Key insights on needs in urban regional governance - Global urbanization (the increasing concentration in urban settlements of the increasing world population), is a driver and accelerator of shifts in diversity, new cross-scale interactions, decoupling from ecological processes, increasing risk and exposure to shocks. Responding to the challenges of urbanization demands fresh commitments to a city–regional perspective in ways that are explictly embedded in the Anthopocene bio- techno- and noospheres, to extend existing understanding of the city–nature nexus and regional scale. Three key dimensions of cities that constrain or enable constructive, cross scale responses to disturbances and extreme events include 1) shifting diversity, 2) shifting connectivity and modularity, and 3) shifting complexity. These three dimensions are characteristic of current urban processes and offer potential intervention points for local to global action. Show
Urbanization in the AnthropoceneWe live in turbulent times—the Anthropocene—where rapid changes are occurring in biophysical conditions driven by accelerating growth in human activity. New risks emerge from interactions at the interface of multiple systems including climatic, ecological, political, social, institutional, infrastructural, financial, and technological systems1,2,3,4. In a globalized world characterized by shifting patterns of inequality, new cross-scale interactions, and decoupling from ecological processes5,6,7,8, altered disturbance regimes increasingly lead to shocks that were previously contained within a geographic area or a sector, but now are becoming globally contagious9,10. Global urbanization (the increasing concentration in urban settlements of the increasing world population), is a driver and accelerator of many of these processes11. The effects of multiple interacting changes that can be traced to the expansion of cities, generates new and extreme global vulnerabilities12,13, making global urban change a frontier of science for sustainability14,15. For example, cities are responsible for ~70% of global CO2 emissions from final energy use, but are disproportionately and increasingly exposed to the impacts of climate change, since 90% of urban areas—and the majority of the world’s population—are situated on coastlines16. A recent study shows that 339 million people live on deltas throughout the world. Of these 31 million people are living in the 100-year storm surge floodplains, 92% of whom live in developing or least-developed economies17. Further, in coming decades, climate-change driven migration is expected to increase dramatically. When migrants settle in larger cities they add to existing challenges, particularly in developing countries often unable to provide basic infrastructure or social protection in response to accelerated growth18,19,20. While some cities are already shrinking, the overall challenge is one of expansion, with the global urban footprint up by up to 1.3 million square kilometers between 2015 and 2050 (an increase of 171 percent over the 2015 figure)21. Given the overarching dominance of urban growth, we here consider ways in which interlinked social, ecological and technological system diversity and interlinkages support or hinder urban development and influence potential for cities to be positive drivers of local and global sustainability transformation. We argue that to position cities at the core of planetary change, better understanding of the city–regional scale is key. Although urbanization has existed for millennia, in its present form it functions as an accelerating aspect of the Anthropocene. What is important is not just that cities and their hinterlands are interdependent but that the form of their interdependencies are increasingly complex and significant globally—as the COVID-19 pandemic has recently demonstrated22. Urban areas are dependent on extracting external, teleconnected resources that empower cities as economic, political, and cultural hubs, that in turn drive global flows of material, energy, and information23,24. A recent study shows that human energy expenditure since 1950 (~22 zetajoules (ZJ)), particularly related to fossil fuels, exceeds that across the entire prior 11,700 years of the Holocene (~14.6 ZJ)25. Urban resource demand is influenced by continuous changes in urban stocks such as population size, infrastructural and housing density, consumption patterns and lifestyles, and urban policy and management decisions26. Disconnection of cities from their hinterlands tends to lead to the undervaluation of remote nature—and associated deforestation and other habitat destruction, agricultural intensification, climate change, and the wildlife trade—are driving biodiversity loss27,28. Uniform approaches to making technology and urban infrastructure ever more efficient are often reducing the redundancy needed for resilience in the face of global change and extreme events15,29. Innovating and transitioning societies along more sustainable development pathways that can reverse changes brought about by the intial onset of the Anthropocene is set in the context of a reality in which strategic decision making in and for cities is challenged by obdurate governance systems30. These have yet to embrace polycentric31, multi-scale32, and other governance innovations already articulated. In our current urban Social-Ecologial-Technological Systems (SETS)33, governance is characterized by decentralization and compartmentalization, intensively managed ecosystems34 and activities increasingly mediated through technologies and through support from socioeconomic infrastructures. Cities have long been known to depend on their natural hinterlands35,36, but an increase in global connectivity and redundancy of supply systems have masked this dependence, particularly consequences of local resource exploitation, through long and complicated global supply chains. Now more than ever, flexible multi scale urban management that links the points of consumption to the extraction, production, and distribution of goods, is essential. It is well established that actions at the local scale can add up to positive or negative impacts at regional or global scales, potentially affecting distant areas through investment and political incentives as well as urban worldviews and lifestyles at an increasingly rapid pace7,13,24,37. In this context, envisioning and implementing ways to extend urban governance and sustainability initiatives beyond the local is a critical challenge38. In parallel with cities taking on more global responsibilities, global decision-making and linked institutions need to allow for local, polycentric, bottom-up embedded solutions and governance approaches to fit the cultural, fiscal, economic, and geographic contexts in which they are to function in order to mitigate “environmental reductionism” in society39. We ask a critical question: What constrains or enables constructive, cross scale responses to disturbances and extreme events, and over the long term, transformations towards more sustainable and resilient cities? To address this complex question we focus on three key dimensions of cities as embedded in the Anthopocene bio-, techno- and noosphere to examine fundamental drivers and opportunities for sustainability and resilience solutions: 1) shifting diversity, 2) shifting connectivity and modularity, and 3) shifting complexity. We describe these three urbanization dimensions as especially characteristic of current processes. Additionally these dimensions offer potential intervention points for local to global action (Fig. 1a–c)
