Leave no city behind

Close to 4 billion people live in cities. As the driver of environmental challenges, accounting for nearly 70% of the world's carbon emissions, and as sites of critical social disparities, with 863 million dwellers now living in slums, urban settlements are at the heart of global change. This momentum is unlikely to disappear, as approximately 70 million more people will move to cities by the end of this year alone. The good news is that recent multilateral processes are now appreciating this key role of cities and are increasingly prioritizing urban concerns in policy-making. Yet, how can we ensure that these steps toward a global urban governance leave no city, town, or urban dweller behind

Science Diplomacy: Introduction to a Boundary Problem

Scientific advancements, their application through technological development, and world politics have been long acknowledged as affecting each other, and are today more than ever at the heart of global policy. Speaking of ‘science diplomacy’ as the encounter of world politics and the world of science at the heart of these advancements might be a unique window into our time. This potential is what prompts this special issue to gather views from a variety of scholarly and practical viewpoints, linking the well‐established world of reflective practitioners in science diplomacy to the growing field of international relations (IR) scholars theorising this realm. Can speaking of ‘science diplomacy’ situate our attention at the crossroads of science and international relations, and spur greater appreciation for their intersections? This introduction to the special issue summarises the rise of science diplomacy as field of inquiry, and casts questions as to the need to advance, where not reform, these conceptualisations. It defines science diplomacy as a ‘boundary problem’ par excellence and emphasises its ‘productive tension’ that emerges between the various ways of knowing of actors belonging to ‘different social worlds’, seeking to gather a productive tension of views on this theme in the issue

City Diplomacy: Towards More Strategic Networking? Learning with WHO Healthy Cities

Cities are increasingly capturing the attention of major international actors and now regularly feature in multilateral processes. Yet while there are many studies on networking among cities, there have been few studies of 'city networks' as formal and institutionalized governance structures facilitating city-to-city and city-to-other actors cooperation, or 'city diplomacy'. Institutionalized networks of cities, while not new, are becoming a growing presence on the international scene, almost omnipresent and perhaps even too common. Might it be time for a 'Darwinian' selection between city networking options? Diving deeper into this networked challenge, this essay focuses on the effects this networked diplomacy and overlap it might have on cities. Drawing on a research collaboration between the UCL City Leadership Laboratory at University College London and the World Health Organization's Healthy Cities Network and both a global dataset of city networks as well as qualitative focus group data, we consider the growth of these governance structures, their strengths, but also the weaknesses associated with their rapid growth, and how cities can engage with this networked landscape more strategically. In short, we argue that the potential of city networks must go hand-in-hand with more integrative and strategic thinking at both local and international levels

Science and the Future of Cities: Interim Report of the Nature Sustainability Expert Panel

This short interim report introduces the work of the Nature Sustainability Expert Panel on science and the future of cities. Developed in partnership by University College London’s City Leadership Lab and Nature Sustainability, and supported by UCL’s Grand Challenge of Sustainable Cities, the expert panel focuses on the urban science-policy interface for global sustainability. It offers a first look into the themes that will be developed in the upcoming Panel’s report (July 2018). The document here discusses existing tensions in the current global urban science landscape and explores how those could be overcome to make existing urban research more responsive to global urban sustainability challenges

Urban Observatories in the Midst of COVID-19: Challenges & Responses

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, urban observatories have demonstrated their value, but also highlighted the challenges for boundary institutions between knowledge generation and decision-making in a variety of different ways. We aim here to capture some of their voices in a time of crisis. The Connected Cities Lab, in collaboration with University College London and UN-Habitat, and in dialogue with a variety of urban research institutions around the planet, has been working since 2018 to develop a review of the challenges and values of and challenges for ‘urban observatories’. That project aims to present evidence on the boundary-spanning roles of these institutions, capturing the ways in which they bridge information in and about their cities and the potential value they offer to urban governance. As the COVID-19 crisis took hold across cities and continents in early 2020, it became apparent that this study could not prescind from a closer look at how these observatories had both been coping with, but also responding to, the pandemic. This resulted in a series of additional interviews, document reviews and a twopart virtual workshop in August 2020 with observatories, and urban research institutions performing observatory functions, to give further voice to these experiences. As a background to this ‘deep’ dive into the reality of COVID-19 for observatories, the overall study underpinning this working paper has relied on, first, desktop research on publicly available information to identify thirty-two cases of either explicitlynamed ‘urban observatories’ or else urban research institutions performing ‘observatory-like’ functions. This research was then coupled with a series of interviews with experts and senior staff from these observatories to ground truth initial considerations as well as to capture how the processes of boundary-spanning worked beyond the publicly available persona of each observatory. We then referred back to these thirty-two cases and selected a sample of fourteen for specific analysis in relation to COVID-specific interventions, with six of them involved directly into two virtual workshops to capture directly their experience in the context of the pandemic crisis. Capturing initial findings from these engagements (which will ultimately form an integral part of the project’s final report), this working paper offers a preliminary snapshot of some of these lessons drawn from the study. Essential for us has been the chance, amidst the complications of COVID-19 lockdowns and travel bans, to better capture the voice of observatories the world over and their tangible experiences with spanning urban research-practice boundaries in a turbulent historical moment. Whilst the final report for the project will likely include more extensively analysed cases emerging from the current crisis, we have sought to present here much of the raw reflections emerging from our engagement with colleagues in observatories (and ‘observatory-like’ institutions) to both offer useful reflections to other contexts around the world as well as to offer insights on the unique situation urban knowledge institutions find themselves in a reality where cities and urban life has been fundamentally recast by the pandemic. The working paper is organised in a way that follows our broader study’s key themes looking at the structure and activities of observatories, putting our broader findings into dialogue with the voices of observatories during the COVID-19 crisis. Section 1 describes the proposed visions and functions performed by observatories and puts it into dialogue with the COVID-19 crisis. Positionality of urban observatories is also discussed in this section. Section 2 explores outputs produced by, and themes investigated in, observatories and how they have been shaped by and for the crisis. In Sections 1 and 2 we endeavoured to capture vignettes from the participating observatories through the experiences of a set of six more specific interlocutor institutions engaged in the project: the Gauteng City Region Observatory (GCRO) in Johannesburg, the Karachi Urban Lab (KUL) in Karachi, the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) in Bangalore, the Metropolis Observatory in Barcelona, and the World Resources Institute Ross Centre in Washington DC. Section 3 concludes with a commentary on the ongoing challenges and opportunities faced by urban observatories in the wake of COVID-19, without underestimating how the crisis might be far from over

