Successful, safe and sustainable cities: towards a New Urban Agenda

There is a growing interest among national governments and international agencies in the contribution of urban centres to sustainable development. The paper outlines the new global agendas to guide this: the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement and the New Urban Agenda. It then sets out the key challenges and opportunities facing urban governments across the Commonwealth in implementing these agendas and achieving inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities. This is hampered by significant infrastructure deficits (especially in provision for water and sanitation) and a lack of funding. After outlining the commitments agreed by national governments in these global agendas, the paper discusses the vital role in meeting these of city leadership, financing and investment, urban planning and local economic development. Whilst it is good to see recognition of the importance of cities to national economies, economic success in any city does not automatically contribute to a healthier city, a more inclusive city or a sustainable city. This needs capable and accountable urban governments working closely with local civil society, and the redirection of public funds and development assistance to support them

The role of cities in sustainable development

This repository item contains a single issue of Sustainable Development Insights, a series of short policy essays that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The series seeks to promote a broad interdisciplinary dialogue on how to accelerate sustainable development at all levels.This brief will argue that with the right innovation and incentives in place, cities can allow high living standards to be combined with resource consumption that is much lower than the norm in most cities today. This is achieved not with an over-extended optimism on what new technologies can bring but through a wider-application of what already has been shown to work by the more innovative and accountable city and municipal governments and their partnerships with civil society groups

Appropriate Sanitation Technologies for Addressing Deficiencies in Provision in Low- and Middle-Income Nations

human development, water, sanitation

Urban Myths and the Mis-use of Data that Underpin them

This paper describes the gaps and limitations in the data available on urban populations for many low- and middle-income nations and how this limits the accuracy of international comparisons – for instance of levels of urbanization and of the size of city populations. It also discusses how the lack of attention to data limitations has led to many myths and misconceptions in regard to growth rates for city populations and for nations’ levels of urbanization. It ends with some comments on how data limitations distort urban policies.urbanization, city populations, censuses

Urbanisation as a Threat or Opportunity in the Promotion of Human Wellbeing

It is possible to present a credible picture of urbanisation as one of the greatest threats to human health, wellbeing and development, although this paper will argue that to do so requires focusing on a limited set of cities. There is a stronger evidence base on cities and urbanisation underpinning good health, fulfilment of civil rights, democracy and freedom from deprivation, although with important exceptions. It is possible to present urbanisation as the most serious driver of human-induced climate change (and of most other kinds of ecological damage). But cities also have the potential to be places where high living standards can be delinked from unsustainable ecological footprints and high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (and there are some cities that demonstrate this). Of course, a very different set of urban centres get highlighted, depending on which of these points one wants to substantiate. What this paper seeks to do is to highlight both the threats and the opportunities posed by urbanisation

Overview of the Global Sanitation Problem

human development, water, sanitation

Learning-by-Doing, Organizational Forgetting, and Industry Dynamics

Learning-by-doing and organizational forgetting have been shown to be important in a variety of industrial settings. This paper provides a general model of dynamic competition that accounts for these economic fundamentals and shows how they shape industry structure and dynamics. Previously obtained results regarding the dominance properties of firms' pricing behavior no longer hold in this more general setting. We show that forgetting does not simply negate learning. Rather, learning and forgetting are distinct economic forces. In particular, a model with learning and forgetting can give rise to aggressive pricing behavior, market dominance, and multiple equilibria, whereas a model with learning alone cannot.

Is More Information Better? The Effects of 'Report Cards' on Health Care Providers

Health care report cards - public disclosure of patient health outcomes at the level of the individual physician and/or hospital - may address important informational asymmetries in markets for health care, but they may also give doctors and hospitals incentives to decline to treat more difficult, severely ill patients. Whether report cards are good for patients and for society depends on whether their financial and health benefits outweigh their costs in terms of the quantity, quality, and appropriateness of medical treatment that they induce. Using national data on Medicare patients at risk for cardiac surgery, we find that cardiac surgery report cards in New York and Pennsylvania led both to selection behavior by providers and to improved matching of patients with hospitals. On net, this led to higher levels of resource use and to worse health outcomes, particularly for sicker patients. We conclude that, at least in the short run, these report cards decreased patient and social welfare.

Urbanisation as a Threat or Opportunity

Urbanisation is often seen as a problem for development yet all the world’s wealthiest nations are predominantly urban and almost all urbanisation among low- and middle-income nations is associated with economic growth. The world’s largest cities are heavily concentrated in the world’s largest economies. The more urbanised nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America generally have the highest life expectancies and lowest infant and child mortality rates. The nations with the worst health and living conditions among their urban populations are generally the least urbanised. Urbanisation is often seen as the main driver of ecological damage and human-induced climate change. But among the world’s wealthiest cities with the highest living standards, per capita greenhouse gas emissions vary by a factor of ten or more. There are cities and city districts that show how urban concentration can delink a high quality of life from unsustainable levels of consumption and the ecological damage and greenhouse gas emissions these cause. Several key issues are raised by an increasingly urbanised world.The Rockerfeller Foundatio