understanding the systemic nature of cities to improve...
TRANSCRIPT
4 Dec 15
Manuscript of article now published in Environment International, available online 25 April 2016:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412016301441
Understanding the systemic nature of cities to
improve health and climate change mitigation
Ralph Chapman1a*, Philippa Howden-Chapmanb and Anthony Caponc
Abstract. Understanding cities comprehensively as systems is a costly challenge
and is typically not feasible for policy makers. Nevertheless, focusing on some
key systemic characteristics of cities can give useful insights for policy to
advance health and well-being outcomes. Moreover, if we take a coevolutionary
systems view of cities, some conventional assumptions about the nature of
urban development (e.g. the growth in private vehicle use with income) may not
stand up. We illustrate this by examining the coevolution of urban transport and
land use systems, and institutional change, giving examples of policy
implications. At a high level, our concern derives from the need to better
1 aSchool of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, and New Zealand Centre for Sustainable Cities, Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Parade, Wellington, 6140, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected].
bDepartment of Public Health and New Zealand Centre for Sustainable Cities, University of Otago, 23a Mein St, Wellington, 6242, New Zealand. E-mail: [email protected].
cInternational Institute for Global Health, United Nations University, UKM Medical Centre, Jalan Yaacob Latif, Bandar Tun Razak, 56000 Cheras, Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. E-mail: [email protected]
*Corresponding author at: School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Parade, Wellington, 6140, New Zealand. Tel: +6421 725 742. E-mail: [email protected] (R. Chapman).
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understand the dynamics of urban change, and its implications for health and
well-being. At a practical level, we see opportunities to use stylised findings
about urban systems to underpin policy experiments.
While it is now not uncommon to view cities as systems, policy makers appear
to have made little use so far of a systems approach to inform choice of policies
with consequences for health and well-being. System insights can be applied to
intelligently anticipate change – for example, as cities are subjected to
increasing natural system reactions to climate change, they must find ways to
mitigate and adapt to it. Secondly, systems insights around policy cobenefits are
vital for better informing horizontal policy integration. Lastly, an implication of
system complexity is that rather than seeking detailed, ‘full’ knowledge about
urban issues and policies, cities would be well advised to engage in policy
experimentation to address increasingly urgent health and climate change
issues.
Keywords:
Urban system; coevolution; cobenefits; transport; health; mitigation
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Understanding the systemic nature of cities to
improve health and climate change mitigation
1 Introduction
Urban policy makers face major challenges as they grapple with immediate
problems such as improving mobility, providing land for new housing and
maintaining population health, against a complex background of macro issues
including climate destabilisation, growing income inequality, and fiscal constraint.
Because of issue interconnection and system complexity, issue-by-issue policies to
address such challenges often have little effect or even perverse effects, especially
when policies are diluted by forces of conventional urban politics and corporate
decisions. Many local governments also have limited policy autonomy, embedded as
they are in a hierarchy of policy-making which is dominated by higher levels of
government.
Urban system complexity requires simultaneous consideration of multiple
issues, processes and outcomes. In such a setting, problems such as improving
urban mobility or accessibility cannot be ‘solved’ as such, and policies struggle to
produce net benefits. For example, a policy to restrain urban house price inflation
by peripheral land development may encourage car dependence and over time
reduce citizens’ health (Rydin et al., 2012; Satterthwaite, 2011) while locking in
higher carbon emissions. Such a policy will likely contribute incrementally to climate
change, worsening health globally, albeit slowly (Costello et al., 2011). Meanwhile,
price restraint in the housing market could be achieved better by other policies such
as housing intensification. The policy challenge, then, is to understand urban
dynamics and wider implications sufficiently to make a net positive contribution to
health and well-being.
The current political context in most countries emphasises economic growth
and cities are under pressure to be seen to contribute to a national development
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and innovation process (Bettencourt et al., 2007; Hodson and Marvin, 2011; LSE
Cities, 2012; Shearmur, 2012). Moreover, the dominant economic paradigm in most
countries privileges the market. This paradigm assumes that higher incomes
contribute directly to social well-being, not recognising the reality of a more
complex long -term relationship between economic activity (measured by GDP) and
well-being (Kubiszewski et al., 2013). Simplistic assumed relationships divert
attention from the complex determinants (such as health) of the well-being of
citizens, the prudent use of resources (including ecosystem services) and avoidance
of irreversible environmental risk (Newman and Matan, 2012; Quental et al., 2011;
Williams, 2010). There are clear opportunities for policies to contribute to both
economic development and population health and well-being (Howden-Chapman
and Chapman, 2012; WHO, 2011), but these opportunities need to recognise the
complexity of urban life.
