey2005; Geobey et al. Reference Geobey, Westley and Weber2012; Klievnik and Jannsen Reference 216Klievink and Janssen2014). Despite urban living labs being intended as an experimental space and a platform for generating social and governance innovation, theoretical examinations and practical analysis of the intersection of social innovation theory and urban living lab practices are limited.

This chapter contributes to this discussion by introducing a brief history of urban living labs and the governance challenges they are intended to address, and subsequently exploring whether urban living labs hold potential as a new forum for urban governance innovation experiments to support positive transformative change. We begin by reflecting on two recent cases, a living lab in Malmö, Sweden, and the Helle Oase lab in Berlin, Germany, building on current literature to deepen our discussion. Recognizing that urban living labs are a relatively new phenomenon and social innovation processes take many decades, this discussion aims to provide a starting point to improve understanding of how different forms of urban living labs are emerging to address current urban challenges and to explore whether these can serve as a platform for social innovations that are likely to lead to systemic change. Such an analysis can contribute to the development of new research questions and hypotheses. Finally, the potential approaches for integrating new social arrangements that emerge from urban living labs within existing urban governance structures are discussed.

10.2 Limitations of Existing Governance Approaches to Cope with Emerging Urban Challenges

Cities often experience governance challenges similar to those faced at the international, national, and regional levels. Consequently, urban areas are forced to grapple with growing inequality and structural injustices and the restructuring of governing agencies and economies underpinned by neoliberal, market-based approaches (Jessop Reference Jessop2002) that largely fail to deliver “the promised efficiency, voice and service integration gains” for city dwellers (Warner Reference Warner2012). Further challenges include short-term political leadership cycles, competing priorities, budgetary concerns, and an often aging infrastructure that is ill-suited to a changing climate (Birkmann et al. Reference Birkmann, Garschagen, Kraas and Quang2010). In parallel, as Bishop and Davis (Reference Bishop and Davis2002) argue, discontent among citizens about these types of issues has created a strong pressure for all levels of government to adopt participatory processes that ensure a fair and democratic inclusion of previously marginalized voices, enhance transparency and accountability, and improve the management of public services (Grindle Reference Grindle2007). However, participation processes themselves are rife with challenges and may still leave citizen expectations unmet (Bishop and Davis Reference Bishop and Davis2002; Irvin and Stansbury Reference Irvin and Stansbury2004).

This combination of factors has led to both a practical and political need for cities to transform their governance frameworks. While opinions and approaches for how best to accomplish this goal are diverse, it is widely acknowledged that such changes require significant shifts in mindsets, partnership constellations, and approaches to governing urban spaces and relationships (for example, Bos et al. Reference Bos, Brown and Farrelly2015; Seitzinger et al. Reference Seitzinger, Svedin, Crumley, Steffen, Abdullah and Alfsen2012). Resultant governance structures would thus need to be able to contend with complex socioecological systems, the demands and needs of the respective urban populations, and the multiscale issues and interests contained therein.

While some cities have emerged as leaders for creating new and adaptive governance structures and processes which move beyond interests at the local government level, these cases remain limited (examples include the Cities for Climate Change Protection Programme and the Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy in the European Union). Where these initiatives of strong leadership and action by cities do exist, they are often undertaken in the absence of, or in direct conflict with, the respective national governments (see Parker and Rowlands Reference Parker and Rowlands2007).

Although governance transitions face a high risk of failure and require innovation and experimentation to be successful, their potential to address current environmental and societal shortcomings can be significant. In this context, some cities have exhibited an openness to becoming arenas for experimentation and social innovation (Bulkeley and Castán Broto Reference 215Bulkeley and Castán-Broto2013) and serve as a reference for generating knowledge about the emergence, development, and institutionalization of innovation for sustainable urban development (Schneidewind and Scheck Reference Schneidewind, Scheck and Rückert-John2013; Evans and Karvonen Reference Evans and Karvonen2014). Urban living labs have emerged as one form of experimental space for social innovation.

10.3 Innovation Pathways for Cities and the Role of Urban Living Labs

Starting mostly as research and development spaces for information and communications technology, the concept of living labs has been credited to William J. Mitchell of MIT (Quak et al. Reference Quak, Lindholm, Tavasszy and Browne2016). The concept gradually expanded and drew on interactive processes with diverse actors to address a range of sustainability issues. While literature on the subject is beginning to flourish alongside the growing prevalence of cities being described as laboratories for social innovation, further in-depth exploration of living labs remains limited (Evans and Karvonen Reference Evans, Karvonen, Bulkeley, Castán Broto, Hodson and Marvin2011, Reference Kieboom2014; König Reference König and König2013; Nevens et al. Reference Nevens, Frantzeskaki, Gorissen and Loorbach2013; Schneidewind and Scheck Reference Schneidewind, Scheck and Rückert-John2013; McCormick et al. Reference McCormick, Anderberg, Coenen and Neij2013).

Urban living labs have continued to evolve; they are now appearing all over the world and are taking on a new scope (see Box 10.1). More recently, living labs have been used as a tool to reinterpret, challenge, and improve urban governance to better address issues of sustainability. Recent initiatives involve, for example, urban stakeholders developing and testing new technologies, governance arrangements, and ways of living (Bulkeley and Castán Broto Reference 215Bulkeley and Castán-Broto2013). Although urban living labs’ physical manifestation may be attached to a defined space, the concept relates more to an approach: intentional collaborative experimentation between researchers, citizens, companies, and local governments (Schliwa and McCormick Reference 217Schliwa, McCormick, Evans, Karvonen and Raven2016).