Fig. 1: Characteristics of urbanization in the Anthropocene over time. a Shifting diversity—colors and shapes of symbols illustrating how diversity of e.g. food and sources of information and knowledge has increased over time at the city level, while becoming more and more homogenized at the global level. b Shifting connectivity and modularity—in the Anthropocene spatial dimensions of modularity tends to decrease and connectivity increase over time. c Shifting complexity—in the Anthropocene development also tends to increase complexity and number of layers of actors/agents/information etc. between source and end user. For discussion see text. Full size image Ecosystem service use is increasingly becoming commodified and commercialized, while information networks are increasingly global (and thus often far from what people can experience directly), and health services and transportation are increasingly provided by interacting, specialized actors and structures. For example, small household appliances often have long supply chains associated with their production, and there is little transparency regarding the sustainability of any production process along the chain. It can be challenging, almost impossible, to make positive choices for sustainable consumption with so many information steps within each step to understand or have information on to inform consumption practices. The subsystems interact as well, creating dizzying complexity for anyone trying to make sense of how to live sustainably, at individual or community decision-making levels. With increasing urban SETS complexity33,54 comes an increased complexity of governance. Cities require multiple city agencies to deal with waste, park management, public health, crime, transportation, infrastructure, and more. As the number of departments or agencies multiply, including ascendent sustainability and resilience departments, coordinating responses to build resilience and transform complex urban SETS along sustainability pathways faces institutional challenges of trade-offs between decisions still made in governance siloes11. Urbanization for the AnthropoceneBuilding on the tradition of seeing the city and nature as interconnected, we argue for a response to the processes of urbanization that highlights the potential of both cities and their rural support areas as positive forces for sustainable development and governance. Global sustainability will hinge on reshaping the nature of urbanization to bring it in balance with fundamental planetary limits and boundaries. We need a transformation of urbanization processes for a desired or “good” Anthropocene11,38,55,56,57.
If fundamental transformations are what we need to move towards sustainability11 we need to understand what the different pathways would mean. For example, the COVID-19 crisis has provided multiple examples of indirect, far-reaching effects of seemingly targeted decisions. In response to these open-ended outcomes, many cities have been collaborating with a wide range of actors, including the national and regional governments, and urban stakeholders and citizens. These collaborations have enabled design and implementation of immediate, short-term and long-term responses to the multiple dimensions of the pandemic, and international city networks have played a key role in peer learning, exchanging knowledge, experience, medical equipment and protective gears, and in taking leadership in policy making49,62. Even though the pandemic has had extremely severe economic, social, and health effects across the globe, there are also positive outcomes, e.g., in its Adaptation Plan 2020, Milan is using the crisis to question fundamental characteristics and expectations of the city and its scale, creating new visions for increased wellbeing62. The future process of urbanization in the post-COVID-19 Anthropocene where globalization processes may be more wisely managed and consequences of different decisions are easier to anticipate and plan for, would likely be strikingly different and take on a new face. Although urbanization may look different post-COVID-19, jobs, infrastructure, and opportunities will still for the foreseeable future exist and mainly expand in urban areas—of all sizes, including suburbs and peri-urban areas. We expect a multipolar world to develop though, where thriving local and regional social, cultural, and ecological diversity and governance towards sustainability become more central, and a new urban–rural regional integration is possible. Global agendas such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda, provide a common roadmap and vision to engage local stakeholders, including the private sector and civil society in co-creating and building new urban visions and purposes. The three urbanization dimensions, as proposed in this paper, offer a framework for a potentially more successful realization of diverse positive urban visions and for guiding action towards a more regenerative urbanization in and for the Anthropocene. References
Download references AcknowledgementsThis paper is a result of a workshop “Urbanization in the Anthropocene” held in Stockholm in January 2019. Funding for the workshop was provided by the Beijer Foundation. Gretchen Daily and Carl Folke are supported by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. TM is supported by the US National Science Foundation through grants (#1444755, 1927167, 1934933, and 2029918). FundingOpen Access funding provided by Stockholm University. Author informationAuthors and Affiliations
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ContributionsT.E., E.A. and T.M. led the writing and all other authors contributed with discussions during the workshop 2019 and commented on the manuscript. Corresponding authorCorrespondence to T. Elmqvist. Ethics declarationsCompeting interestsThe authors declare no competing interests. Additional informationPublisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Rights and permissionsOpen Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Reprints and Permissions About this articleCite this articleElmqvist, T., Andersson, E., McPhearson, T. et al. Urbanization in and for the Anthropocene. npj Urban Sustain 1, 6 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00018-w Download citation
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