Key aspects of the urban physical system
The urban physical system needs a rethink in many places
The urban physical system is what we create, build and live and work in. Our physical structures link, sometimes well and sometimes not very well, with the ecological and socio-economic systems of our urban environments. They should leverage good governance and good building codes to be as effective, efficient, resilient, sustainable and hopefully also as beautiful as possible.
The way that we build our cities and towns, founded on their ecological setting - the natural environment they exist in - is fundamental to the quality of people's lives in urban settings.
For our cities and towns to be thriving, green and resilient places, our physical environment must be integrated with nature and it must be more closely connected to responsible socio-economic policy. By designing and creating our urban environments for time, with nature embedded within them, and in a more inclusive manner, we can create places that are pleasurable and equitable for everyone, leaving no one behind. We have the skills and abilities to make this happen - we just need to all get on board with the journey to collectively ensure that it does.
Changing the transport & mobility hierarchy
What do we need to focus on for good transport & mobility?
Two particular areas we need to focus on are:
(1) how to reduce carbon and other emissions caused by transport, and the impacts of this change on the ecological and socio-economic systems. Reducing emissions is an urgent priority for the world to tackle. Tough decisions need to be made by authorities in cities and towns to drive change. Citizens and businesses need to understand why the change is required, and adapt.
(2) how to get more people using active mobility and transport (taking into account mobility restrictions some people have), and improve public transport so that it is more compelling and better value than using a private vehicle (be it an electric vehicle or a traditional one). Getting from A to B has to become more efficient, more pleasurable, and healthier for us all if we are to achieve thriving, green and resilient cities and towns.
Too many urban places around the world today have transport and mobility infrastructure that is focused on people using cars for too many journeys. If we can change this, we can move around more efficiently and lead better lives, whilst also benefitting the planet.
As the decade up to 2030 unfolds we must drive forward with ambitious and collective action to change our transport & mobility infrastructure. The SDGs provide us with targets to aspire towards, to make the change happen. A small number of cities and towns are making good progress in the journey of change. Many need to catch up.
Do we have time to change?
Can a fundamental change to transport and mobility infrastructure policy, concepts, design and implementation take place in cities and towns where changing existing infrastructure will take years and money to make such changes is in short supply? Intelligent action can help us overcome any inertia. Some cities and towns are driving forward active mobility initiatives such as pedestrianisation and cycle lanes, improving public transport and transit, and forcing changes to how and where people can use cars and other motorised transport. Policy makers and urban planners around the world are rethinking their approach to transport, as part of an “urban systems approach” which considers the needs of all members of society and local communities.
Time is of the essence to reduce global carbon and other emissions, for which transport is responsible for a large amount, yet changing an entire city or town takes time. How can we speed it up and “invert the transport and mobility hierarchy”, with cars coming last? The decisions that are made in the coming years by those who oversee cities and towns everywhere around the world, and the projects that are implemented to support these decisions in the next decade will have major repercussions over the coming decades on our ability to implement effective climate adaptation measures, and to the overall health of our urban areas (with many of them heavily polluted today because of fossil fuel-powered vehicles).
Some context to transport and emissions
The physical system’s transport and mobility infrastructure is intimately linked to the ecological and the socio-economic system. The way we move around and the energy and time we consume to do so makes transport collectively one of the biggest emitting categories of CO2 – it currently accounts for about a fifth of all global emissions (in urban and rural environments). Data from 2018 shows that road travel accounts for three quarters of transport emissions. Rail is much smaller in comparison.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has published statistics that show CO2 emissions from the global transport sector fell by over 10 per cent in 2020, with global transport emissions of 7.2Gt CO2 in 2020, down from nearly 8.5Gt in 2019. However, as economies re-opened as the world adapted to COVID-19 being accepted as endemic, transport CO2 emissions are increasing (even as economic problems persist, including rises in the cost of energy and fuel). Against this backdrop, the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario produced by the IEA requires transport emissions to fall by 20 per cent to 5.7Gt by 2030. This will require significant shifts in transport policy, with major changes in options and energy efficiency measures across all forms of transport. The IEA proposes an "Avoid, Shift, Improve” approach in its Sustainable Development Scenario to reduce transport emissions by 2030. It will require implementing a broad set of policies globally if it is to succeed.
Tackling the problem with better master planning
A good transport and mobility infrastructure network that benefits all members of society, that is resilient and that integrates with nature is at the heart of a good urban environment. How we move around is a key structural component of the urban physical system and vital to its socio-economic system. How transport and mobility infrastructure is planned, implemented and maintained has a significant impact on the urban ecological system.