Five key attributes characterize urban living labs (Voytenko et al. Reference Voytenko, McCormick, Evans and Schliwa2016; Quak et al. Reference Quak, Lindholm, Tavasszy and Browne2016; Evans and Karvonen Reference Evans and Karvonen2014). First, geographical embeddedness implies that the labs are embedded in the urban context. Experimentation and learning mean that they involve testing, experimenting, and reflexive learning processes, while participation and user involvement outline the involvement of multiple partners from different sectors and engagement of users and citizens. Fourth, leadership and ownership refer to the labs having a leader or coordinator that shapes the design of the activities. Finally, evaluation and refinement refer to continuous evaluation or assessment that feeds back into improvements, refinements, and learning within the labs.

Researchers are increasingly categorizing urban living labs within frameworks and typologies based on their use of a variety of methods and metrics to support the generation of innovation and learning. For example, Leminen et al. (Reference Leminen, Westerlund and Nyström2012) proposed four types of living labs to capture the range of approaches being employed in cities around the world: utilizer-driven, enabler-driven, provider-driven, and user-driven living labs. These types are defined by the dominant actor in the initial phase of the lab or by the principal promoter of innovation activities later on. They differ in terms of activities, structure, organization, and coordination. Utilizers are often companies applying the living labs approach for product-service system development, enablers are often but not exclusively local governments representing the public sector, providers are mainly research institutions and universities that in some cases host living labs on university campuses (for example, Robinson et al. Reference Robinson, Berkhout, Cayuela, Campbell and König2013), and, finally, users are people or grassroots organizations that often initiate living labs. This basic framework draws attention to the key role played by the leading actor or coordinator in designing and implementing urban living labs.

In the following sections, we investigate two different urban living labs and draw on the literature to complement these findings and frame them within wider theoretical discussions. Our first case is an enabler-driven platform in Malmö, Sweden that focuses primarily on improving the energy efficiency and liveability of existing apartment buildings, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and increasing social well-being. The second case represents a user-driven initiative utilizing collaborative urban gardening to improve social cohesion in a socially deprived neighborhood in Berlin, Germany. We analyze aspects such as the motivations, existing social perceptions and understandings, as well as the aims, objectives, and approaches for each initiative. This also includes a discussion of the actors involved and institutional structures, impacts, benefits and limitations, and future outlooks. The two examples provide contrasting approaches of urban living labs, with the Malmö case being platform-based and city-led and the Berlin case being project-based and citizen-led (see Table 10.1). Given their small-scale spheres of activity and early stages of development, the case study findings are, to some degree limited in their ability to clarify the connection and interlinkages mentioned; nevertheless, they serve to highlight indicative trends and conclusions for further research and actions at the city level.

10.4 Bridging the Gap between Public Policy, Governance, Urban Living Labs, and Social Innovation

These two illustrative and distinct cases demonstrate that urban living labs can provide a protected space for experimentation and for forming creative collaborations that can, in turn, foster different approaches to resolving societal problems. While these developments potentially lay the foundation on which social innovation processes can emerge, our analysis demonstrates their failure to propel true systemic change in ways coherent with the provided definition of social innovation. In this regard, neither of the case studies has led to any fundamental changes in the defining resource and authority flows or beliefs of the broader social system in which they were introduced. Reasons for these failures may link to the infancy of these initiatives, the lack of political support, and insufficient integration into existing structures (in the Berlin case), or the lack of connecting technical innovations to create new social opportunities (in the Malmö case).

We therefore highlight the need for additional research on the relationship of urban living lab initiatives to overall urban governance. In particular, the following aspects are suggested to be pursued: whether the existing lab forms are truly fostering governance innovations that will create large-scale systemic change, and what the critical success factors and realistic timespan entail. More specifically, there remains a pressing need to answer the questions: How can newly created social arrangements be integrated within existing (political) governance structures to maximize effectiveness in responding to current urban challenges and turn into social innovations that enable true changes within existing governance systems? Can such successful experimental initiatives developed in urban labs move from small-scale, niche positions to a broader scale? What conditions would be required to facilitate such a move? Although the evidence from the case studies and available literature has provided only insufficient answers to these multifaceted issues to date, an array of interesting insights can be discussed in light of existing literature and pursued further in future research in this field.

For social innovations to emerge, develop, and stabilize, a set of coalition-building opportunities for actors and certain framework parameters must be present (such as the institutional context, welfare regime context, and local political culture) (Cattacin and Zimmer Reference Cattacin, Zimmer, Brandsen, Cattacin, Evers and Zimmer2016). In this context, urban living labs may offer a platform and a flexible approach to start building such coalitions and to increase connectivity among different actors within the urban area, which will be necessary for more systemic transformative changes (see Westley et al. Reference Westley, Zimmerman and Patton2006; Westley Reference Westley2013). Those innovations that do emerge may be integrated into existing governance systems with various degrees of difficulty. While the Helle Oase still requires strong support and political will at the municipal level, the Malmö Innovation Platform has already been promoted by the local government, demonstrating that different organizational configurations may create better access to the political will that can inevitably be necessary for addressing complex challenges. However, this hypothesis requires further testing with additional cases.

