Cities of light

As Forum for the Future unveils its latest Sustainable Cities Index, Roger East asks just what makes a city sustainable – and how do we begin to achieve it in the here and now?

Sustainability looks simple if you’re starting from scratch. Take Masdar – the oil-financed, solar-driven city rising from the sands of Abu Dhabi, designed from the outset as a modern urban oasis of low-carbon living. Or Dongtan, the visionary new community slated for the outskirts of Shanghai.

Simple – but far from easy. Meeting the energy needs of a modern metropolis without fossil fuels requires innovation on an unprecedented scale. And that’s before you work out how to shrink the footprint of its food and water sourcing, let alone tackle materials consumption and waste disposal.

Small wonder, perhaps, that some grandiose plans for urban sustainability – from Dongtan to the UK’s eco-towns – remain stuck on the drawing board.

“Portland’s mayor envisions a 20-minute city, with everything accessible inside that time”

Half of humanity, however, already lives in cities which have evolved, organically and chaotically, for centuries. Here, the vital shift towards sustainability is less an issue of clean sheet planning, more a matter of real world wrestling with manifest mess. And progress comes in (often modest) increments.

So what would success look like, and where are the shining examples?

Curitiba in Brazil is one, so often cited that you’d think it was Eldorado. Its streets aren’t actually paved with gold, but decades of visionary leadership has helped build the sense that they truly belong to their two million inhabitants. It started with one single pedestrian area in 1972 – a radical step for the age. Since then, it has progressively spawned a mass of people-friendly neighbourhood projects, linked up in a city-wide model of participatory planning.

Also in Latin America, there’s the Colombian capital, Bogotá, where the now famous busway and bicycling network has been a driving force in transforming not just transport, but health and access to work and services too.

Portland in Oregon would be on most ‘green city’ lists. It regularly tops the rankings of US cities produced by SustainLane, the ‘people-powered sustainability guide’. Localism, public transport and cycling are all big themes here too, in line with mayor Tom Potter’s vision of a ‘20 minute city’ with everything accessible inside that time. “Ever since the ‘70s, Portland has put sustainability at the heart of its development”, says SustainLane founder James Elsen. “That’s what has given it the jump on other US cities.” And it has also given Portland the cachet of being one of the most desirable places to live in all America.

“Half of humanity already lives in cities which have evolved, organically and chaotically, for centuries”

Western Europe has its own A-list of urban best practice. Take Sweden’s Växjö, a university city nestled amid its southern forests. Its claim to fame is biomass: wood waste heats the city to the extent that over 50% of all its energy needs are being met from renewable sources. That’s not a target; it’s a fact on the ground.

Size matters, of course. Megacities face special challenges. Sustainable city exemplars tend to be more modest sized. Only Vaxjo, however, comes in under Aristotle’s ceiling for the well-governed polis – a maximum population of 100,000. Which, intriguingly, was the size envisaged for Dongtan….

But what of Britain? While the idea of so-called ‘eco-town’ settlements flounders at the planning stage for lack of support – not to mention credibility – its existing large cities scarcely register in terms of global green kudos. London alone emerges with some credit, and that principally for its efforts to stave off gridlock via congestion charging.

In a bid to raise both their game and their profile, Forum for the Future’s Sustainable Cities Index [see below] now ranks how the 20 largest cities are doing. Just published for the second year, the Index weighs the many different factors that cluster together within the ‘sustainability’ rubric.

Bristol, Brighton and Plymouth come out at the top, while Glasgow, Birmingham and Hull bring up the rear. The Index won’t avoid controversy, not least for the way it highlights a striking north-south divide. But the point of it is not to praise or to chide, but to stimulate action – and help point up ways to make that action effective. Margaret Eaton, chairman of the Local Government Association, says it has already started to drive real change, “by inspiring cities to adopt more ambitious sustainability strategies – and by providing a framework against which they can benchmark their efforts.”

Helen Clarkson, head of the sustainable cities project at Forum, is a bit concerned about people looking too much to the Curitibas and the Portlands of this world. “We urgently need more shining examples in the UK,” she argues, “so we can inspire change much closer to home, and our cities can go on to create the new cutting edge themselves.” The more homegrown successes we have, she says, the better we can study and learn from “the inputs and processes that lead to those outcomes”.

Leadership, she emphasises, is a crucial issue. Curitiba’s success owed much to the relentless passion of mayor Jaime Lerner. In their response to Forum’s Index researchers, Britain’s civic leaders were only too ready to acknowledge the power of inspirational personalities worldwide. Nelson Mandela’s name kept cropping up. “Leaders with passion and drive,” says Forum’s chief executive Peter Madden, “can create thriving cities which offer their people a high quality of life, respect their environment, and have the resilience to cope with the changes climate change will bring.”

“We urgently need more shining examples in the UK”

Ah yes, climate change. A key test of local leadership is active planning to cut carbon emissions. On this score, the top cities in the Index have no monopoly of virtue. London’s action plan aims to stabilise carbon dioxide output at 60% below its 1990 level by 2025. Bristol, Leeds and Manchester are aiming to “achieve low-carbon city status” by 2020. Manchester is setting the pace here, publishing key principles for action across all sectors.

Clarkson thinks it’s helpful, too, to have a strong vision statement – and here Leicester is the leader. Its straightforward ‘One Leicester’ statement is refreshingly jargon-free. It scores highly for putting sustainability at its centre, for its commitment to inclusiveness, and for its explicit 25-year timeframe for meaningful change.

Leicester prides itself on having been named Britain’s first Environment City back in 1990, by an alliance of environmental NGOs. It now shares the title with the somewhat surprising trio of Peterborough, Leeds and Middlesbrough. Peterborough although too small to rate inclusion in the Forum’s Index, has announced its intention to make itself “the UK’s Environment Capital”.

Its aspiration reflects an understanding of the value which green fame could bring, not least by attracting both money and future-proof green jobs to the region. Bristol is aiming to go one better: it is Britain’s lone entry (in a field of 35) for the EU’s European Green Capital. Just eight are now being shortlisted, and the top two will bear the title successively in 2010 and 2011.

So Bristol may be top of the Forum’s Index, but won’t be resting on its laurels. It’s already the focus of a separate Forum initiative to bring together sustainability work throughout the city region.

Sceptics may say they’ve heard all this before, and perhaps they have. Good people have been struggling to make sustainability more than a sideshow in local authorities since the days when Local Agenda 21 was a shiny new idea in the wake of the Rio Summit back in 1992. But in times of recession, when money counts more than ever, just think of the buying power that well networked green cities could exercise when it comes to procurement. Game-changing purchasing, for instance, of such things as solar roofs, low-carbon fleets, and green amenities at super-keen prices – the kind of thing councillors can point proudly at, come election time.

Roger East is consultant editor of Green Futures.

 

UK’s top 20 sustainable cities

10 November 2008

Roger East

Add new comment