The world needs a more resilient urban transport and mobility infrastructure in developed and developing economies. Most of the focus of transport infrastructure in recent decades has been for roads to serve cars and other vehicles, which we now realise has led to structural problems with CO2 emissions and our physical and socio-economic urban systems. Can we change our spending focus over the next decade and in the decades beyond, to drive changes to how urban environments function? Globally, we have to agree how we will reduce our carbon (CO2) emissions. The fact is that our use of road vehicles needs to reduce if we are to succeed.
To introduce change, we need agile and inclusive planning to drive forward projects that provide better urban health and wellbeing, and better links to ecology. It is not feasible to rip up all their existing transport networks - many of them can be adapted and repurposed, some successful examples of which are provided in this section. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and changes being seen to municipal authority income and receipts from transport modes, we have to spend financial resources in an intelligent way, which requires the involvement and agreement (with the necessity of compromise) of a broad range of stakeholders. Some decisions towards urban transport and mobility require cutting across political factors such as city and town electoral cycles, with long-term “cross party agreements” reached to benefit the greater good.
Three areas of focus
The IEA puts forward the following three focus areas for policy makers and planners to improve transport sustainability in cities:
1. Policies that alter the urban physical system, promoting the right type of densification, with the urban layout catering for a good blend of transit options to reduce trip distance and frequency.
2. Travel demand management (TDM) policies which can be fiscal (e.g. congestion charges and parking strategy) and regulatory (e.g. zero‐emission zones).
3. The right investment in public and non‐motorised transport, including improvements to walking and cycling infrastructure improvements, public transit networks, passenger fare and pricing strategy, planned and unplanned maintenance, and extensions to cater for growth.
Can these policies be practised by cities and towns around the world, as part of ambitious and inspiring plans to improve their transport and mobility infrastructure and how it is stitched into the rest of the physical system and the socio-economic system?
For any type of transport solution to be implemented, it has to be linked to a transport & mobility plan and also the overall urban system. For example, if new metro lines and systems are conceived and built but they are not properly integrated with other forms of transport that support the nature of the local urban environment including how dense or spread out it is (e.g. linked cycle paths or buses), they will not succeed over the long term.
10 points to change transport & mobility
Ten points to consider are as follows:
1. Will perceived boundaries between private, shared and public transport and mobility become more porous and synchronised?
2. Will the citizens of cities and towns be provided with enough choice of how to get from point A to point B, in an inclusive and accessible way, in ways that are clean, cheap, flexible and societal?
3. Will people be convinced to make important changes to the way they travel in urban environments, especially – and crucially – using cars less?
4. Can we reimagine our transport and mobility hierarchy as an integrated part of dealing with modern housing demands and strategies?
5. Will the design of our cities and towns help us to engage in better quality movement which maximises our quality of life?
6. What does the future of public transport look like, and how can the public sector and private sector work better together to deliver the best solutions?
7. How do we ensure transport in urban environments significantly reduces pollution (air and noise)?
8. Can we afford the financial outlays to make the changes required, with the public and private sectors working together to provide cooperative finance solutions (whilst dealing with reductions in public finance income from reduced urban public transport use during the COVID-19 pandemic)?
9. What kinds of taxes, including “the elephant in the room” – carbon taxes – will be used as “sticks to push change”?
10. What kind of incentives and nudges will work as “carrots to encourage behavioural change”, appreciating that different age groups and people with different needs requires an inclusive approach?
Changing our energy and water infrastructure
Energy and water infrastructure for now and the future
Energy & water infrastructure utilities in our urban environments have a large role in how we live. As more people live in urban environments, can we control the emissions we produce from our energy needs and use water wisely, to maintain a good state of resilience in our cities and towns amidst a changing climate and disaster threats? Many urban communities are already adopting new solutions for energy and water use. Circular economy principles play a part to ensure there is a mindset to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and conserve energy that is created and reuse it (for example, some energy suppliers provide free electricity to citizens when circumstances permit).
Looking at our urban energy and water needs
On a global basis, as cities and towns grow and change, the citizens of these urban environments are set to demand and consume an increasing amount of energy, as more and more people live in urban areas. Climate change includes the growing need to deal with heat, which is adding to people’s energy demands. On a geopolitical level, the world’s energy mix needs to change as we grapple globally with two important challenges – (1) how to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and (2) at the same time, ensure that nations and states, and by extension their cities and towns, are not reliant (with “concentration risk”) on one or a few sources for most of their energy, especially sources that come from geopolitically unstable geographical regions that have an inherent supply risk to them. Solutions are not easy and they require a coordinated approach from a wide range of stakeholders.
