Authors

Miriam Pollock¹;  ¹ University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UK

Discussion

With urbanisation rapidly accelerating, scholars and policymakers have increasingly come to recognise the importance of urban sustainability. Cities now contribute 80% of global GDP as well as most of planetary energy demand (65%), resource use (75%), and carbon emissions (70%). Urban sustainability failures accordingly represent a significant obstacle to global sustainability. As such, it is critical to understand and identify the causes of such failures. But contemporary research on urban sustainability tends to focus on successful case studies rather than poorly performing cities. My paper addresses this gap by proposing two factors (based on prior qualitative research I conducted) that I hypothesise lead to poor sustainability outcomes for cities:

H1: Cities with more monopolistic market structures are more likely to have low levels of sustainability, all else being equal.

H2: Cities in more authoritarian countries are more likely to have low levels of sustainability, all else being equal.

I use multivariable logistic regressions to test these hypotheses, regressing level of economic monopolisation against level of sustainability to test H₁ and separately regressing regime type against level of sustainability to test H₂. This method enables me to control for potential confounding variables, which consist of other factors commonly hypothesised to affect urban sustainability, such as city GDP per capita, population density, industrial structure, and local government fiscal expenditures.

There are many indices which have been used to assess urban sustainability. However, there is not a consensus as to which measure is most accurate or reliable, with most suffering from significant methodological deficiencies. This lacuna has contributed to a deficit of empirical, quantitative, large-N studies on urban sustainability. To help rectify this, I develop my own index to measure level of sustainability based on United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 (‘sustainable cities and communities’) indicators. This is justified both by the paradigmatic nature of the SDGs and the fact that most extant indices already define urban sustainability according to SDG 11.

This paper contributes to the literature on urban sustainability by focusing on political factors which hinder, rather than promote, sustainability efforts. A better understanding of the causes of urban sustainability failures can enable policymakers to improve the sustainability of the least sustainable cities. Because failing cities have both more room for improvement and, in many cases, disproportionately detrimental impacts on overall sustainability, improving the sustainability of these worst performers can have a much greater overall impact on planetary sustainability.