Moreover, existing urban governance scholarship has determined that governance regimes embedded in a federal system or in systems applying the subsidiarity principle are likely to facilitate the greatest emergence and sustainability of social innovations because the local level is in a position to address social challenges independently.Footnote ¹ Cattacin and Zimmer (Reference Cattacin, Zimmer, Brandsen, Cattacin, Evers and Zimmer2016) found that local self-government and cooperation with nonstate actors such as civil society organizations show a higher level of openness and likelihood for social innovations. In this context, it is promising to see that urban governance increasingly involves nongovernmental actors from civil society and private businesses – a practice in line with the core features of urban living labs (Gerometta et al. Reference Gerometta, Häussermann and Longo2005). The Malmö Innovation Platform represents, for example, a new interface and form of cooperation between the city and nonstate actors, and is actively engaging with partners to enable sustainability interventions. Such new partnerships and modes of governance can also facilitate significant sharing of knowledge and cultivation of learning processes. In this context, both cases from Malmö and Berlin reveal that urban living labs do not necessarily challenge the existing governance structures. Rather, the experiments act as learning platforms for new urban knowledge, which may eventually inform systemic governance change.

In European cities, Brandsen et al (Reference Brandsen, Cattacin, Evers, Zimmer, Brandsen, Cattacin, Evers and Zimmer2016). found that initiatives that remain separate from or insufficiently integrated into urban policies are potentially limited in their expected impacts and ability to address current societal challenges. Social innovations that both complement existing urban development strategies and can contribute to making the respective cities more dynamic and attractive are more likely to be accepted, supported by local governments, and integrated into local welfare administrations securing their sustainability (García-Sánchez and Prado-Lorenzo Reference García-Sánchez and Prado-Lorenzo2009). However, even in these cases, it is not guaranteed that true impacts on the system will occur.

Innovative initiatives focusing on vulnerable groups living on the fringes of urban society and dealing with social inequities are unfortunately accorded less attention under urban development strategies and political agendas, and are commonly affected by budget cuts. In the specific case of Helle Oase – and as revealed by Ewert (Reference Ewert, Brandsen, Cattacin, Evers and Zimmer2016) – public funding for innovative capital may diminish in the near future for social innovations, emphasizing the need to develop and establish a new system to enable cooperation between the political administrative system and social innovations. These conditions may also weaken the capacity of cities to integrate such new developments thoroughly into public policies, thereby diminishing their potential to transform into social innovations. Research on urban living labs needs to continue to track whether urban living lab initiatives continue to rely on existing governance mechanisms, such as funding from local governments, or whether they turn to using their platforms themselves to create innovative approaches to financing their initiatives. A host of critiques could emerge from either of those approaches, and the risk is that neither leads to transformative changes responding to identified needs.

Overall, there seems to be a trend of shifting from a hierarchical model of governance to a heterarchical, more participatory structure in cities (Hohn and Neuer Reference Hohn and Neuer2006). This progression may enable a better horizontal integration of new, nonpublic actors that can provide services for urban society at a large scale. In this context, it is essential that the involved actors recognize each other’s roles in the creation of a workable urban society (Cattacin and Zimmer Reference Cattacin, Zimmer, Brandsen, Cattacin, Evers and Zimmer2016) by creating respect, trust, and even responsibilities and power. Gerometta et al. (Reference Gerometta, Häussermann and Longo2005) go further and suggest that the state should instead adopt an enabling and stimulating role, maintaining responsibility for central problems of societal welfare while promoting an environment for civil society organizations and the private sector to fuel social innovations and contribute to sustainable urban development. The Malmö Innovation Platform illustrates how such a vision can be achieved, given its strong support from the local city government and its function as a connector of entrepreneurs, property owners, and local residents who want to pursue sustainable urban transformation processes. However, this approach can neglect to confront the potential asymmetrical power dynamics existing in urban areas, requiring that we be more specific when talking about how this represents system transformation, not just a perpetuation of governing approaches that have created inequalities in the first place. Therefore, further research is needed to assess the potential of government-led urban living labs.

The integration of emerging social innovative initiatives and arrangements into existing governance structures to respond effectively to current urban problems remains a challenging endeavor. Nevertheless, we can highlight a few promising outcomes. The capacity of civil society and its networks to develop and establish solutions to current societal challenges and to contribute to more sustainable, liveable, and cohesive cities – as well as to the urban governance arrangements that promote them – should be acknowledged by state and city governments. Making explicit use of self-organization and civil society initiatives (Gerometta et al. Reference Gerometta, Häussermann and Longo2005) as part of the official urban development agenda and respective action plans, as well as providing room for experimentation, such as through urban living labs, can not only enrich the urban development agenda, but can also contribute to its achievement.

Further actions to enable social innovations and their integration into existing structures may entail a transfer of responsibilities and power to non-state actors and enable a thorough and equal participation of civil organizations across all social strata (for example, ensuring everyone is equipped with voting rights) in local policy processes. The examples of initiatives in Malmö and Berlin do not suggest a transfer of power, but rather attempts to better engage local communities. There is, however, an underlying question of power dynamics. Overall, frequent dialogue and exchange between private companies and business, civil society, and city government should take place (for example, via round tables) to inform public and legal decision-making and strategic decisions at the state and city levels. Urban living labs are a platform for such dialogue and collaborative activities that can span multiple organizations and sectors. Still, urban living labs should try to embed their practices in the systems that they seek to change, should rethink current modes of governing in urban systems, and should approach public authorities to discuss the integration and uptake of their activities (Kieboom Reference Kieboom2014).

10.5 Outlook

The outlined case studies offer a small taste of the wide variety of urban living labs and their potential to tackle various societal challenges, including environmental, economic, cultural, and social issues. There remains a clear need to consider how localized, discrete initiatives such as urban living labs amount to larger, system-level change or to transformations in urban governance arrangements (that is, social innovations) and what the critical success factors behind them are. Although urban living labs have proliferated across the world in recent years and have proven to be a valuable and innovative approach to developing new products and platforms for convening and coordinating, it remains too early to determine whether the additive effects of the diversity of technical innovations and collaborative approaches will equate to the change necessary to achieve urban sustainability. However, the examples and literature presented in this chapter suggest considerable potential for urban living labs to contribute to the development of more sustainable cities, increased social justice, and the development of a system which is better prepared to handle future societal and environmental challenges.