Water stewardship and management is at a similarly critical juncture. Many parts of the world face the prospect of bigger challenges to clean water availability and supply in the years to come. Cities and towns around the world must ensure they engage citizens and businesses in careful stewardship of this precious resource. Important lessons can be learned from cities that are already facing this challenge. Water is a precious resource that too often has been taken for granted. For an increasing number of urban areas, securing a resilient future water supply will require imaginative and bold solutions.
Learning from a project in Denmark
Consider the learnings from EnergyLab Nordhavn, which was created in 2015 as a cooperative partnership of local government, industry, utilities and academia. It was set up to explore solutions for the design and operation of a cost-efficient and integrated energy system for urban environments of the future, using the district of Nordhavn in Copenhagen as a “living lab”.
The full Report from the initiative, which includes 28 key recommendations for authorities, municipalities, utility companies, building consultants, and technology providers is available here. The summary of the key recommendations is available here. A video about this initiative is available here.
Some of the innovations are simple, and they link strongly to infrastructure for transport and mobility. Nordhavn has been designed to have more bike trails and walking paths than most neighbourhoods in Copenhagen. Other innovations are high tech. One example is the citywide “energy data warehouse”, which collects real-time data on wind and solar energy production, weather, energy costs, and how all resources for the whole area are being consumed at any given moment – that is, for transport, electricity, heating and other uses. This real-time provision of data allows authorities to constantly make risk- and resilience-informed decisions about energy usage, including the best way to manage energy from its renewable sources.
An important aspect that has been tackled is the cost and taxation of energy. The project synchronised energy taxes across all energy types and found ways to use buildings to store energy to be subsequently incorporated into the district’s energy system. In an example of public-private cooperation, access to data from private sector energy suppliers is a critical point to ensure continued monitoring and learning, and innovation and development in this field.
Each building in the area helps to reduce Nordhavn’s overall energy footprint. For example, the Copenhagen International School is home to the area’s largest rooftop solar panel array. Residents of the Harbour Park residential development periodically give up control of their own heat supply systems so that authorities can examine the data in order to recalibrate and optimise the district’s thermal systems as the weather and seasons change. The local Meny supermarket uses technology to capture waste heat from its cooling systems and transfer it to a district heating network.
Making Nature-based Solutions happen
Our use of electricity is intrinsically connected to the challenges we face in dealing with climate change. Electricity that is clean and resilient is a critical goal to achieve (in line with SDG 7) for urban environments to be sustainable and resilient. Yet changing weather conditions (heat and cold) lead to greater demand for electricity and introduce resilience risks. The urban heat island effect amplifies the impact of hot weather and results in greater electricity demand (to stay cool). Storms and other disaster events are electricity resilience risks.
Changes to energy solutions will have a financial impact on people’s energy bills and require the right energy reserves and storage as well as on-demand energy (energy costs in some parts of the world have been volatile in 2021 due to supply constraints and rising demand). Can policy makers and urban planners find the right solutions, achieving good financial outcomes for citizens who pay their energy bills as they make the energy mix greener?
Can countries, and their cities and towns afford the switch to clean sources of energy, especially those in the Global South? UNDP, as part of its strategic plan 2022-2025 has set ambitious targets, including on energy — through which it intends to help 500 million people gain access to clean energy in the coming three years.
The potential of solar power
Solar power demonstrates an economic and environmental success story in recent times. The cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy globally has decreased by over 80 per cent between 2010 and 2021. The International Energy Agency (IEA) provides an overview about the use of solar PV. The significant shift in the cost of solar is providing a boost to creating a zero-emissions energy system that could be less costly than the fossil-fuelled system it will replace.
As well as their obvious energy benefits, solar panels can also help combat the urban heat island effect by turning sunlight into energy and not radiating it back into the local environment as wasted and potentially harmful heat. Linking to Nature-based Solutions shows us that using “green roofs” that have solar panels and also the right type of greenery are better than installing solar panels by themselves on hard surfaces such as concrete. Studies indicate that solar cells work better when a roof is “green”, because the greenery helps to regulate the roof temperature and prevents the solar panels from becoming too hot and going past their efficiency threshold.
In a small-scale but valuable study in Sydney, two identical office buildings side by side in the Barangaroo district were compared by solar energy researchers. They found that the "green roof" improved performance by as much as 20 per cent at peak times and by 3.6 per cent over the length of the experiment. Over eight months, the roof with greenery generated an additional A$2,595 worth of renewable energy.
Cities and towns have many roof spaces of buildings that serve no societal purpose. Could they be economically used to generate solar power?
