Sarah Lewis is a Research Assistant with C40 Cities. Prior to this, Sarah worked as a medical secretary and hospital care assistant. In her spare time, Sarah blogs about sustainable lifestyles and has been interviewed for the BBC, The Guardian, The Times, and ABC’s Future Tense Podcast on circular economy and low-consumption lifestyles. She was also a theatre critic for the Hackney Citizen newspaper for a number of years. Sarah holds an MSc in Sustainable Resource Economics, Transitions and Policy from University College London. Her dissertation focused on municipal energy companies in the UK. She also holds a BA in Middle Eastern Languages from the University of Manchester, and has lived in Alexandria, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the West Bank, and Amsterdam, as well as London. Sarah enjoys cycling, yoga, hiking, and beaches.
Introduction
Martin Powell
If you walk along London’s embankment, you can see a gleaming river, lots of trees lining the streets, clean streets, some expansive green spaces and open areas, and Peregrine falcons nesting and flying between the buildings, and you breathe clean air.
Actually, none of that is entirely true. The river is regularly filled with sewage after heavy rain when the Victorian sewers merge storm water with sewage and the overflow goes into the Thames. This is being resolved with a super sewer being bored under the river as you read this. There are not enough street trees, but they are planted and added every year across the city. The green spaces are generally eroded over time. The wildlife is there to be seen, including the Peregrine falcons, but it is not exactly teeming with life, and the air regularly exceeds the World Health Organization (WHO) limits, as do all big cities, with some streets in constant breach of air quality limits.
It’s not good enough, but the reason London is considered a successful city is that it’s better than most. It’s moving faster than most to rectify these problems, which are constantly exacerbated by a rising population, a rising demand for goods, changing demographics, changing habits, and, above all, the need to mitigate and adapt to the existential threat of climate change.
An Expanding Problem
A staggering two billion people live in extreme poverty and 789 million people do not have access to electricity.1 Many of these people will seek a new life in the city, they will seek employment, and they will seek a home. They will join the rest of the population as consumers of energy and water, and makers of waste, and demand will go up. We have no right to deny anyone this opportunity, but it makes the challenge of reducing CO2 emissions even greater.
If you look back in history, all of the great cities have progressed through economic focus and trade and always to the detriment of the environment. This has, in nearly all cases, been a problem that has reached a critical level, public outcry has ensued, and the error rectified. If I were a true cynic, I would say this is how we solve all of our problems. This constant iteration of growth and advancement followed by a “fix” is what has enabled this walk along the London embankment to be all the more remarkable. Cities through time have developed governance structures that are so in tune with the life of the city that the problems can be identified, captured, analysed, debated, and “fixed” without upsetting all of the other critical elements that make city life so enchanting.
The myriad of governing entities developed over time are able to respond and enact new policy, with the benefits to the wider city being the overriding decision. Perhaps this is what was so troubling about the rapid rise of ride-sharing. They just came. They used public advocacy for cheaper and more convenient travel but at a cost to the overall balance of city life. I don’t blame the ride-sharing companies who see this service as invaluable to the citizen, and there is clearly demand for their service, but they can’t possibly understand or calculate the overall impact to the whole city population.
In his book If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities,2 Benjamin Barber makes the case that modern cities are best poised to meet the challenges posed by the global economy. Ben’s book reflects on urban manifestoes with the theme that local governments are uniquely positioned to save the planet. Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley made this case in The Metropolitan Revolution.3 Ben advocated for a parliament of cities, which would ratify a shift in power and political reality that, he argues, has already taken place.
“Because [cities] are inclined naturally to collaboration and interdependence, cities harbor hope,” Barber writes. “If mayors ruled the world,” he says, “the more than 3.5 billion people who are urban dwellers and the many more in the exurban neighborhoods beyond could participate locally and cooperate globally at the same time – a miracle of civic ‘glocality’ promising pragmatism instead of politics, innovation rather than ideology and solutions in place of sovereignty.”
Barber claims that national sovereignty is a handicap. Cities, by contrast, can capitalise on diversity, share intelligence on security and the environment, and face up to inequality in housing, jobs, transportation, and education.
“My proposal for a parliament of mayors is no grandiose scheme,” Ben writes, “no mandate for top-down suzerainty by omnipotent megacities exercising executive authority over a supine world. It is rather a brief for cities to lend impetus to informal practices they already have in place.” And he notes that, “in changing the subject to cities, we allow imagination to cut through the historical and cultural impediments to interdependent thinking in the same way a maverick Broadway cuts through Manhattan’s traditional grid”.
So if cities are so effective at rectifying problems, then why did the air get so bad? The water so polluted? The traffic so congested? The answer to this is simple. Firstly, nobody fully assessed the external factors impacting these basic elements of air, water, and nature; secondly, nobody assessed the impact on our health and wellbeing; and thirdly, our guesses of future growth and future expectation have been underestimated.
My journey since advising the Mayor of London on the environment has enabled me to look at technology and how it can tackle climate change and how it can meet city targets for climate change mitigation. This has enabled me to visit some amazing cities, such as Ephesus in Turkey; Madain Saleh in Saudi Arabia, which is the first settlement after Petra; Matera in Italy (Figure I.1), where you can stay in a hotel room where a cave-dwelling troglodyte once slept; and cities like Venice that help challenge the conventional wisdom of how cities can thrive. These trips have given me insight into why people live in cities and what is important to them, something that every mayor understands all too well.
Figure I.1 Matera, Italy. Many consider this to be the oldest inhabited city on Earth. (Source: Siempreverde22/Getty Images.)
Madain Saleh, for example, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, can tell this story. While not as well known as Petra, the Nabatean’s second-largest city was once a thriving metropolis along the ancient spice route and played a crucial role in building a trade empire. Today, its monumental stone-hewn tombs are some of the last, and best-preserved, remains