11.1 Introduction

The term “big data” has emerged as a powerful technology trend affecting many aspects of life. Since the early days of big data applications in science and various commercial sectors, the term has come to refer to the exponential increase in the volume and variety of data available, as well as the availability of new tools and approaches to process ever more complex data. Reflecting its global impact on societies, the United Nations speaks of a “Data Revolution” (UN IAEG 2014). Within several domains, big data are already being applied with success. The increased availability of consumer data, for example, provides new opportunities for business and commercial enterprises to develop targeted advertisements and increase revenues (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier Reference 237Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier2013). Big data have facilitated major scientific breakthroughs in various academic disciplines including healthcare, environmental studies, and physics (Krumholz Reference Krumholz2014; Bryant et al. Reference Bryant, Katz and Lazowska2008). In the public policy realm, the collection and processing of personal data has already transformed intelligence and surveillance practices (Lyon Reference Lyon2014). Law enforcement is another field that has experienced a growing number of experiments in data-driven innovations, such as fraud detection, crime fighting, and violence (Technopolis et al. 2015).

Given the above-average connectivity in urban areas, cities lie at the heart of the trend towards data-driven approaches for confronting societal challenges (Barber Reference Barber2013; Thakuriah et al. Reference Thakuriah, Tilahun and Zellner2015). With more than half of the world’s population residing in cities and more than 90 percent of the population growth through 2050 expected to occur in urban areas, there is increased pressure to look for data-driven solutions in the urban context (Pfeffer et al. Reference Pfeffer, Verrest and Poorthuis2015). This holds particularly true for cities in the Global South, where urban sprawl represents a major impediment to sustainable development. Since the 1970s, low-income cities have experienced a 325 percent population increase. In Latin America alone, 110 million people out of 558 million urbanites live in slums, or so-called no-go areas, where basic municipal utility and service delivery remain scarce (de Boer Reference de Boer2015; Muggah Reference Muggah2015; see also Chapters 7, 8, and 9). In this context, recent studies emphasize that “cities … are unable to respond to the needs of their growing populations faced with rising violence, crime, and poverty” (Mancini and Súilleabháin Reference Mancini and Súilleabháin2016: III). Urban scholars argue that many cities are set to struggle with income and social inequality; youth unemployment; homicide and criminal violence; poor access to key services; high concentrations of, or preexisting, violence; and exposure to environmental threats (Muggah and Diniz Reference Muggah and Diniz2013).

To date, most big data applications in the urban context have centered on the quick wins of managerial practices. For example, data analytics are being used in a variety of urban policy sectors, such as public health or infrastructure improvements. These schemes are often driven by cost-saving considerations (Batty Reference Batty2013), while there is much less movement vis-à-vis the underlying dynamics of urban life and policies aimed at improving social cohesion. Applications are also mostly occurring in OECD countries, where data generation to date is still much more meaningful than in data-poor regions: Using mobile phone records to improve public transport, for example, is only viable once a certain threshold of mobile phone users and representation across the population has been reached. Such an effort makes sense in affluent cities, but not (yet) in urban agglomerations where the digital infrastructure and connectivity are more nascent. At the same time, there is an increasing number of experiments in the developing world, where new data sources are being collected and analyzed for the public good (Bellagio Big Data Workshop Participants 2014).

This chapter aims to contribute to this emerging discourse about how big data can improve urban policy-making, and focuses on the role that this technology can play in building more inclusive cities in the Global South. The authors highlight the need for urban authorities to invest in additional resources as well as meaningful knowledge transfer mechanisms that are in line with the concept of “mobile urbanism.” This is particularly important in low-income cities, where policy-makers are driven by the desire to address urban violence and to build more inclusive cities across different constituencies.

11.2 Managing the City in a Digital Age

Data in the urban context can be used in various ways and are applicable to diverse settings. An analysis of 58 initiatives worldwide, performed by Technopolis, the Oxford Internet Institute, and Centre for European Policy Studies in 2015, shows that the most widespread use of data relates to agenda setting and/or problem analysis. The same study found that open data were commonly used for transparency, accountability, and increasing participation, whereas administrative and statistical data were used for implementation and monitoring purposes (Technopolis et al. 2015). To understand these applications, we clustered them into three dimensions: data, processes, and community.

11.3 Towards More Inclusive Cities? Tackling Inequality and Violence with Data

How can big data help policy-makers build more inclusive cities in the Global South? There are many ways to approach this question; for the purposes of this chapter, we focus on the possibilities that are emerging for tackling inequality and violence. We first present five categories of data streams, and then present the possible impact these could have on both challenges. Even though using big data to accomplish inclusivity goals is a relatively nascent field, we present some insights from published case studies on reducing violence in cities within Colombia and South Africa to highlight recent developments in the use of data and the knowledge transfer mechanisms involved.

12.1 Introduction

Conventional science is usually conducted in a remote location, abstracted from day-to-day conditions and needs. Even when it produces useful outputs, those outputs are rarely effectively communicated to those who could put them to best use. “Citizen science” is increasingly providing powerful alternatives to this approach.

Though citizen science often evokes images of, for example, school children measuring rainfall, we see it as a much larger field. Citizen science can range from crowd-sourcing information to participatory monitoring and action research, to collaboration between the general public and professional scientists, and to highly informed public science interests funded by citizens.