The potential of hydrogen
We have been using hydrogen for energy-related purposes for a few hundred years. “Coal gas”, which includes hydrogen, was used to power street lamps in the UK in the 1800s. The first fuel cell, a “gas battery” in which the formation of water from hydrogen and oxygen gas generated an electric current, was invented by the British physicist Sir William Robert Grove in 1839.
Hydrogen provides various opportunities for the energy needs of urban environments, including property heating and power, powering large vehicles and operating machinery (such as buses and construction equipment) and grid energy storage and power generation.
Achieving cost efficiencies will be an important factor in determining its use in future. Legislation and new laws will be instrumental to how the use of hydrogen as an energy carrier will develop around the world. Hydrogen should have a bright future for helping the world’s urban environments to meet their energy needs in a sustainable way.
What we can all do to play a part
Digital solutions will be critical to our urban buildings in future as part of meeting energy efficiency requirements. Smart sensors and controls for thermostats and lighting, and better forms of lighting such as using energy-efficient LEDs rather than incandescent light bulbs, are well established forms of technology and can help owners and occupants use energy more efficiently and improve building resilience.
Anyone who is used to seeing city skylines at night will know that lighting in office buildings is left on more often than not. Can office owners improve their management of lighting? Whilst it is important that cleaners and maintenance staff have the lighting on in the evenings to perform their tasks, better sensors would make CBD lighting use more efficient (which would also saves costs for the building occupiers), so that it is only on when it needs to be (including for safety reasons). This is an example where technology is more reliable than trusting people to “turn out the lights”, because studies repeatedly show that humans can be unreliable for this. In addition to energy savings, turning out the lights could save a huge number of birds, who fly into the windows of lit buildings much more often than we may think. Earth Hour is an annual event which, amongst other things, includes turning off lights in cities around the world – so can this behaviour be made general practice, in a safe way?
Using LED lighting (in street lighting and in buildings), and switching off lights at the right times is just one behavioural and lifestyle nudge that can make a large difference in our energy use. Optimising building energy efficiency and energy demand at the city-level is key to achieving climate goals. How buildings are designed, procured and built, and integrated into the urban energy infrastructure network, is key. It will be particularly challenging for the many small building projects around the world that are undertaken, in which there is often little incentive to invest in technology. Can “carrots and sticks” in building codes encourage, and require developers and builders to adopt a minimum standard of energy digitalisation?
Digital technologies are also helping to encourage a change in the transport and mobility hierarchy, by helping people switch to greater adoption of active and shared transport in place of cars. The electrification of transport could tie into the greater use of variable energy sources including renewables via flexibility services such as smart charging and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services. Time-of-use strategies can improve energy management.
The urgency to address water stewardship
Each year that passes seems to be high in the "warmest year" charts. The many interconnected impacts of rising temperatures and changes in precipitation are predicted by some observers to result in at least 200 cities that will be put under sever water stress and water security. Drought could become a major problem.
If they have not already done so, cities, towns, states and national governments around the world need to develop detailed water stewardship plans for how they can cope in a 1.5C world (or worse), and how they can help to combat climate change and be more sustainable and resilient. Context to their geography is key. In some cases, what they need to do will be expensive and require dramatic changes in the way their citizens live and their businesses function.
As discussed in the ecology system section, many cities and towns around the world are built on water resources - be they rivers, harbours, lakes or by the sea. Indeed, one of the challenges that these cities and towns face today is how to change from having built “on top of” water sources, to working in an integrated way with them. Considering the context about water scarcity risks, and projections of urban growth in the coming decades, how can urban environments improve their stewardship of water, and be more resilient to water risks?
According to studies conducted by the group Down To Earth in 2018, at least 200 cities across the world are running out of water. Their analysis suggests that ten of them are headed towards Day Zero, when the taps will run dry, which has been followed up by subsequent similar reporting.
Maintaining good water governance, and an appropriate amount of capital expenditure and investment in water and wastewater infrastructure, is critical if many cities and towns around the world are to avoid major water shortages in future. It starts from where the supplies of water to urban environments come from - how resilient and how well maintained they are, and the size and nature of their catchment areas. It flows through to how water is regulated and managed, how technical innovations can help responsible water stewardship and how businesses and the citizens of urban environments can be societally responsible with their use of water. If water utilities are operated by the private sector, they must be run for the public good, not for profit maximisation of shareholders.
The Alliance for Water Stewardship owns The AWS International Water Stewardship Standard, which is a framework including detailed guidance and scoring criteria (which can link to SDG 6) for major water users to understand their water use and its impacts, and to work collaboratively and transparently for sustainable water management within a catchment context.