Increased economic opportunities generated through urban agglomeration have
lifted health and well-being enormously over time, driving global urbanisation. But
urban development can adversely affect health: for example, the increasing
dispersion of modern cities is associated with a trend to major unintended health
impacts, through reduced levels of physical activity, and reduced air quality,
typically due largely to motor vehicle emissions. The results include epidemics of
obesity, diabetes, respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and depression (Burnett et
al., 2014; Frank et al., 2004; Lindsay et al., 2011; MacDonald et al., 2010; WHO,
2011; Witten et al., 2011). Alongside these health trends, there is increasing
recognition among the public health community of the significance of climate
change as a key driver of long-term health outcomes (Costello et al., 2009;
McMichael et al., 2009; Rydin et al., 2012).
Because of these multiple linkages, a framework is needed for understanding
the connections between city characteristics on the one hand, and on the other,
two critical twenty-first century preoccupations -- health and climate change
mitigation. We bracket these together, not only because climate change increasingly
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affects health, but because there is a strong affinity between the health of humans
and the health of planetary systems: climate change is a sentinel indicator of
planetary health (Whitmee et al., 2015). We argue that (a) cities need to be seen as
complex systems, with a variety of characteristics affecting urban behaviour; and (b)
urban systems need to be seen within a coevolutionary framework, in which urban
systems coevolve with natural systems, infrastructure, technologies and institutions.
These interact to determine in a dynamic way the outcomes of interest, in particular
the health and well-being of citizens.
Seeing urban challenges through these two lenses can provide rich insights for
policy analysis. It offers policy makers a better understanding of the problems they
confront and why solutions which appeal in the short term subsequently fail. The
two lenses also crystallise important urban system interconnections, and better
illuminate urban transition paths.
While it is intuitively evident that cities are complex, interconnected systems,
much policy is made without considering broader ramifications and dynamics
(Banister, 2005), nor how a range of drivers such as institutional evolution affect
urban outcomes. This is partly because of the reductionist reaction to considering
complexity, and partly because there is too little empirical evidence about policy
interactions and consequences. Accordingly, this paper seeks to be practical – it
focuses on tangible illustrations, useful for policy, from the urban transport and land
use sector, highlighting instances where, even with limited empirical evidence,
characteristic urban system behaviour can be better understood and projected.
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly summarises characteristics
of urban systems, and discusses how key sectors are interconnected. It also
introduces a framework identifying how key elements of dynamic urban systems
coevolve. Turning to policy, section 3 considers how policies can better recognise
system characteristics of cities (especially transport and land use) and
coevolutionary forces. Examples from various countries are given. Section 4
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discusses how systems thinking on policy matters increases the potential of cities to
be ‘transformed’ to yield better outcomes for health and climate change. Section 5
draws conclusions.
2 Cities as systems
2.1 Insights from the systems and coevolution literature
The general systems literature (Allen, 1997; Capra, 1996; Chapman, 2004;
Dollfus and Durand Dastes, 1975; Elzen et al., 2004; Loorbach and Rotmans, 2006;
Lovelock, 2006) typically characterises natural systems or human activity systems,
whether communities or parts of organisms, as follows. First, systems are integrated
wholes, where the whole, with its emergent properties, is more than the sum of its
parts. Second, systems comprise nested (sub-)systems, at a range of scales. Third,
systems have feedback processes among network elements, allowing self-
regulation, self-organisation and learning in response to changing external
conditions. Fourth, systems behave in a complex fashion, with non-linear behaviour,
seldom stable or in equilibrium, and with interventions generating unintended
consequences. Lastly, systems are able to be resilient, if adaptively managed.
Let us briefly consider the way in which cities exhibit these characteristics. First,
a city is a ‘socio-ecological-technical’ whole, comprising strongly interconnected
parts, driven by and contributing to social, ecological and technological forces
(Monstadt, 2009). Within the city, nested integrated wholes exist, e.g. a city public
transport network. Such wholes have important emergent properties, such as
economic productivity and city identity.
The second system characteristic, nesting, is also evident. Cities exhibit
interacting activity and governance at multiple scales – from the state to the
household, and increasingly extending to international networks of cities as sites of
influence on the life of a city. From a geographic perspective, the immediate region
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is vital, but wider systems that provide resources, from food to communications, are
also important (Tyler and Moench, 2012). Urban innovation niches nest within wider
sociotechnical regimes and a wider institutional and economic landscape (Geels,
2011; Monstadt, 2009). In terms of governance, we see a wide variety of nested
institutions (Bulkeley and Betsill, 2005; OECD, 2009), down to local home owners’
associations in the US (Seto et al., 2010). Nested systems are richly interconnected
and evolving; for example, internet linkages facilitate interactions between
individuals both vertically, up and down levels, and horizontally, across networks,
making social and cultural linkages fluid and complex. At the same time, evolving
technologies such as broadband networks can make new urban services possible,
while making traditional governance more challenging (Wedel, 2009, p.39).
