How to make our cities more livable
What the UN in Geneva taught me. Spoiler alert: one answer is trees.
Peter Hulm is a contributing editor for Global Geneva website and magazine.
Towns and cities may be responsible for most of the air pollution causing our global climate crisis (three-quarters of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions). But more and more municipalities are doing something about it without waiting for national governments to set the rules, as I learned from a United Nations meeting in Geneva in advance of World Cities Day this 31 October.
For example, Barcelona — for many the poster child among livable cities, and not just Catalans — bars diesel vehicles older than 15 years and automobiles more than 20 years old from its streets. It enforces speed limits during pollution episodes inside its limits.
And next year, Deputy Mayor Laia Bonet told the meeting of the 56-nation UN Economic Commission for Europe, Barcelona’s budget will be “100% in line” with the noble Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations to offer better lives for all in 2030. Each municipal budget line will be linked to whichever of the 17 SDGs it relates to.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goal 11 commits governments to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”
The UNECE — it includes the United States and Canada — discussed SDG11 on 1 October as part of its Sustainable Cities Week. I sat in on the session. What I learned sent me scurrying around the Internet to discover more. Here, in very abbreviated form, is what I found.
What can we do about making cities more liveable?
UNECE Executive Secretary Olga Algayerova of Slovakia has made trees in cities her special mission. She noted nine out of ten urban citizens in the word breathe polluted air, and worldwide urban areas are responsible for an estimated 76% of CO2 emissions.
She enlisted the Mayors of Tirana, Vancouver, Bonn and Helsingborg (Sweden) to kick off a programme on 23 September for Mayors to commit to planting more trees in their cities by the end of next year.
Apart from storing CO2, trees limit urban heat islands, and “can increase surrounding property values by an estimated 2–10%”, UNECE notes.
It also says: “Strategically planted trees can cool the air by between 2°C and 8°C, thereby reducing air conditioning needs by 30 per cent. A single tree can absorb up to 150 kg of C02 per year and help mitigate climate change. Trees also help control land erosion, reduce landslides and control surface water, and help mitigate flood damage.”
Major step to cutting dirty air
In Europe and North America, at least, a landmark UNECE-monitored agreement to cut air pollution came into force just after the end of Sustainable Cities Week. For the first time, soot (also known as black carbon) is included in emission reductions. “Black carbon is 680 times more heat trapping than CO2,” the main greenhouse gas that is creating the climate crisis, UNECE points out.
Soot is fine particulate matter (PM2.5 in the technical jargon), also covered by the 1999 Air Convention for the first time. The amended protocol, adopted in 2012, establishes legally binding commitments to emission reductions for 2020 and beyond for the major air pollutants. As of now it covers 18 countries, though more are expected to sign on in coming months.
Preventing 600,000 deaths a year in Europe
The 40-year-old Convention is the only regional control of its kind. The Transboundary Air Pollution Convention has reduced fine particulate pollution by 90% in Europe and 30–40% in North America since 1990, Franziska Hirsch of UNECE reported. “In Europe, these measures account for 1 additional year of life expectancy, and prevent 600,000 premature deaths annually,” UNECE observes.
Under the new agreement, Cyprus will have to reduce its major air pollution by 46%, and even the Netherlands by 37%, compared with 30% for the UK and 22% for the EU as a whole — from the 2005 levels.
The cost? Less than 0.01% of annual earnings
The UNECE makes the argument that costs of implement these measures in the EU will be less than 1/100th of a percent of the EU’s annual wealth (Gross Domestic Product).
Given that the costs of healthcare and lost workdays due to air pollution are estimated at between 2.5% and 7% of GDP per year in Western Europe and to at or above 20% of GDP per year for 10 countries in the pan-European region, this makes the agreement a highly cost-effective policy solution,” UNECE says.
True, pollution has been the price of prosperity for many cities, and still is, even today. But cities can also be expensive, scary — particularly for women, terrible to work in, and great producers of waste that cascade down into the rest of the environment.
