Why aren’t we living in sustainable cities and will we ever?
by Dr Tony Matthews
A Provocation
Let me begin with a provocation:
We will never live in sustainable cities…
What do I mean by this?
I mean there is no end-state sustainable city. We cannot achieve sustainability by chasing big visions; instead we must will it into being from the ground up. History tells us that improvements in cities come from fine-grain thinking, not chasing urban unicorns.
If we want any city to be more sustainable — socially, economically, environmentally — we need to consider what sustainability looks like within the context of that city’s unique circumstances. And we need to remember that while any city can potentially be more sustainable, none will ever be absolutely sustainable.
The Horror of the Factory Cities
To illustrate what I mean, let’s take an imaginary trip back in time to the mid-1800s, when the Industrial Revolution was in full-swing.
Let me paint you a picture…
A factory city is bustling with activity. The Industrial Revolution, happening at rapid pace, is driving major economic, environmental and social changes. Mass production and factories of dizzying scale are dominant symbols of the time. Dozens of cities in Europe and the US are filling up quickly as rural dwellers abandon agrarian life to chase a dream of guaranteed wages.
The sharp turn towards industrialisation is radically restructuring cities. Factories demand more and more space, resources and workers. Heavy industries are becoming integral urban features, changing traditional working relationships forever. Workers are adapting to shift work and the novelty of weekends. They are learning new skills or forgetting old ones in return for steady pay.
But all is not well beneath slate grey skies. Most workers live in misery, with families crammed into filthy and fire-prone tenements. The factory city is a profoundly unhealthy place. It has limited sewerage and refuse systems. It’s rife with pollution. Neither the air nor the water is safe. Nor are the streets, especially at night. Life for many is hard and short, with low life expectancies and high child mortality.
Utopian Visions
This doesn’t sound very sustainable, does it? It’s a million miles from the sophisticated urban life many enjoy today. A modern city of the 21st century would be unimaginable to the factory worker of 200 years ago. Relative to then, the cities of today are more sustainable in every way.
So what changed and how did cities improve so radically in such a short time? And what can that tell us about how we might realise sustainable cities in a 21st century context?
Well, one thing that didn’t work was trying to imagine what an ideal, one-size-fit-all city might look like and then trying to turn imagination into reality. It’s easy to think a grand design, with form, function, health and beauty, can be realised on a city scale. Alas, urban history tells us bluntly that it cannot.
Many great thinkers were repelled by the horrors of the factory cities and became determined to propose visions for better solutions. They had wonderful ideas but those ideas rarely worked in practice.
Ebaneezer Howard visioned the Garden City. His circular design was intended to lead people from unhealthy cities to new towns that were safe, healthy and prosperous. Garden cities were to be planned communities, self-contained and surrounded by greenbelts. Carefully balanced areas of residence, industry and agriculture would be master-planned.
Howard’s vision was widely celebrated but never achieved on a large scale. We can see fingerprints of his design in parts of London, the North of England, Canberra and Adelaide. Turning his full vision into everyday reality proved too challenging.
Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect who fancied himself an urban luminary, proposed the Radiant City. The city would benefit from the precision and function of a machine — or so the story went. Entire urban areas would be inverted, as houses, services, businesses and social spaces could be encased within high-rise buildings.
In reality, his vision became the basis for the high-rise, modernist social housing developments that have failed all over the world.
Many others also shared their grand visions of new urban utopias only to likewise find that dreaming is easy, but realising a dream at the city scale is much harder.
The Emergence of Modern Urban Planning
So if visioning didn’t work, what did? How did we improve upon the unsustainability of the factory cities and set ourselves on an upward trajectory?
Like so many things in life, going back to basics and making incremental improvements from the ground up proved the best formula. Resisting the temptation to chase urban unicorns was a good first step.
It may surprise you to learn that modern urban planning emerged as a way to bring order and improvement to the factory cities. Its founding principles were beauty, health and convenience.
An early focus for urban planning was public health improvement. This was based on a growing awareness of a connection between living conditions and poor health. Legislation was introduced widely to improve living conditions in cities. Targeted areas for improvement included sanitation, public health provisions, residential standards, maximum occupancy laws and fire escapes.
Formalised urban planning evolved quickly as a way to limit urban problems and create healthier cities. But it couldn’t achieve such a large task alone, so planners coordinated with other professions. Planners worked then — as now — with architects, surveyors, engineers, health-care professionals and emergency service personal.
This quiet revolution improved building and sanitary conditions, brought disease vectors under control, improved housing and re-developed factory cities. It saved countless lives and set foundations for the consistent improvements in urban conditions that we have enjoyed since.
Back to the Future
So, what can we learn from this and how might it help us in our current quest for sustainable cities? How do we move successfully to the next level?
Here are my thoughts -
First, let’s accept that cities are now the dominant human environment. More than half the people on the planet live in cities and the proportion is heading steeply upwards. Cities are therefore the front lines of sustainability; they are both problem and solution.
Next, let’s accept that there is not and never will be an ideal model or definition of urban sustainability. It’s more than 30 years since the Bruntland Report, a landmark report into sustainability, offered the common definition of sustainable development: “… development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. This sounds great but doesn’t mean much once you look closely. The UN Sustainable Development Goals suffer from a similar problem — they’re aspirational, fuzzy and short on meaningful detail.
So we don’t really understand what sustainability is and the goals we have are not that helpful. We also know from urban history that idealised visions are very difficult to achieve. We can chase urban unicorns but it probably won’t lead us anywhere useful.
Instead, I propose we draw inspiration from the efforts of those who preceded us. The cures for the ills of unsustainable factory cities were found in fine-grain thinking and addressing problems locally. Incremental improvements followed, eventually leading to wholesale improvements.
Any city wishing to be more sustainable today needs to look closely at its performance across many metrics and focus on improving bad performance where it occurs.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals are useful here as categories for cities to assess their performances against. For example, a city might be doing well in meeting many of the goals, but failing on climate action. Addressing that shortcoming then becomes the surest way towards improving the city’s overall sustainability profile.
I believe locally focused action offers the best way forward. A similar approach is used in urban climate change adaptation. Start small, understand local conditions, tailor responses accordingly. It may not be as exciting as dreaming up an ideal city design to cure all urban ills, but it can and does work. Fundamentally, it is the difference between activity and achievement.
Reframing the Journey
Let us revisit the source question: Why aren’t we living in sustainable cities and will we ever?
My answer is that we will never live in sustainable cities as long as we hold to the idea of an end-state of sustainability. We should realise that many cities are becoming more sustainable all the time. Incremental improvements, leading to large-scale changes, abound in many places — the energy sector, healthcare, low carbon design, economic opportunities. Certainly bad outcomes will still occur. But the overall trend is one of improvement in most cases.
Many of us are in fact living in sustainable cities — at least in relative terms. Like the factory cities of the 18th century, the cities of the early 21st century will improve dramatically if we attend to the small details properly.
There is no finish line, no point at which success is complete. The journey towards sustainable cities has been underway for centuries and continues apace today. We will get there, just like we have before.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DR TONY MATTHEWS
Dr. Tony Matthews is a Senior Lecturer in Urban and Environmental Planning at Griffith University. His research interests include managing climate change impacts in urban systems through planning; the role and function of green infrastructure in delivering adaptive interventions; institutional, governance and policy change processes; and community, cultural and spatial rejuvenation led by informal local networks. Dr. Matthews is a member of Griffith’s Cities Research Institute and co-presenter of urban affairs program called The Urban Squeeze.
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