Complexity tends to increase with greater scale; indeed, easier communication
and increasing returns to scale in knowledge appear to drive urban innovation
(Glaeser, 2011b; Shearmur, 2012). Size, agglomeration and innovation are often
connected (Kamal-Chaoui and Robert, 2009), which may help account for the often
higher incomes and associated consumption levels of many in big cities.
Third, much urban activity is self-organising. For example, in a well-functioning
city, largely self-regulating markets, employing myriad feedback mechanisms,
respond to changing conditions such as socio-demographic shifts. City political
systems are self-organising and often autonomous from national politics, frequently
contesting the demands of the state (Magnusson, 2011).
However, urban analysts’ ability to predict sustainability outcomes arising out of
socioeconomic trends and city policies is limited, because of the non-linearity of city
systems and the complexity of the interrelationships.
Complexity, a fourth characteristic, means that city development is driven by a
range of interacting processes, partly described by the coevolutionary framework
presented below. Non-linear effects and chance events are important, and
development paths are affected by feedback, inertia, and innovation (Arthur, 1989;
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Martin and Simmie, 2008; Scheffer and Westley, 2007). Developments at one scale
are contingent on linked developments at other scales (Chapman, 2004). For
example, cities are linked economically not only to their regional hinterlands, but
into the global economic ‘ecosystem’ (Brown et al., 2008).
Lastly, cities can be resilient, although history demonstrates that this is not
necessarily the case (Chelleri, 2012). Resilience in an urban context implies social-
ecological adaptive capacity and the ability to reflect on and evaluate policies for
long-term sustainability (Allan and Bryant, 2011; Nelson, 2010, p.115). Many cities
suffer from fragmented or under-resourced institutions, but others with more
strategic governance are able to adapt as conditions change (Bowen et al., 2012;
Bulkeley, 2010; Newman et al., 2009). Frameworks for understanding cities’
resilience to climate change impacts, for example, are still evolving (da Silva et al.,
2012; Davoudi et al., 2012) and cities are still struggling to adjust their policies and
institutions to mitigate climate change.
A small but growing ‘system coevolution’ literature (e.g. Costanza et al., 1997;
Foxon, 2011; Kallis and Norgaard, 2010) can augment this view of systems by
viewing it more dynamically. Figure 1 presents a framework, building on Kallis and
Norgaard’s pentagram of interacting elements, but adapted to urban systems. Four
domains can be emphasised as critical to cities: natural systems, infrastructure,
institutions, and technologies. Outcomes of interest in this paper are health and
well-being, but also climate change mitigation. Interaction among system elements
is represented by bidirectional arrows. This portrays the coevolution of the systems
in question.
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Newer technologies such as electric vehicles and bus rapid transit require
infrastructure investment, and that investment influences technological evolution
and application in a given city. Similarly, evolvling institutions and business
strategies can have a major effect on outcomes of interest. Examples of institutions
Infrastructure Natural systems
Technologies
Institutions; business strategies; user practices
Figure 1: Coevolutionary framework for urban systems
Outcomes: e.g. well-being, health, climate change
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include planning legislation, urban spatial plans, policies affecting urban
intensification, car sharing policies and strategies, and so on.
The natural systems most affecting cities are the atmosphere, air, water bodies,
green spaces, and local soils: these affect not only quality of life but also climatic
events, such as storms, and biological productivity in the city region. Infrastructure
encompasses not only transport systems, but energy, housing and other aspects of
the built environment.
These urban systems coevolve, and with the exception of natural systems, none
is more fundamental than the others. For example, the provision of road
infrastructure has influenced the development and application of motor vehicle
technology and vice versa. Institutional strategies such as approaches to
environmental management feed back to the resilience of natural systems, while
natural system behaviour affects institutional responses. Institutions are more
effective if they take a long-term, encompassing view (Levin et al., 2012). The
interplay between natural and institutional-cultural systems (Boyden, 2004; Grimm
et al., 2008) matter for addressing issues such as the degrading of productive and
peri-urban landscapes, the management of urban water supply, local environmental
effects such as urban biodiversity changes, and the urban heat island phenomenon.
An increasingly important example is the behaviour of the climate system: as the
atmosphere begins to exhibit greater volatility, institutions determining mitigation
and adaptation policies, and business strategies, are forced to adjust; while at the
same time, those policies feed back over time to affect the climate system.
Outcomes such as the well-being of citizens depend, of course, on institutional
systems at levels beyond the city, including not only the region, the site of much
strategic spatial planning (Healey, 2004), but also the larger national
macroeconomic policy domain (Kaletsky, 2010; Rickards et al., 2014), and the global
domain, with its institutions for attempting to manage globalisation, financial
instability, migration crises, and so on.
