Combining ‘smartness’, resilience and sustainability in city development

During the run up to the UN’s global agreement on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015, including SDG11 on ‘inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities’, and not least the Climate Change Agreement in December of that same year, policy, research and practice has all turned their attention to the green and sustainable agenda. It would be a mistake, however, to perceive this as purely about environmental protection, as the ‘sweet spot’ which the city occupies is increasingly understood as the most effective matrix in which environmental concerns can be successfully wedded to social, economic and governance imperatives to provide wins across all these four dimensions. Indeed, it has been the large number of medium-sized and large cities in the USA which have declared that their President’s withdrawal from the UN Climate Accord will have no affect on their climate agendas. These cities have their own resources and powers to continue to implement their chosen initiatives, regardless of the policies of their federal government.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the ‘Fab City’ agenda and network, developed in Barcelona in 2016, has an ostensibly technological, economic and manufacturing purpose, but proposes and develops its raison d’être also on the basis of its social and environmental credentials. The vision is to address the extreme industrialization and globalization that have turned cities into the most voracious consumers of materials, and they are overwhelmingly the source of carbon emissions through both direct and embodied energy consumption; we need to reimagine the cities and how they operate.” [1] Since its launch in 2016, the Fab City network has grown to sixteen practicing cities, encompassing all continents, with the following objectives:

• To move from the current linear model industrial production, i.e. importing raw materials and products and exporting waste and pollution
• To move to a spiral innovation ecosystem: i.e. where materials flow within cities whilst information and data on how things are made circulate globally
• To move from centralized mass production to decentralized distributed manufacturing and mass customization.

The Fab City concept is perhaps the most ambitious, as well as most recent, attempt to promote new forms of low carbon economic growth based on the knowledge economy and the deployment of ICT. Despite the clear benefits that the Fab City approach has already brought, the overwhelming smart city utopian discourse, whether intentionally or not, may serve to depoliticize urban redevelopment and environmental management. There is some evidence that the techno-political language adopted has made it difficult for ordinary citizens to participate, let alone understand what is going on. There are calls to re-politicize the smart city discourse and “put citizens back at the center of the urban debate”[2]. This is of course not just an issue in Barcelona, but one which pervades most attempts to develop smart cities.

The European Commission is reflecting such calls to put citizens back at the center in some of its current research and innovation programmes, most notably the nature-based solutions for inclusive urban regeneration initiative[3]. This recognizes a growing awareness that nature can help provide viable solutions that use and deploy the properties of natural ecosystems and the services that they provide in a smart, 'engineered' way in urban development. The evidence shows that nature-based solutions, by reshaping the built environment, can enhance the inclusivity, equitability and livability of the cities, regenerate deprived districts, improve mental and physical health and quality of life for the citizens, reduce urban violence, and decrease social tensions through better social cohesion, particularly for the most vulnerable groups, such as children, elderly and people of low socioeconomic status.

Such approaches are clearly top-down policy pushes, part of a number of strategic initiatives in response to the UN’s SDGs and the Climate Change agenda. But there are also a large number of genuine examples and practical approaches taking place on the ground developed by individual city authorities, working with local social and commercial organizations, in response to local demands as well as market forces, many of which are also linking up through city learning networks. For example, the ‘new Nordic scalable model for city development’, implemented at various sites around Copenhagen and developed by a small Danish architectural company[4]:

• Attempting to move away from tackling climate change issues, such as water, using bigger sewers, harder surfaces and technological ‘fixes’, but instead focusing on the intricate design of topography, soil, trees, flowers, vegetation, natural seepage and drainage woven into the urban fabric.
• Focusing on inter-linking three extremely site-specific circuits: the hydrological, the biological and the social.
• Deploying social innovation approaches and methods, like co-creation, dialogue and humanistic nature-based solutions, through continuous collaboration with residents, school children and local civil organizations, where the results are claimed to be greener, happier, more sensuous and varied local cultures that promote neighbourhood identity and empower inhabitants.

[1] The Fab City Whitepaper: locally productive, globally connected, self-sufficient cities, 15 April 2016: http://fab.city/whitepaper.pdf

[2] March H, Ribera-Fumaz R (2016) Smart contradictions: The politics of making Barcelona a self-sufficient city, European Urban and Regional Studies, 2016, Vol. 23(4) 816–830.

[3] http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/opportunities/h2020/topics/scc-02-2016-2017.html

[4] http://sla.dk/files/2914/9449/3217/SLA_Ramboll_HansTavsensPark_UK.pdf