The common threads of citizen science are:

1. 1. Citizen science functions as a check and balance on information. In places where information is controlled by governments or the private sector and there is limited access or manipulation, citizen science can increase access to information or provide alternative information.

2. 2. Citizen science operates at different scales. It is often granular and/or collected by hundreds or thousands of people and can, therefore, provide very different information from what is available through conventional channels, allowing for investigations that have not previously been possible.

3. 3. Citizen science is grounded locally and relates to issues that people see and/or experience on a daily basis. This relevancy aids in community ownership of the results and makes them more actionable.

4. 4. Citizen science cultivates an informed and engaged citizenship. Participants understand the value of science and see themselves as an integral part of that science. Ideally, this translates to a more informed public and greater citizen engagement in influencing science-policy decisions.

These differences between citizen science and conventional science mean that citizen science can generate unexpected – and sometimes very different – knowledge. That knowledge can lead to transformative change in how processes are undertaken and in how people act.

Citizen science is supporting the growth of new scientific endeavors in powerful ways, particularly as technology has progressed and virtual networks have expanded, increasing scientific literacy and inclusivity (Bonney et al. Reference Bonney, Cooper, Dickinson, Kelling, Phillips, Rosenberg and Shirk2009; Connors et al. Reference Connors, Lei and Kelly2012). Yet, it is not clear that citizen science is being used to its fullest potential. Indeed, Mueller and Tippins (Reference Mueller and Tippins2012: 3) argue that citizen science has largely been top-down:

For this reason, we are encouraged to see the emergence of a new type of citizen science, one based on equitable collaboration. In this citizen science, citizens are engaged as equal players in the scientific process, contributing their local, grounded perspectives, knowledges, understandings, needs, and aspirations in an ongoing and iterative process. This is related to but different from action research, which is either initiated by researchers to solve an immediate problem or is an iterative learning and doing process. Action research doesn’t necessarily engage citizens. Citizen science empowers citizens to act, and makes science directly responsive to their needs and interests. Therefore, citizen science is especially important for urban-focused science, in which a multitude of diverse perspectives and knowledges need to be captured. This chapter explores several case studies from urban areas in which citizens were engaged in equitable collaboration, and how this led to new learning and action.

12.2 Types of Citizen Science

There are two types of commonly practiced citizen science; one is focused on data collection, while the other both collects data and conducts its own analysis of that data.

12.3 Case Study One: The Odo-Osun Natural Spring Project, Ibadan, Nigeria

Oke-Offa Babasale is an unplanned, high-density, low-income residential community in Ward 10, Ibadan North-East local government area, or IbNELGA, of Ibadan, Nigeria (Figure 12.1). A spring has been the major source of water to the community for drinking and other domestic uses year-round for over 80 years (Adewoye Reference Adewoye1995). The spring is located within a densely built community and is accessible from the nearest road only by a network of foot paths running between residential buildings. Prior to the development of the spring, the water supply situation in the community was poor. Women and children (ages 8 to 16 years old) spent hours scouting for water, and there was a high incidence of waterborne diseases, typhoid fever, and cholera (Odo-Akeu Spring Water Development Project Working Group 1996; SIP-TSU n.d.).

Figure 12.1 Odo-Osun Spring in Ibadan North-East local government.

Source: CNES/Airbus DS, DigitalGlobe/Esri, @OpenStreetMap.

The Odo-Osun Community Spring Water Development Project, or OCSWDP, was designed to provide 20 to 50 liters per person per day of clean and hygienic water to the people of Oke-Offa Babasale community and adjoining areas for an affordable fee. By improving the environment of a heavily polluted and underutilized natural spring, the project sought to enhance and sustain the community’s access to safe water.

The process of collaboration and integration evolved in stages through series of consultation and communication as follows:

• The Oke-Offa Babasale Community conducted a situation analysis, identified problems related to the spring, and consulted the UN-Habitat sponsored Sustainable Ibadan Project-Technical Support Unit, also called SIP-TSU, for assistance;

• SIP-TSU conducted a joint diagnostic survey of the environment and the quality of spring water with community leaders and representatives of other stakeholders;

• SIP-TSU and other stakeholders communicated results using video documentation, print, and electronic media;

• New water infrastructure was designed in consultation with SIP-TSU, representatives of the community, and other stakeholders;

• A cost estimate was prepared and roles assigned to identified stakeholders;

• Resources were mobilized, a project management committee was established, and a bank account was opened; and

• Project implementation and design of a framework for operation took place between 1995 and 1997.

The SIP-TSU provided overall technical guidance and advice and assisted the community in establishing the 16-member Odo-Osun Spring Water Development Working Group, which served as the think-tank committee for the project. A respected community leader, Chief David Adewoye, coordinated the working group; it drew its membership from the community, Oyo State Department of Rural Development, Ibadan North-East LG Council, UNICEF, SIP, academia, and the private sector.

The collaboration ensured an equal partnership, based on consensus, in critical decision-making. Each side contributed time, material, financial resources, and human resources, though in varying proportions. Conventional scientists scaled up the community’s traditional method of increasing water yield from natural springs, brooks, and streams by introducing a concrete storage tank fitted with hand pumps and taps for easy and hygienic collection of water. The community members managing the project were taught how to fix simple faults in the pumps while plumbing artisans within the community could replace damaged pipes and taps.