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2.2 Policy interaction and coevolution in the urban policy context
Bearing in mind these systemic features of cities, and their coevolution over
time, there are two central propositions of this paper. First, that policies based on
recognising and understanding significant system interactions (and not merely the
main relationships identified in conventional analyses) can create better outcomes
for cities, especially when cobenefits are analysed. Second, that resisting the
pressure for urban policy to be a series of short-term political fixes, policy makers
advancing the long-term health and well-being of their citizens need to anticipate
the impact of critical coevolutionary drivers, such as the spread of new digital
communication and transport technologies, energy decarbonisation to minimise
anthropogenic climate change, and changes in socio-cultural and business practices
associated with ongoing urbanisation.
Interactions and cobenefits
A way of expressing the importance of the interplay among elements of a
complex urban system is though identifying and valuing coimpacts (cobenefits and
adverse side effects) of urban policy (Ürge-Vorsatz et al., 2014). Some urban policies
can generate multiple cobenefits, and sometimes multiple adverse side-effects.
Policies can also interact so that a particular policy may reinforce (or undermine)
another.
A range of studies suggests that health impacts can be more important than
conventional analysis has allowed for: health impacts ‘often dominate in terms of
the importance of the different categories of cobenefits…’ ((Ürge-Vorsatz et al.,
2014, p.574). Accordingly, policy formulation which takes into account such
cobenefits and adverse effects for health and well-being, including unintended
consequences, will present a richer and more realistic picture of outcomes.
For example, intensification of housing can have a cobenefit of making public
transport more economically viable, increasing access and associated well-being for
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many. Similarly, more compact cities tend to have lower infrastructure costs per
capita (Carruthers and Ulfarsson, 2003; Trubka et al., 2010), freeing city
infrastructure budgets for other priorities, including supporting public transport. In
both these ways, policies to intensify cities may not only mitigate climate risk and
save on energy (Fuller and Crawford, 2011) but also have benefits in terms of
transport system diversity and resilience, and health or well-being cobenefits for
many citizens (Woodcock et al., 2009; Younger et al., 2008). Conversely, poorly
targeted road building can have unintended consequences such as undesirable land
use change, and socially, environmentally and even economically adverse effects
(OECD, 2006).
Of course, housing intensification can have adverse side-effects if poorly
handled (Howley et al., 2009). It may create noisy environments and harm air
quality, through increased exposure to congested motor traffic. A Toronto study
suggests that intensification can increase road congestion, if public transport is not
upgraded at the same time (Filion and McSpurren, 2007). However, the adverse
effects of intensification may be minimised, and air quality and noise levels
managed, with options such as converting public transport to battery electric
vehicles.
A second important aspect of the interplay of cobenefits is through the enabling
of political alliances, or the ‘translation’ of interests’ (Rutland and Aylett, 2008;
Trumbull, 2012), even when the individual parties seem weaker than concentrated
corporate interests (Trumbull, 2012). Often policies are adopted mainly because of
shorter-term local urban benefits, but have wider cobenefits in mitigating climate
change. This matters politically, since mitigation policies are often unpopular, as
benefits accrue largely to ‘others’ and future generations. The local, immediate
benefits which drive change often include air quality improvements (Pittel and
Rübbelke, 2008), reduced congestion, improved health and greater productivity.
The Vision California case study (Calthorpe, 2011) illustrates how urban redesign
offers both ‘livability’ benefits and contributes significantly to emissions abatement.
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However, the extent of cobenefits in particular contexts can be difficult to pre-
judge, and policy experimentation (Ansell, 2012; Walters and Holling, 1990) is
needed to illuminate more contentious instances of urban change such as major
reconfigurations of land use.
Keeping long-term outcomes and coevolutionary drivers in mind
To illustrate proposition (2) above, consider urban form, particularly the
management of land for urban development. Governments have long recognised
the need to regulate the land market in the collective interest; but questions
consistently arise around what gives best long-term outcomes. A focus on short-
term business growth, for example, will yield different outcomes from focusing on
long-term urban sustainability and citizen health. Promoting greenfield
development can interact with developments in related domains (particularly
transportation) to affect health and sustainability outcomes (Filion and McSpurren,
2007). Greenfield development may appear to assist households by opening up low-
cost housing sites on the urban periphery. But if a household chooses a dwelling
further from the centre and if some household members are employed in the
centre, then increased commuting costs may offset the saving in the cost of
housing, and the household may be exposed to significant oil price risk (Center for
Transit Oriented Development and Center for Neighborhood Technology, 2006).
Some households lack capacity to take into account such factors, for example,
through being cash-constrained and unable to afford more centrally located
housing; they may therefore become exposed to economic risk in buying an outer
suburban dwelling (Dodson and Sipe, 2008; Preval et al., 2010). Over time, social
well-being may not be maximised by such choices.