One-sixth of EU citizens cannot afford proper heating
As of 2015 in the UNECE region — remember it includes Canada and the United States — “at least 100 million low- and middle-income people in the UNECE region […] spend more than 40% of their disposable income on accommodation,” the UN body reports. “It is estimated that 52.08 million people in the EU cannot keep their homes adequately warm and 41.74 million face arrears on their utility bills.”
There’s no sign that on the housing front things have improved since. Many other places are worse.
Housing in Asia: where air pollution is worst
Among 12 Asian countries studied recently, the comparatively rich states Singapore and South Korea — in that order — have been the most successful at providing giving their peoples affordable housing. But both also have the worst record for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Tony Mulhall of the UK-based Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RISC), which commissioned the research into places where many of its 130K members work, describes the situation as “scary”.
RISC President Chris Brooke says that the common development agency prescription — that economic growth will solve city housing problems — ignores the pollution effect. It “has led to the wearing of face masks in Beijing and […] frequently brings traffic to a standstill in Delhi”.
Who gets help
Singapore is rich, while neighboring Indonesia is poor in terms of income per head ($52K income per head as against $3.4K). But the richer country produces 25,000 units of public housing each year, while its neighbour produces scarcely any subsidized housing.
Mulhall told the UNECE meeting that leaving housing to market forces was “largely ineffective” in giving people reasonable accomodation. His other conclusion: “We can’t use the Korean model and transfer it across to India.”
How to build affordable housing
The Geneva-based World Economic Forum, the leading body promoting public-private sector cooperation to solve social problems, reported on its efforts to make sustainable cities more attractive to investors.
In June 2019 it published a study, produced in collaboration with PwC, entitled Making Affordable Housing a Reality in Cities. Its package of recommendations cover supply-side and demand-side challenges for city governments, the private sector and non-profits.
Cities acting on their own
Barcelona’s action to reduce vehicle pollution is just one indicator — as I heard — of how cities are taking steps on their own rather than waiting for national legislation.
The representative of the Aarhus Convention on public access to information said Haifa in Israel had used its 7-stage process to assess health risks in planning an industrial zone. This led authorities to promote moving refineries out of the city, when they saw it could lead to a revival of the entire area.
Barcelona’s Deputy Mayor insisted on the city’s power to provide jobs through its culture, techno-hub companies and tourist attractions.
The elephants in the room
But no city can claim to meet SDG11 unless it tackles crime. “Safe” is one of its key elements. And some cities are taking real action
with help from the UN and international organizations. But there are two elephants in the room: the general fear of violence and dangers to women in particular.
Over the past five years, the Vienna-based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has helped national authorities and cities in Colombia, Kyrgyzstan and Mexico to carry out safety audits to help reduce crime.
Reducing the perception of violence
Medellin, Colombia, has “achieved very positive changes” with UN help over the past four years “in reducing violence and the perception of violence by its citizens,” Deputy Director Bo Mathiasen observed.
UNODC’s programmes now recognize that safety is not just about violence but also fear of violence, and the opportunities for disadvantaged groups to access social services and employment.
In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) worked with local health and education authorities in 2018 to develop ways of reduce the impact of violence on services. This included self-protection mechanisms for staff, the ICRC reported.
DCAF, the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, reported its programmes had tackled narcomayors and similar problems in cities, while also establishing local police-oversight bodies.
Many women feel threatened in public spaces, and what to do about it
Christine Löw, Director of the UN Women Liaison Office, reminded the participants that many women fear using public spaces, often because of urban design (even in developed countries 53% of women feel unsafe or very unsafe on railway platforms after dark).
But what women want is also accountability mechanisms in cities to ensure paper commitments to gender equality are carried out. Training should take account of how women and men differ in the way they use public transport and public spaces — and authorities should learn to plan accordingly. It is not enough to engage women in politics but they should also be present as workers in planning offices.