The Odo-Osun project has resulted in a number of benefits, including increased access to hygienic water; less time spent by women and children scouting for water; improved attendance of children at school; project accountability and probity; an example of effective multi-stakeholder collaboration; capacity building for community members on water system construction and repair; improved sanitation in the vicinity of the spring; improved health and reduction in waterborne diseases among the people of the community; sustainable natural resource protection and conservation; more time for women to pursue socioeconomic activities; and a good lesson in integration of citizen science and formal science (Figure 12.2).

Figure 12.2 Odo-Osun spring in 2010.

Source: Grace Oloukoi.

However, these benefits were not achieved without effort. The project was faced with some challenges, including:

• Community members initially found the pay-as-you-draw water scheme, implemented to pay for project costs and ongoing maintenance, to be alien. Many residents protested the user fees, resisted payment, and forcefully drew water.

• Community members were slow to understand the sustainability-related and cost-recovery implications of self-financing the service delivery, operations, and maintenance of a community-based resource.

• A fence, erected around the spring to prevent pollution and vandalization of pumps and taps, was seen as limiting the previous 24-hour access.

• There were complaints against the management committee about composition of the committee, lack of information, poor communication, and overprotection of the spring.

To resolve the conflict, project participants applied indigenous approaches (Wahab and Odetokun Reference Wahab and Odetokun2014). The SIP-TSU, acting as facilitator and mediator, consulted with and mobilized representatives of Oke-Offa Babasale community, including the youth, women, and project development stakeholders, to attend a series of meetings over five months to resolve the grievances. At the end, the project put in place a more robust, inclusive project management structure composed of the representatives of each zone, the elders, youth, women, and an auditor.

The citizen-initiated OCSWDP, realized through multi-stakeholder collaboration, earned international recognition as an ambassador project on New Solutions for Sustainable Cities during the Stockholm Partnership for Sustainable Cities final event held in Stockholm, June 4–7, 2002. This project has demonstrated how citizen science can be integrated with formal science to enhance the quality of a community-based water resource, to increase a community’s access to potable water, and to promote sustainable water delivery. The project experienced some challenges from the integration of the two sciences, but these were resolved using the extant indigenous approaches to conflict resolution within the community.

12.4 Case Study Two: Using City Stakeholder-Defined Extreme Weather Thresholds to Customize Climate Projections, United States

The Climate Thresholds Project is designed to enlist city stakeholders and climate scientists to codevelop climate projection data customized specifically to city needs. Started in 2014, the project is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sectoral Applications Research Program and is led by Adaptation International, with support from the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program, the Climate Assessment for the Southwest, Atmos Research, and ISET-International. The project is partnering with four cities of various sizes, capacities, and resources with a diversity of climate challenges: Boulder, Colorado; Miami, Oklahoma; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and San Angelo, Texas.

Many communities around the world are already vulnerable to extreme weather events. As climate conditions change, many of these vulnerabilities may get worse or increase in frequency, magnitude, and/or intensity. Communities already know from experience when weather goes from being a nuisance to a problem for their citizens, city operations, natural resources, and other things that matter to the community. To develop effective community responses to future change, it is essential to utilize local experience and knowledge to identify critical thresholds for extreme weather events and to understand how these events may be altered in the future as the climate changes.

To be truly useful for local decision-making, climate information needs to be as specific as possible for that community. For many communities, generic thresholds for extreme weather events are insufficient to connect people with climate impacts and catalyze actions. The Climate Thresholds Project is piloting and testing a methodology for: (1) engaging citizens to identify critical thresholds for extreme weather events specific to their communities; (2) using these thresholds to analyze localized climate projections to community-specific needs; and (3) supporting community stakeholders to take new actions in response to identified risks.

The core of the methodology is a series of community workshops in each city called Shared Learning Dialogues – participatory, multisector workshops where new information is introduced and explored collectively. This approach addresses two major challenges in building resilience and adaptive responses to climate change: 1) translating scientific information into forms useable by stakeholders; and 2) generating buy-in and developing practical solutions that include a variety of stakeholders who operate in different ways, with different tools and contexts, and from different interests (Randolph Reference 259Randolph and Goldstein2011).

Equally essential is clear information about changing climate and extreme weather conditions and the associated impacts and risks that the city will face. To date, projections of climate change have generally been provided in one of two ways: one-size-fits-all national or regional reports and datasets; or locally tailored, external, expert-driven, desktop studies. Even the best of these generally fails to present information in ways that relate to local, on-the-ground issues and needs. The Shared Learning Dialogue approach works to address this disconnection between information holders and information users by bringing them both into the dialogue and allowing both sides to learn (Tyler and Moench Reference Tyler and Moench2012). It also recognizes that information users have unique local experience that is invaluable in developing meaningful knowledge for the community.

In each city, stakeholders involved in the Shared Learning Dialogues include city and county staff; emergency management personnel; medical and mental health professionals; utility representatives; local, state, and federal researchers; and local and state decision-makers, as well as project staff and scientists. This diversity allows participants to look beyond their traditional job duties and identify areas of common interest or particular problematic climate and extreme weather events. For example, in Las Cruces, key concerns included extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme wind and dust, flooding, and city water demand, with specific questions related to each. Following the Shared Learning Dialogue, the project team worked with participants to narrow these concerns down to specific, quantifiable indicators that localized global climate models can project with medium-high confidence. Table 12.1 gives examples of participant questions and their associated thresholds.

Many of the thresholds identified in Las Cruces are similar to those in the other three cities – high maximum temperatures, high nighttime temperatures, increased frequency of flooding – but the exact numbers vary, fitting the local environments of each city. Other thresholds – the effectiveness of evaporative cooling and frequency of dust storms – are particular to Las Cruces.

