Urban Planning for City Users

ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY NOT ONLY CHANGES THE URBAN WAY OF LIFE, BUT ALSO CITY INSTITUTIONS THROUGH A MIX OF TOPDOWN AND SELFMANAGED SERVICES THAT ARE FACILITATED BY DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

by Lanfranco Senn, Dept.of Policy Analysis and Public Management, Bocconi
Translated by Alex Foti

Today the majority of the world’s population lives in cities, and recent estimates predict that 70% of humans will live in urban areas by 2050, with a corresponding increase in average city size. Today, there are 20 cities in the world having more than 10 million inhabitants, and 450 cities exceeding 1,000,000 people. The trend toward growing urbanization is engendering negative externalities for people and firms alike, such as traffic congestion and air pollution. However, tackling these doesn’t mean that growth and competitiveness (i.e. urban development) should take the backseat.

Urban sustainability goes beyond mere environmental aspects and is increasingly seen as the combination of four interdependent factors: environment, the economy, society, and institutions. Administrators have a hard time addressing sustainability in a holistic and systemic fashion, because policy interventions are compartmentalized and thus suffer from a partial approach. Energy, construction, mobility policies are often designed and implemented separately, without taking into full account their health, labor, and welfare implications. Also, they invariably are supply-side policies, but it is urban dwellers – better, city users – be they residents or commuters, who stand to gain from them and have a better grasp of the issues.

In fact, city users do not see a tradeoff between clean energy and green spaces, job opportunities and health safety, or better city schools and greener buildings. It’s not about aggregating individual preferences, but attaining a set of solutions to increase the city’s quality of life. Considering the city from the perspective of people living it means adopting a demand-side approach to the issue, which gives paramount importance to the customer satisfaction of city users, and which in turn requires a major cultural change for city managers.

The slowness with which institutions are adapting to the new paradigm are pushing city users to develop their creativity, thus becoming key actors (i.e. prosumers) in the development of sustainable urban policies. A case in point concerning prosumerism is sustainable mobility, whereby residents manage their own mobility via bike/car sharing or carpooling services. Another example is the self-management of energy consumption, with users shaving off daylight peaks in electricity use, conserving heat through better insulation, or installing solar panels, thus becoming energy producers. A third example is garbage recycling, whereby higher individual commitment translates into lower garbage taxes.

Since autonomy in managing these services crucially depend from information and communication technologies, the sustainable city is more and more a smart city, i.e. able to efficiently apply such technologies to urban living. For example, think how smartphones let you book your car or bike sharing service or pay the toll to enter traffic-restricted zones; alternatively, consider smart grids that let you monitor your water, electricity and gas consumption.

In a sustainable city, the existing concept of urban governance is challenged: top-down services managed by public institutions now live side by side with services managed from below by residents, although complete self-management on the part of citizens is neither attainable nor desirable, since only city administrations are able to plan adequately for a sustainable urban future.