Delivering sustainable, resilient and liveable cities via transformed governance

Abstract

In the context of steadily declining Natural Capital and universal recognition of the imperative to reverse this trend before we get to the point that nature is not able to restore itself, cities have a crucial role to play. The UK Government commissioned a comprehensive study into the value of biodiversity, and by extension nature, reinforcing “why we should change our ways”—yet what is missing is the “how?”. This paper uniquely describes both the “how?” and a conclusive demonstration of the remarkable benefits of implementing it in a city. Critical to this process, it took a UK Parliamentary Inquiry to reveal that nature has become invisible within the economy, yet the ecological ecosystem services nature provides have enormous benefits to both people and the economy. Therefore integration—or seamless weaving—of urban greenspace and nature into people's lives and the places where they live, work, and spend their leisure time is vital. Moreover, what nature does not provide must be provided by engineered systems, and these have an economic cost; put another way, there are enormous cost savings to be made by taking advantage of what nature provides. In addressing these issues, this paper is the definitive paper from a 20-year portfolio of research on how to bring about transformative change in the complex system-of-systems that make up our cities, providing as it does the crucial in-depth research into the many diverse strands of governance—the last link in a chain of the creation, testing and proof of efficacy of methodologies underpinning a theory and practice of change for infrastructure and cities. The impact of this portfolio of research on Birmingham is two-fold: the Star Framework that placed natural environment considerations at the heart of all decision-making in the city, and the successful bid for the largest of the UK Future Parks Accelerator awards. While both are transformative in their different ways, yet mutually supportive, the latter enabled the design of a suite of system interventions from which the value of Birmingham's greenspaces is estimated to rise from £11.0 billion to £14.4 billion—a remarkable return on investment from the research's conceptualization of Birmingham's urban greenspace as a “business” (with its associated business models). In achieving this, the necessary enablers of thinking and practicing systemically, seamlessly working across disciplinary boundaries, an unusually strong focus on both the aspirations of all stakeholders and the context in question to define “the problem,” and the testing of proposed system intervention(s) both now and in the future have been iteratively combined. However, it is the critical enabling steps of identifying the complete range of value-generating opportunities that the interventions offer, formulating them into alternative business models to underpin the case for change and ensuring that they are synergistic with all the dimensions of governance that yielded the profound outcomes sought.

How do governance visions, institutions and practices enable urban sustainability transformations? A study of Battambang and Sihanoukville, Cambodia

“…In line with Rogers et al (2023), we found that urban transformations do not just depend on policies and strategies, but on the willingness of key urban stakeholders to be agile and adjust to changing contexts and emerging technologies. Both case study cities were seeking to take advantage of smart city technologies to achieve their sustainability goals, particularly in waste management reforms.…”

“…Our research uses a "transformative urban governance" conceptual model, drawing from the literature on urban sustainability transformations and urban transformative capacities (Wolfram, 2016(Wolfram, , 2019Borgström, 2019;Hölscher et al, 2019a;Hölscher and Frantzeskaki, 2021;Rogers et al, 2023). Transformative governance and decision-making in the context of urban sustainability transformations aim to re-direct urban development pathways toward sustainability and resilience (Fazey et al, 2017;Hölscher et al, 2019a).…”

“…. Reflections on our research approach Sustainability transformations research requires both the formal and informal rules of governance to be identified and analyzed, and for research to help identify how changes in systems of governance can support sustainability transformations (Yasmin et al, 2020;Rogers et al, 2023). Our conceptual model and research method provided a practical framework for analyzing stakeholder perceptions of urban governance across three levels of governance conceptualized by Kooiman (1999).…”