The workshop discussions in each city have been strongly influenced by the diversity and the multisectoral views represented. Discussions have ranged from the potential climate impacts on agriculture and how they could change local culture, to explorations of the various types of climate action that will be needed and how to achieve these through local code changes, to how to educate and influence funding agencies and political entities to begin building support for acting more broadly.

The questions that city stakeholders are asking about how future climate will affect them, their operations, and the things they care about are focused and insightful. They have gone far beyond disseminating generic climate projection information. They are grappling with a broad range of possible impacts that could result from changing climatic conditions and are deciding what they can start doing today to mitigate or adapt to those impacts. These questions span departments and disciplines – the county transportation department is talking with the city sustainability officer, the police chief, and the state senator’s office staff about what their issues are and how they can work together to solve challenges. The results are dramatically more proactive than is typically achieved in a more traditional, top-down climate modeling project.

This project clearly falls into the third category of citizen science focused on equitable collaboration. The ultimate users of the information are not only those identifying thresholds, but are also those coproducing knowledge about why those thresholds are important and how to incorporate the new information they have gleaned into decision-making processes. From a scientific perspective, the results are equally expansive. Project staff are being pushed to identify resources for city players that can help them generate urban heat island maps, understand the potential impacts of climate change on crops, and explore how to distinguish between natural variability and changing climatic conditions. The questions that city stakeholders are asking make it clear how much more could be done to make climate projection information actionable and are generating exciting new avenues for scientific exploration.

12.5 Case Study Three: Adversity to Advantage in Gorakhpur, India

Climate change is threatening food production systems and, therefore, the livelihoods and food security of millions of people who depend on agriculture in India. Consistent warming trends and more frequent and intense extreme weather events have been observed in recent decades, and climate change projections show consistent temperature increases and erratic precipitation trends. Farmers must adapt to these changing conditions to build resilient livelihoods.

People involved in agriculture tend to be among the poorest urban residents, and the poorest of all tend to be women farmers. Yet the women farmers of Mahewa ward of Gorakhpur city, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, have been adopting innovative and resilient agricultural practices. These practices have sustained their farming – especially vegetable cultivation – in an area that is acutely waterlogged.

Mahewa ward is situated in a low-lying area on the southwestern periphery of Gorakhpur city (Figure 12.3) where residents have particularly poor socioeconomic status. Located near a wholesale vegetable market, the majority of the farmers of Mahewa ward grow vegetables to sustain their livelihoods. Waterlogging and weather uncertainties – such as late monsoons, intense rains, and drought – adversely impact the vegetable farming in the area. Farming in such challenging conditions has been successful only because of the synergy between scientific methods adopted by the farmers and the application of citizen science.

Figure 12.3 Mahewa ward, Gorakhpur, India.

Source: map provided by GEAG.

Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group, or GEAG, formed under the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network initiative, began promoting resilient agriculture with small, marginal, and women farmers in 2010. Their underlying strategy is to make farming economically viable and to demonstrate new, climate-resilient farming techniques.

To engage with farmers, GEAG set up and facilitated a neighborhood committee on Climate Resilient Agriculture, or CRA. The CRA committee provides a platform for farmers to share their agriculture-related problems and to find solutions. Since the platform meets monthly at the ward level, it is easy for women farmers to access, participate, and learn new methods of farming. This platform has been instrumental in scaling up new techniques to other farmers.

One of the key agricultural practices promoted by GEAG in the CRA committee has been dhaincha (Sesbania aculeate; Figure 12.4) farming. Dhaincha is a leguminous crop that is tolerant of high saline and waterlogged conditions. It is popularly and scientifically known for its green manuring attributes; scientists recommend it as a measure to reclaim alkaline soils that have been induced by waterlogging. GEAG’s past experiences had shown that dhaincha survives very well in waterlogged conditions.

Figure 12.4 Dhaincha (center).

Source: photo by GEAG.

The farmers who grew dhaincha for a year saw additional potential uses for the crop. They began using the hard, semi-woody stem of dhaincha as the base for climber crops in a multitier cropping system. This unique method of crop combination (dhaincha with vegetable crops) helps reduce the impacts of waterlogging on the vegetable crops and, simultaneously, increases soil fertility when the farmers plough dhaincha back into the soil after the vegetable crop is harvested. Farmers also began using dhaincha as fuel and as fodder for livestock. In the CRA committee meetings, successes were shared and expanded.

Dhaincha farming has improved the incomes of local farmers. Table 12.2 shows the income of Ms. I.D., a farmer in Mahewa ward, who sowed dhaincha along with sponge gourd on a quarter of an acre of land. With an input cost of Rs. 1250 (18.75 USD), she earned profits worth Rs. 7750 (116.50 USD).

Dhaincha is very popular in the urban environment. The intervention started with 10 farmers; now, more than 500 farmers have adopted it. The farmers are also promoting this technique in farmer field schools, meetings, in farmers’ fairs, and so forth. Word-of-mouth popularity has produced much recognition and adoption of the crop. Farmers have also started using it as a “trap crop,” as it provides protection against pests and insects.

Equitable collaboration between GEAG and the farmers improved the dhaincha farming model substantially. The resulting model delivers sustainable social and economic benefits to poor farmers, enabling them to increase their incomes and improve the quality of their lives. Such local innovations are attracting large numbers of other farmers who are facing similar problems farming in waterlogged contexts and are experiencing deteriorating soil health. Today, this citizen science initiative, acting in synergy with conventional science, is helping approximately 800 farmers in this flood-affected region.