Where households are encouraged to make such choices – by, for example, the
US Federal Reserve Board’s expansionary policies of the early 2000s, and poor
regulation of financial ‘innovation’ (Cortright, 2008) – then there will be a decline in
both urban sustainability (due to greater vehicle carbon emissions) and economic
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resilience. Evidence from US cities such as Atlanta suggests urban policies can
obstruct the realisation of preferences for more compact, walkable and transit-
friendly neighbourhoods (Levine and Frank, 2007), reducing resilience in the face of
energy price volatility and climate change policy risk.
Institutional rules on urban form and design interact with transport to affect
health and climate outcomes. They are key elements in the coevolution of the city,
with important consequences. To illustrate, a New Zealand study found that more
compact, mixed land-use neighbourhoods with better destination access and
greater street connectivity showed higher physical activity levels among residents
(Witten et al., 2012), which is important for health. A Beijing study found that
diversity of land use, job density and exclusive cycle lanes were positively associated
with bicycle use, and commuting time was inversely associated with it (Zhao, 2014):
urban expansion has cut bicycle commuting, and car use has risen dramatically, as
have emissions. Most recently, Sallis et al. (2015) reviewed a range of international
evidence showing that when urban settings are designed to be ‘activity friendly’, a
range of health benefits accrue, alongside environmental, and economic benefits.
The importance of these factors for health and climate outcomes needs to be kept
in mind as urban policies are adjusted to shape development, as the next section
argues.
3 Enhancing urban policy by recognising systemic characteristics of cities
3.1 The evolving urban transport system
The previous section discussed better understanding system behaviour. In this
section we illustrate how policies on urban transport and land use, as an
interconnected system, can better recognise system and coevolutionary
characteristics. We use systems insights around urban transport and land use policy
to exemplify more integrated policy approaches.
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Consider how transport mode choice depends on the transport ecosystem.
Policies to foster public transport, which involves walking to the train or bus stop,
require attention to the quality of the urban environment. Walkable cities also
involve people living in the city at some density (Glaeser, 2011b), and walking in
their local neighbourhood (Jacobs, 1961). However, public transport is far from
suitable for all trips, and functions best as part of a diversity of transport modes,
including not only active modes, but also car use such as car sharing for more
complex journeys (Shaheen et al., 2009). Policies to encourage transport system
diversity create choice, flexibility and adaptiveness to changing conditions, but
require careful integration. For example, good quality, well-lit, attractive bus or train
stations and mode interchanges (such as park and ride stations). In short, there is an
important interplay between mode choice and the quality of the urban
environment, and policy makers need to keep this interplay in mind when designing
transport and urban space policies. Neglect of this interaction in the past has likely
contributed to the decline in public transport mode share.
Historically, the eclipse of public transport and active transport in many cities
reflected the interplay between technological change and business strategies. As
automobile technology improved and fell in price, the eclipse of public transport
was accelerated by a rewriting of the social connotations of collective as opposed to
individualised travel – a revolution in user practices. The expansion of cities
hindered active travel: in the UK, cycling fell from 11% of all passenger travel in
1952 to 0.5% by the mid-1990s (Davis et al., 2007). The declineof public transport
was often deliberately fostered by the automobile industry, with for example, Los
Angeles’ freeways portrayed as ‘liberating’(Klein, 2008). Similarly, in Auckland, New
Zealand, during the Cold War period, trams were represented as embodying
‘Stalinist’ centralist planning (Harris, 2010). The car-dominated monoculturing of
Auckland’s transport system had the long-term effect of reducing its flexibility and
resilience, and creation of congestion when land available for motorway expansion
was exhausted. Automobility crowds out other forms of transport over time
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(Denniss and Urry, 2011). Active travel options are now marginalised in many cities,
having ceased to appear safe as vehicle volumes increased (Jacobsen, 2003;
Robinson, 2005), and modes became more socially differentiated, potentially
reducing social cohesion.
The European city experience suggests that explicit policy effort with system
interactions in mind can keep the transport ecosystem diverse (Ministry of
Transport Public Works and Water Management and Fietsberaad, 2009). At least
from the 1970s, European cities consciously encouraged active travel, constraining
the growth of car use. Such cities took the view that losing an active travel culture
would be damaging to the city, and difficult to reverse (Liu and Guan, 2005; Pucher
et al., 2010). The policy decisions to support active travel were made even before
research provided clear evidence of the health and other benefits (de Nazelle et al.,
2011; Gössling and Choi, 2015; MacDonald et al., 2010; Rojas-Rueda et al., 2011). A
transport ecosystem-sustaining approach requires authorities to consider the
system dynamics of urban transport, including non-linear, threshold effects. Since
active travel support measures are often ‘staged’, individual steps may be
ineffective until other steps are complete, whereupon synergies emerge (Pucher et
al., 2010).