Global science for city policy

Research and data are increasingly at the heart of how we conceive of urban governance. Urban control rooms and city dashboards championed by cities like Chicago, São Paulo, and London have been promising real-time snapshots and tracking over time of urban systems, via geolocated mobility data sets, social media inputs, environmental sensors, and other tools (1). At the international level, the importance of urban research and data has been enshrined in major United Nations (UN) processes, from the UN New Urban Agenda, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to the World Data Forum (2). Yet overall, the global state of data-informed urban governance remains underdeveloped, often promising, as with the dashboards, more than it actually delivers. It is time for a step change. A truly global reform of scientific advice to cities must take place on multiple interconnected fronts, linking a UN action plan on science and the future of cities, a “good advice” commitment by the private sector, and formalized partnerships for urban science at the local level. This scientifically informed urban reform, ripe for discussion at the upcoming UN World Urban Forum in February, can be uniquely bold in recognizing the potential of municipal action on global challenges. Despite being considered the “lowest” level of governance, cities have developed a track record of global action on key matters like climate, disasters, and health, often surpassing, in speed, commitments, and global coverage, that of nations

A model independent and rephase invariant parametrization of CP violation

The phenomenological description of the neutral B meson system is proposed in terms of the fundamental CP-violating observables and within a rephasing invariant formalism. This generic formalism can select the time-dependent and time-integrated asymmetries which provide the basic tools to discriminate the different kinds of possible CP-violating effects in dedicated experimental B-meson facilities.Comment: 19 pages, Plain Te

Mobilising urban knowledge in an infodemic: Urban observatories, sustainable development and the COVID-19 crisis

Along with disastrous health and economic implications, COVID-19 has also been an epidemic of misinformation and rumours – an ‘infodemic’. The desire for robust, evidence-based policymaking in this time of disruption has been at the heart of the multilateral response to the crisis, not least in terms of supporting a continuing agenda for global sustainable development. The role of boundary-spanning knowledge institutions in this context could be pivotal, not least in cities, where much of the pandemic has struck. ‘Urban observatories’ have emerged as an example of such institutions; harbouring great potential to produce and share knowledge supporting sustainable and equitable processes of recovery. Building on four ‘live’ case studies during the crisis of institutions based in Johannesburg, Karachi, Freetown and Bangalore, our research note aims to capture the role of these institutions, and what it means to span knowledge boundaries in the current crisis. We do so with an eye towards a better understanding of their knowledge mobilisation practices in contributing towards sustainable urban development. We highlight that the crisis offers a key window for urban observatories to play a progressive and effective role for sustainable and inclusive development. However, we also underline continuing challenges in these boundary knowledge dynamics: including issues of institutional trust, inequality of voices, collective memory, and the balance between normative and advisory roles for observatories

Networking Cities after Paris: Weighing the Ambition of Urban Climate Change Experimentation

Over the past few decades, cities have repeatedly demonstrated high levels of ambition with regard to climate action. Global environmental governance has been marked by a proliferation of policy actions taken by local governments around the world to demonstrate their potential to advance climate change mitigation and adaptation. Leading ‘by example’ and demonstrating the extent of action that it is possible to deliver, cities have aspired to raise the ambition of national and international climate governance and put action into practice via a growing number of ‘climate change experiments’ delivered on the ground. Yet accounts of the potential of cities in global environmental governance have often stopped short of a systematic valuation of the nature and impact of the networked dimension of this action. This article addresses this by assessing the nature, and challenges faced by, urban climate governance in the post-Paris era, focusing on the ‘experimentation’ undertaken in cities and the city networks shaping this type of governance. First, we unpack the concept of ‘urban climate change experimentation’, the ways in which it is networked, and the forces driving it. In the second and third parts of the article, we discuss two main pitfalls of networked urban experimentation in its current form, focusing on issues of scaling experiments and the nature of experimentation. We call for increased attention to ‘scaling up’ experiments beyond urban levels of governance, and to transformative experimentation with governance and politics by and in cities. Finally, we consider how these pitfalls allow us to weigh the potential of urban climate ambition, and consider the pathways available for supporting urban climate change experimentation