Forum for the Future has published its 2nd annual Sustainable Cities Index. The easy headlines are that Bristol has leapfrogged Brighton and Hove to take first place, Newcastle has risen up the rankings to become the only northern city in the top five, and three of the bottom four places are still held by Birmingham, Liverpool and Hull.

It gets more interesting when you look behind the rankings. The exercise ranks the cities against one another and is designed to help city leaders benchmark themselves against meaningful indicators which they can do something about, like recycling rates and readiness for climate change.

But it doesn’t mean that Bristol is a genuinely sustainable city, it’s just faring better across the board than others in the UK.  Furthermore, Britain’s cities lag behind international rivals on sustainability and we lack the shining examples that others can come and learn from.

Looking at those international cities that are raising the bar on sustainability – such as Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, we can see that their success now is due to far-sighted policies in the 70s and 80s, which are coming to fruition now. 

Back in the 70s when the rest of the US was embracing shopping malls, Portland enacted strong land-use policies, which set the city boundary and encouraged housing density. This means that now it can aspire to be a “20 minute city” where citizens will spend no more than 20 minutes travelling to work, shop, or play.  They are currently in the process of updating the Portland Plan which aims to take the lead on “sustainable, equitable, and economically viable long-range planning”.

As part of the work for the Index, we interviewed nine UK city leaders (both elected Leaders and Chief Executives of the city councils) and got their views on leadership in cities.  They shared the view that good leaders will have a vision which they can articulate, be passionate about and motivate people to follow.  Looking at those international examples we think it needs to go further than this.  If a uniting vision isn’t sustainable in itself then trying to graft sustainability onto it results in a strategy full of compromises and trade-offs.  A strategy, like Portland’s, which is driven by questions such as “How can we design a city which thrives whilst minimizing carbon emissions?”, is more likely to lead to long-term success than one where sustainability is an after-thought.

We’ve seen a similar shift with companies.  As we noted in our Leader Business Strategies report back in January, companies we work with have moved from asking us "What should our sustainability strategy be for our business?", to "What should our business strategy be, in the light of sustainability?" Substitute the word ‘cities’ for ‘business’ and this is how we need our city leaders to be thinking.

Leicester City has recently released just such a plan “One Leicester", which includes ambitions such as “Planning for People Not Cars”.  We believe visions like this, which are driven by the principles of sustainability, will lead to real change for British cities, and we hope that increasingly city leaders look to sustainability for the answers to the pressing questions they are dealing with, rather than seeing it as one more agenda to addressed alongside all the others.

This blog entry has been amended to reflect revisions to the Index. City rankings have changed slightly after corrections to an error in the air quality data.