Transport policies are evolving rapidly, driven by technology change and a
concern about climate change, and business strategies and government institutions
are responding to changing economic opportunities and user practices. Policies are
starting to recognise that a ‘tipping point’ may have occurred in a number of
developed country cites, if recently declining car use (‘peak car’) is indicative
(Newman and Kenworthy, 2011; Puentes and Tomer, 2008). US vehicle miles
travelled (VMT) reached a plateau in 2004, declining since mid-2007. Australian and
New Zealand patterns are similar: VKT (vehicle kilometres) per capita have fallen in
New Zealand since 2004 by 8% (Lyons et al., 2014). Key influences appear to have
been fuel prices, the global financial crisis, population aging and a cultural shift
linked to digital communications. Despite this change in pattern, in Auckland, with
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its ongoing rapid population growth, the institutional feedback mechanism from
changing practices to corrective investment in public and active transport has been
weakened by central government reluctance to rethink a road-oriented transport
policy model. A short-term consequence has been unnecessarily high levels of
congestion and carbon emissions. Nevertheless, recently, Auckland Council has
made the idea of a ’quality compact city’ a defining feature of the direction in which
it wishes Auckland to evolve (Auckland Council, 2011; Cameron, 2011), recognising
the interaction with the quality of its transportation system, and its importance for
health and climate change mitigation.
In short, more policy makers are now recognising the system characteristics of
urban transport when considering transition paths and policies for long-term health
and sustainability. Sound policies both anticipate and recognise evolutionary
changes, and work with the grain of system interactions. Active travel measures, for
example, will be more cost-effective in reducing carbon emissions if combined with
complementary public transport investment or ‘smart growth’ initiatives such as
encouraging location-efficient school siting (Barias et al., 2005; WHO, 2011; Wright
and Fulton, 2005).
3.2 Urban evolution towards zero carbon transport
Over the next few decades, urban transport systems need to contribute to an
economy-wide transition to zero net carbon emissions (Foxon, 2011; Rogelj et al.,
2015). Transport, land use and energy systems are tightly interlinked at the city
level, with significant policy implications. Urban transport has long been dependent
on imported oil supplies: oil is currently the source of around 95% of transportation
energy (Urry, 2010). But as services have become the dominant sector in most
industrialised countries, industry’s energy needs have shrunk, and transport systems
have absorbed a greater share of the economy’s energy, and produced a larger
share of carbon emissions. Globally, transport accounts for more than a fifth (7.3
billion tonnes) of energy related CO2 emissions (IEA, 2015). Despite climate stability
fears, it has so far proved very difficult for industrialised economies to wean their
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transport sectors off fossil fuels (Committee on Climate Change, 2009; Davis et al.,
2007; EEA, 2011, p.56).
This partly reflects the close ties between transportation energy use and the
embedded form of the built environment (Dantas et al., 2006) including the design
of buildings (IPCC, 2007). Urban form does, however, evolve over time (National
Research Council, 2009) particularly in the commercial building sector (Ewing et al.,
2011). Improving the location efficiency of buildings is vital for a city’s long-term
energy use and emissions: a US study reports that for an average office building
built to modern energy codes, more than twice as much energy is used by
commuting to the building than by the building itself (Wilson and Navaro, 2007).
Another US study found that the central parts of urban areas where housing is high
density use less domestic energy (home heating plus electricity), as housing design
responds to density (Glaeser and Kahn, 2008). This reinforces the carbon advantage
of these high density and mixed land use areas (Marshall, 2008).
Reducing urban carbon emissions, then, requires more activist land use
planning: Wright and Fulton (2005), for example, argue that a strategy for
developing country cities focused simply on low-carbon fuels would miss carbon
savings and opportunities for cobenefits (such as congestion and accident
reduction) that a broader strategy addressing urban design and public transport
would provide.
In future, transport and energy technologies and policies will become more
integrated, with the rise of both hybrid and fully battery-powered electric vehicles
(EVs). Carbon savings will depend on the source of the electricity. Currently, around
two-thirds of electricity globally is generated by fossil fuels (IEA, 2010), and the
carbon footprint from manufacturing EVs is significant, so overall lifetime carbon
savings from EVs may be substantially less than imagined by some (Low Carbon
Vehicle Partnership, 2011). In a few countries with high proportions of renewable
electricity generation (e.g. Iceland, New Zealand), the lifetime carbon savings from
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EVs will be greater, especially if EVs are recharged off-peak, reducing requirements
for power station peak capacity. These trends underline the evolving interplay
between the energy and transport systems, local regulatory policies, user practices
and business strategies.
EVs have the potential to substantially improve urban air quality and increase
the capability of people with disability to function in cities. But their overall social
and health implications are not entirely positive. Like other private motor vehicles,
EVs facilitate sedentary habits. Their adoption could also increase the number of
injuries involving vehicles; and their widespread use could validate political pressure
to expand the roading system with the effect of increasing severance and
congestion, and damaging the urban fabric. EV availability might be used to justify
inaction on urban sprawl (Marshall, 2008). More positively, EV uptake could,
especially if combined with car sharing, provide a modest addition to the emission
savings achieved by reducing sprawl.
