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Are you interested in how much sustainability substance is in urban visions?

Our summary today works with the article titled How much sustainability substance is in urban visions? An analysis of visioning projects in urban planning from 2015 by Beatrice John, Lauren Withycombe Keller, Armin Wiek, and Daniel J. Lang, published the Cities journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see whether visionary urban planning can help with economic decline, social injustices and environmental degradation. This article presents recommendations for urban future visioning processes based on 9 global examples to integrate better sustainability substance.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss with a special attention to Australian cities.

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Cities are hubs of innovation in social interaction, technology, ways of living and possibly sustainability. However, cities also host intensive consumption, production and trade that impact water resources, land use, and biodiversity, among others, at local, regional and global scales. The inflow of ecosystem services and the consumption of direct material per capita has outpaced population growth in most cities during the last centuries. Detrimental health effects, social segregation, and access equity issues threaten the well-being and quality of life of the urban population. Therefore, sustainability transitions are needed within cities to meet the demands of growing populations amid resource scarcity.

Urban sustainability efforts are increasingly initiated and led by municipal planning departments and often aim to build capacity within a city to endure dramatic changes while fulfilling the basic needs of all residents and reducing resource consumption and improving efficiency. Current planning is strongly tied to community development facilitated in part by the urban form. Since the 1990s, visioning has been an important tool to define community priorities and to develop sustainability goals for cities. These approaches in urban planning can promote and direct innovation and decision-making within cities on a variety of topics and apt to address sustainability challenges and facilitate sustainability transitions.

Visions, defined as desirable future states, can orient strategic operational planning as well as monitoring and adaptation of implemented plans. The conducted conceptual and empirical studies highlight the benefits of different visioning approaches for a broad range of applications. Some have positive and innovative effects on the dynamic of change within cities. Despite these benefits and the increasing application of visioning in general urban development contexts, sustainability remains an elusive goal for most cities. If cities are tailored to help facilitate urban sustainability transitions they must draw from best practices and successful sustainability solutions in order to add substance to and flash out principles of sustainability. This can act as target knowledge to orient planning, policy-making, and bring stakeholders and the community together for a more sustainable and culturally connected future so they can assume ownership and accountability.

To inform such sustainability transitions within cities, this research employs an exploratory case study to determine how much sustainability substance is in nine urban visions and what conditions of visioning processes contribute to or impede generating substantial sustainability visions. The authors compared Gothenburg 2050 project from Sweden, Ahrensburg from Germany, Saskatoon from Canada, Portland from the States, Dublin from Ireland, Ingolstadt from Germany, Canmore from Canada, York from Canada, and Sydney from Australia. These cities all have visions for their cities which the authors analysed to develop a framework that categorised the relevant data and evaluates the level of sustainability substance in each case.

Overall, the results showed that no city fully integrated all sustainability principles in their vision. Portland, York, Dublin, and Sydney incorporated the most sustainability substance in their visions. Generally, the results show sustainability substance in visions with strong emphasis on the built environment and weaknesses considering impacts of the cities in their hinterlands. The conditional attributes highlighted that different groups in the vision making majorly influences the outcomes and the sustainability substance. For example, combination of conditions, like situation analysis and high actor diversity, lead to successful integration of sustainability principles – which underscores the importance of interconnected visioning conditions.

Three major findings emerge from the analysis with implications for sustainability visioning in cities. First: visions do not adequately consider the city as embedded within and connected to other regions like the hinterland and cities. As a result, cities miss out on opportunities to design collaborative, synergic solutions which can be informed by innovative technical or social networks with other cities. Second, visions focus on narrow aspects of the urban built environment and physical programming, like transportation and density, and undervalue others. Instead, the visioning process could use common methodological conditions, like extensive situation analysis and a more diverse project team, to successfully capture sustainability more broadly. Third, participation of the public and varying types of project teams all aligned to contribute to a shared and tangible outcome. Yet, the visions are more institutional and administrational without direct engagement with the public, reducing the ownership and accountability for the community and stakeholders.

Cities need to actively steer urban development paths and use options that urbanisation trends offer to find innovation solutions and embrace their role as forces for sustainability transformation. Decisions about a shared sustainability vision are vital for communities as they can pave the way for solutions and have practical implications for long-term planning. The vision making processes need to be more comprehensive involving many stakeholders, experts and communities to use the full potential of sustainability visioning.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Cities need to actively steer urban development paths and use options that urbanisation trends offer to find innovation solutions and embrace their role as forces for sustainability transformation.
2. Current visions miss significant sustainability substances due to lack of connections to other regions, narrow focus on the built environment, and top-down approaches.
3. Decisions about a shared sustainability vision with comprehensiveness and stakeholder inclusion are vital for communities as they can pave the way for solutions and have practical implications for long-term planning.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What is the vision of your city?
2. What do you think about the sustainability substance of your city’s visions?
3. What has been your part in the visioning process?
4. What would you like to change in the visioning process?

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