UN Women’s flagship initiative works with 27 “champion cities” in developed and developing countries to revamp urban design to make public spaces inclusive, secure and responsive to the needs of both women and men.
Privacy in public spaces
The new digital world is enabling Boston Public Schools to save $5m from its $120m a year bill for children’s buses, and cutting out 20,000lb of C02 emissions each day. An algorithm developed by Arthur Delarue and Sebastien Martin, doctoral students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for a BPS Challenge competition launched in 2017, reduced journeys by 1 million miles during its 2018 tests. The $5 million saved has been reinvested in other school initiatives, reports Popular Mechanics.
But the surveillance society that has come with the networked world of the 21st century has also created new problems for urban citizens. WEF, which lauded the Boston achievement, is partnering with the Japanese government to launch a G20 coalition, officially known the G20 Smart Cities Alliance on Technology Governance.
The aim is to establish universal norms and guidelines for implementation of smart-city technology, for example, how technology is used in public places and promote core principles including transparency, privacy and security. “Currently, there is no global framework or set of rules in place for how sensor data collected in public spaces, such as by traffic cameras, is used,” its website notes.
What resilient means
Charles Deutscher, speaking for the Policy and Humanitarian Diplomacy Division of the ICRC, underlined: “A truly resilient city is one that continues to work in bad times as well as good.” This made safety and security “the twin great challenges” for local mayors and municipal authorities in ICRC’s experience, for example in Gaza.
A Forum of Mayors
UNECE’s Committee on Urban Development, Housing and Land Management — the official name of the urban group established in 1947 — decided to call a Forum of Mayors in 2020 and 2021 to discuss the challenges they face. The first meeting will be on climate.
Promoting carbon neutrality, local biodiversity action plans, integrating the environment into city planning, bringing nature closer to people, and championing social inclusion — these were the themes of the World Bank’s sustainable cities conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a few days before — and all came up in Geneva. Plus security, jobs, decent housing, making cities smarter, and protection of citizens’ rights.
There was even discussion of the city itself.
Teaching for solutions
I have my complaints about Geneva. Affordable housing is just a dream for many people. It has some streets whose air pollution rivals that of Los Angeles. I was walking to the UN a few days later in the rain, and the water stung my eyes.
But the Director of Geneva University’s Global Environmental Policy Programme (GEPP), Alexandre Hedjazi, told the UNECE meeting that his university practises solution-based teaching methods.
So his students studying urban sustainability connect with their peers online across the world through Swissnex to monitor air pollution. They are also encouraged to have contacts with the local authorities both to inform and learn from officials: “They have to be active and engage policymakers and not be observant only […] so that science does make a difference.”
As part of this mission, GEPP has co-organized, with UNECE, UN-Habitat, UNDP and locals, several international training workshops for policymakers in Albania, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine on evidence-based policies for sustainable housing and urban development.
Who’s doing best?
On 27 September 2019 WEF published the security firm kisi’s listing of the world’s best cities for “work-life balance”. Helsinki came tops. Following were Munich, Oslo, Hamburg, Stockholm and Berlin in that order.
Vancouver, Canada, was the only non-European city in the top 10, and Paris 9th. Barcelona was 8th, but it was definitely the warmest city in the list.
Zurich, at the other end of Switzerland from Geneva, was 7th. The report noted: “In Zurich, people work the longest hours of any city in the top 10 and experience some of the longest commutes.” Geneva, presumably, would score much the same.
I have to say this in favour of Geneva, though. In the latest Parliamentary elections, a left-wing woman voted to represent the city nationally turned it down because she had too many interesting local projects to take care of. Next in line was a man, who also turned the nomination down, because he said voters had clearly shown they wanted a woman to speak for them. So the seat went to the third-placed party candidate.
My full report, with links, is available at www.crosslines.ch/ggeneva/2019/cities/20191001cities.php (5000 words).