12.6 Discussion

All three case studies fall into our third category of citizen science, which focuses on equitable collaboration. In all three cases, scientists worked with citizens to coproduce knowledge about how information could be best used locally. This process was facilitated by boundary organizations that have links to the community and experts. Likewise, in all three cases, the outside experts learned how extensively their information needed to be tailored to be adapted for local action.

These case studies illustrate several elements that we believe should be at the foundation of citizen science if it is to reach its full potential:

1. 1. Coproduction of knowledge, as illustrated in the dhaincha farming study

2. 2. Meaningful participation, as illustrated in the climate thresholds study

3. 3. Citizen ownership of solutions, as illustrated in the Odo-Osun study

We note that, in addition to these three elements, monitoring and evaluation is a growing area of donor interest and an undertaking that supports the development of strong science, particularly science focused on producing change. As such, we see monitoring and evaluation as fundamental to citizen science and an area in which citizen science could grow considerably. However, a detailed exploration of monitoring and evaluation, insofar as it can help support and develop citizen science, is beyond the scope of this chapter.

The dhaincha farming case study illustrates the benefits of coproduction of knowledge. GEAG brought top-down information on green manuring with dhaincha into Mahewa ward, but it was the women farmers, working together and with GEAG, who quickly realized dhaincha could also be used to address other issues they were having – trouble growing vegetable crops in waterlogged soils and lack of fuel and fodder. By customizing the top-down information with bottom-up knowledge of local needs and capacities, highly useful science was created. The credibility, legitimacy, and saliency of this knowledge to the local community is evident in the rapid uptake and continued development of this crop by other farmers, and in the economic impacts it is having on farmers’ lives.

The climate thresholds case study illustrates the value of meaningful participation. Climate projection data have been available in the United States for well over a decade, yet governments, agencies, organizations, and businesses are only just beginning to take action to mitigate climate emissions or to adapt to anticipated climate change impacts. Action, where taken, still tends to be highly focused within one or a few sectors. In this case study, the use of Shared Learning Dialogues to convene highly diverse, multidisciplinary groups significantly changed the content of the dialogue in all four project cities. Participants’ thinking became substantially broader, opportunities for cross-sectoral collaboration were identified, and local stakeholders began actively exploring the depths of internal and external expert knowledge in the room. This is only possible when participants feel they are engaged as equals, such that their knowledge, perspective, and opinions matter.

Finally, the Odo-Osun case study illustrates the value of citizen ownership of solutions. Many of the issues identified as challenges for the Odo-Osun project are typical of development projects worldwide – conflict over who is involved, over access, and over cost. The other common cause of project failure is selection of technology that cannot be maintained by those using it. By keeping the community at the heart of this project, technologies the community could maintain were preserved, and the challenges were addressed.

All three types of citizen action explored in this chapter – citizen data collection, citizen analysis, and equitable collaboration – are valuable. Citizen data collection is changing the nature of information available to conventional science and is making new analyses possible. Similarly, citizen analysis is challenging the conventional knowledge base and provides much broader sets of data and assessments in the conducted areas. Nonetheless, we believe the real power of citizen science lies in the third area – equitable collaboration. The three case studies we have explored here demonstrate the different cultures, problems, and solutions that are present in urban settings; still, the core method of equitable collaboration used in all three cases has contributed to the success of all three projects, has led to learning both for the citizens and scientists involved, and, through co-development of project focuses and goals, has produced valuable outcomes for the citizens who participated in the work.

12.7 Opportunities Moving Forward

Citizen science is changing the scientific process in powerful ways, and its full potential has yet to be tapped. However, to add value, citizen science needs to be done well, which takes time and funding. If we are to invest our time and money, where should we focus to make our investment as influential as possible?

Some of the opportunities we see include:

• Scale: Citizen science can help bridge the micro- versus macroscale gap. Conventional knowledge, particularly outside the developed world, is generally only available at a macroscale, and, frequently, it is stuck there due to a lack of finer-scale data. Increasingly, citizen science can help us to close that gap, informing the macroscale picture with microscale detail.

• Framing: Many of the data that can be easily captured by citizens aren’t data that scientists can use. We need to explore ways to take what can be captured easily and to give it value.

• Techniques: Local knowledge, such as changes in distribution of indicator species, is not easily crowd-sourced. We need more research into what communities know and how this could support, or challenge, conventional science; how citizens can capture this information and feed it into conventional science; and how we can incentivize citizen participation.

• Validation: Science typically requires verifiable information rather than perception, myth, or ideology. Yet, citizen-collected data are often based on perception, and in the context of vastly differing lived experiences for citizen scientists and conventional scientists. These perceptions are an important part of how fact is interpreted and provide valuable information about existing needs, values, and constraints. While perceptions are difficult to validate, collaborative engagement between citizens and conventional science can help bridge the gap between formal and informal ways of knowing and create a knowledge that is valid and relevant for a given context.

• Ownership and action: Increased coproduction of science can lead to high feelings of ownership and high levels of action based on the research results. Refining techniques for building ownership and fostering action will assist in scaling coproduction up and out.

Overall, citizen science is supporting the growth of new science endeavors in exciting ways, particularly as technology has progressed and virtual networks have expanded, increasing scientific literacy and inclusivity of contributors. But, it is not being utilized to its full potential. In this chapter, we have identified the value and opportunities for conducting citizen science that is more equitable and collaborative as a means of narrowing the gap between knowledge and action, particularly in urban settings. We know there are multiple organizations that have been practicing this type of science for years, as illustrated by the studies explored here. We hope this chapter inspires more organizations to embrace citizen science, both for the benefit of citizens, for the benefit of research, and for the benefit of the positive change it can affect for us all.