4 Cities as transformable systems
At a time of increasingly clear signals about the risks of unmanageable levels of
global warming, urban policy makers face a critical choice as to whether they
passively undergo disruptive change or take a proactive approach to transform
interconnected transport, land use and other urban systems to reduce carbon
emissions while improving health and well-being.
Because transport and land use investments so strongly shape urban ‘direction’
they are vigorously contested at multiple political levels. Change often presents
some communities with prospects of real disadvantage while others with
advantage. The path-dependent nature of urban development means such points of
inflection are vital: from a policy viewpoint, it is important that the systemic
implications of policy choices at such moments are considered and openly debated.
Policy and investment can act to preserve an unsustainable status quo, or steer
transport systems towards greater resilience. Urban modelling can provide insights
20
into the likely outcomes of infrastructure investments, but – given the numerous
simplifications and assumptions involved in modelling – it is wise to remember the
limitations of modelling complex urban systems (Zhao et al., 2013).
Cities resemble other evolving social-ecological systems in either undergoing
planned change or eventually facing unplanned transformative disruption (Walker
et al., 2004). External stresses in the form of energy price shocks particularly
affected low-density US cities in 2006-7, leading to a sudden collapse of housing
prices in suburban areas as petrol prices rose sharply (Cortright, 2008). Many
sprawling cities are now having to anticipate a rising carbon price, which will require
a difficult transformation of transport and land use (Dodson and Sipe, 2008).
Policy change that is integrated, planned and consistent, such as integrated
spatial planning with a long-term perspective, is the ‘holy grail’– elusive but vital for
urban resilience (Grazi and van den Bergh, 2008; Sovacool and Brown, 2010;
Williams, 2010, p.130). For example, while changes in walking and cycling mode
shares tend to be slow, they can occur with coordinated governance and the
patience to see through a sustained transition. In London, the allocation of much of
the 2003 cordon toll revenue to bus system improvement reinforced investment in
walking and cycling. Public transport by 2008 accounted for 90 per cent of travel
into Central London during the morning peak, and cycling numbers approximately
doubled between 2000 and 2008 (Transport for London, 2010 p.273). Reducing
traffic congestion with measures such as pricing may be unpopular and relies on
highly sophisticated institutions (Glaeser, 2011a). However, the gains achievable
from reduced congestion are important for productivity, as well as cutting
emissions, and productivity may be further enhanced by the cobenefits for health
from the shift to active travel.
A transformation of urban transport systems also relies on some preconditions
around land use governance which do not apply everywhere. Land use planning in
northern Europe is regionally coordinated and generally restricts low-density, car-
21
oriented sprawl (Schmidt and Buehler, 2007), and transit-oriented development is
assisted by public institutions having powers to aggregate and develop land. But in
many other cities, regional coordination is limited and constraints on low-density
suburban development are weak. For example, in New Zealand cities, where
‘resource management’ legislation remains permissive rather than strategic, and
where there is significant support for continued urban expansion (Rudman, 2011),
there is limited capability to resist suburban shopping developments that dilute the
role of city centres as the main specialised retail hubs, and metropolitan urban
limits on sprawl are being eroded (Arbury, 2005; Witten et al., 2011; Zhao et al.,
2011). Without regional governance with strong powers for strategic land use
management, some metropolitan areas may continue to sprawl, creating high
infrastructure costs (Floater et al., 2014), loss of high quality soils and biodiversity,
tensions with the need for climate change mitigation, and worsening population
health problems.
Recognising the interactions among urban systems requires challenging
conventional assumptions and considering more nuanced and integrated
approaches. The myth that urban expansion provides cheap housing has been
shown to be particularly empty when the full social costs of car mobility are
considered. And other conventionally prominent relationships (such as the growth
of VKT with income) have started to shift, in line with a coevolutionary systems view
of cities, taking into account changes in technology and social practices.
However a comprehensively integrated systems view of cities is difficult to
enact in policy. European cities show the importance of linking together diverse
measures, from promotion of compact, mixed-use development to higher vehicle
and petrol taxes which raise the cost of car ownership and use, thus promoting
active modes. Complementary policies include car parking constraints, and
comprehensive traffic calming (including road diets and lower speed limits), which
‘reduce the overall convenience and attractiveness of car use’ (Pucher et al., 2010).
A similar conclusion about recognising system synergies is reached by Calthorpe in
22
the US context, examining the conditions for sustainable, carbon-reducing urban
change. He argues for combining smart land use policies with ‘conservation’, and a
range of new technologies, externality pricing, and major public investments
(Calthorpe, 2011 p.106).
Integration offers major governance challenges, as organisations and agencies
with diverse interests have to be persuaded of the merits of linked policies. For
example, implementing a zero carbon city agenda would require the cooperation of
finance, transportation, land use planning, and other departments within one city
council. Integration can be especially challenging when it also requires aligning
public and private interests – as, for example, in rethinking city transport systems.
In such situations, evolutionary policy learning may help, through encouraging
diverse innovations, and learning what measures work via policy experiments that
reflect on systemic behaviour (Chapman, 2004).
5 Conclusions
This paper has argued that adopting a framework that views the city as a
complex system that coevolves with changing institutions, technologies,
infrastructure and natural systems, can generate important insights for urban health
and sustainability. A systems framework underlines interconnections and co-
benefits, providing a basis for more integrated approaches to urban policy making
and planning. While there are increasing calls for sound urban management for
economically productive and sustainable city growth (Floater et al., 2014), going
further, to a better understanding of the connected long-term challenges of urban
governance, requires a coevolutionary systems view.
Further analysis and case studies of urban systems are important in order to
build knowledge of how these systems interact and coevolve in a variety of cities.
For example, we need better understanding of how urban transport and land use
23
can interact in limiting sprawl by creating a virtuous circle of well-designed
intensification, more efficient transport, lower carbon emissions and higher quality
of life (Crawford and French, 2008; International Council for Science; Regional Office
for Asia and the Pacific, 2011; Proust et al., 2012; Rode et al., 2014).
Our second conclusion, about policy, follows from the first: each time an urban
policy proposal is put forward, it should be appraised in terms of critical interrelated
outcomes – health and well-being outcomes, and climate change mitigation in
particular. These are critical aspects of resilience and sustainability, and studying
how policy can influence them is vital. Because of the political complexity of shaping
integrated urban policy, there is also a strong need for horizontal alliance building,
with an emphasis on thoughtfully appraising the cobenefits of policies during policy
formulation, and evaluating long-term interactions with underlying evolutionary
drivers of urban systems.
Questions arise as to whether the policy and planning institutions in many
countries are able to cope with and ‘manage’ the complexity of urban systems with
appropriately integrated policies, especially where local government receives
minimal fiscal and political support from central government (Bulkeley and Kern,
2006). Hull’s study of UK local authorities and vertical links to central government,
analysing impediments to joined-up planning for transport and land use
sustainability, concluded that strategic sustainability issues can ‘fall through the
“cracks”’ (Hull, 2008 p.101). Despite this risk, cities have in many instances
developed governance capacity over time to be strategic and address important
adverse side-effects such as congestion, noise and air pollution. Strong public
institutions, in dialogue with a well-educated urban constituency, can articulate the
case for governance in the wider, longer-term public interest, resisting narrow
sectional interests. For example, urban property development is typically carefully
regulated in the developed world – in terms of design of public spaces, building
height, shading, view-shafts, and even architectural form – in the public interest
(Brook, 2013). Better integrated cities evolve in this way and it is evident that these
24
constraints yield benefit over time, as the merits and competitive advantages of
compact, coherent and aesthetic urban centres become clear.
Our final conclusion relates to timing. If critical environmental issues such as
climate change are to be addressed effectively within the next decade or two, it is
essential that cities not wait for detailed and complete assessment of urban policies
before adopting far-reaching policies for sustainability. The speed with which
climate change is now becoming manifest indicates that this evolving driver of city
form and function will have to receive dramatically increased attention in future,
not only in terms of adaptation but also in terms of reducing emissions fast enough
to avoid unmanageable climate change later this century. All cities have an
obligation to contribute to mitigating climate change, and effective action requires
escaping conventional thinking (Anderson and Bows, 2012), and boldly taking
opportunities (Rutland and Aylett, 2008). Growing cities can learn from the
maladaptive paths taken by others, and avoid over-investing in carbon-intensive,
car-oriented transport and land use configurations. The potentially transformative
paths taken by cities such as Copenhagen, Curitiba, Portland and Wellington
(Gössling and Choi, 2015; The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2013) offer hope that this
pressing issue can be addressed in a way that also promotes the health and well-
being of citizens.
In short, urban system governance can be seen as an opportunity to plan,
design, develop and transform cities and towns in ways that realise a mix of
outcomes, but especially health, well-being and climate change mitigation.
Immediate needs must be considered, but policies also need to anticipate the
longer-term coevolution of urban systems. It is desirable that governance actors –
such as transport and spatial planning agencies – make use of systems thinking to
develop a more integrated view of outcomes, and understand the dynamic
interactions between urban systems as they attempt to advance those outcomes.
Better urban governance is a huge global challenge, but reflection on system
25
interactions and behaviour has the potential to contribute significantly to improved
outcomes.
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Acknowledgements
Funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment through the Resilient
Urban Futures programme grant to the New Zealand Centre for Sustainable Cities is
acknowledged.