By David Kaufmann and Michael Wicki
David Kaufmann is Assistant Professor of Spatial Development and Urban Policy at ETH Zürich. He serves as the Director of the Network City and Landscape and as the Deputy Director of the Institute for Spatial and Landscape Development (both at ETH Zürich). His research examines the intersections of public policy, urban studies, and planning.
Michael Wicki is a senior researcher in the Spatial Development and Urban Policy (SPUR) group at ETH Zurich. His research examines how urban transformation policies—such as fostering sustainable mobility, climate mitigation, or environmental adaptation—can be designed to gain public acceptance and drive behavioral change. Using experimental survey methods, he investigates public preferences for policies such as densification, urban infrastructure, and low-emission transport. Michael’s work contributes to understanding how cities can balance ambitious energy transition goals with the practical need for public support and policy feasibility.
Cities and their urban transformations are critical to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Our new research shows that European cities tend to prioritize environmental and technical issues, such as biodiversity or transportation, while their residents prefer issues linked to their everyday socio-economic needs, such as cost of living or public health. The findings are highly relevant for the energy transition as this transition seems to be only feasible when considering fairness and avoiding political backlash in energy planning.
Achieving sustainable cities and communities with SDG 11
Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11) aims to make cities sustainable, safe, inclusive, and resilient. SDG 11 thereby directly includes targets like providing affordable housing, increasing access to green spaces, expanding renewable energy, and promoting sustainable transport—all areas closely tied to residents’ daily lives and well-being. Given these activities of cities for the global sustainability agenda, the international discourse has shifted from a perspective that frames cities as primary contributors to environmental destruction and social inequality to an approach that values the potential of cities in creating a more sustainable future. Indeed, cities are now considered essential in realizing not only the urban-centric SDG 11 but the entire array of SDG. Cities often frame their ambitions for a sustainable future via Urban sustainable development (USD) plans and policies. These plans and policies cover the wide range of social, technical, and environmental issues needed to achieve SDG11.
This wide range of ambitions, targets and activities raises the question of their democratic legitimacy. Urban sustainability transformations should not be implemented in a top-down and technocratic manner if it is to be socially accepted and effectively adopted but should align with the priorities of its residents. Without democratic alignment, sustainability initiatives risk facing public resistance, delaying necessary changes, or even resulting in political backlash. When residents feel that policies overlook their everyday concerns, it undermines social trust and weakens support for long-term environmental goals. This disconnect could make it difficult for cities to meet ambitious sustainability targets, highlighting the essential role of ensuring public acceptance in successful, lasting urban transformation.
Local preferences in urban sustainable development plans
In our new article in Nature Sustainability, we studied whether the preferences of residents with respect to USD policy issues align with the priorities set out in existing urban sustainability plans. To do so, we first derived the 17 most prevalent urban sustainability issues from the literature. We first examined the preferences of 5,800 urban residents in Antwerp, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Lisbon, Manchester, Marseille, Milan, and Valencia through the application of survey experiments, which randomly present participants with varied issues to assess preferences. The eight cities were systematically selected to capture diversity in ecological vulnerability and financial capacity among European cities with populations over 350,000. For analysing the urban planning priorities, we then collected and examined 166 urban sustainability plans from these eight cities. These plans ranged from techno-economic strategies—such as those focused on infrastructure, green energy, and transport—to more socially driven initiatives addressing poverty, health, and equity. We included plans authored by city governments that explicitly referenced urban sustainability, excluding diagnostic or evaluative reports and plans created by non-municipal entities. We measured how each city prioritizes the 17 sustainability issues based on the frequency with which these issues are mentioned in the plans
The findings indicate a high average acceptance of urban sustainability planning as 72.6% of residents accepted such hypothetical plans in the survey experiments. Thus, residents appear to support urban sustainable development and generally support diverse sustainability issues. Yet, the results indicate that sustainability issues that aim to secure basic human needs are deemed most important. The highest ranked issues are: (1) cost of living, (2) public health, (3) education, (4) poverty, (5) unemployment, (6) water and air quality, and (7) wealth and income equality (Figure 1A). Increasing the share of green energy was only ranked as 9th most important out of the 17 issues considered. For energy practitioners, these findings imply the importance of aligning sustainability initiatives with residents’ immediate socioeconomic priorities, such as affordability and public health, to enhance public support for long-term environmental goals. This suggests that addressing basic human should be a core element of urban sustainable development strategies to foster broader acceptance and more equitable implementation of energy transitions, especially as the most important issues are not always the ones most frequently referenced in USD plans (Figure 1B).
Figure 1: Ranking and framing for city strategy measures. (A) Shows the average ranking of city features by policy category and framing. Framing refers to how measures were framed in the survey experiments (see original paper for more detail). (B) Shows the absolute frequency of city strategy measures in the policy documents examined.
The key critical finding of this study is, however, that we could detect widespread discrepancies between the preferences of the residents and the content of urban sustainability plans. There is a remarkable relative underconsideration of cost of living, wealth and income equality, unemployment and public health in the existing sustainability plans compared to residents’ preferences. Although cities mostly pursue strategies relating to long-term sustainability issues (such as education, biodiversity, public transport and urban green spaces), residents first prioritize issues aimed at securing their essential and everyday needs, such as cost of living, public health, poverty and unemployment.
This key finding resonates with the sustainability and green transition literature, which mobilizes concepts of environmental justice, social sustainability or socio-ecological transformation. These concepts stress the importance of just sustainability transformations, a process that aims to pursue ambitious sustainability interventions while alleviating or at least not widening socio-economic inequalities. The crucial implication of this study seems to be the importance of securing basic human needs if we want to pursue profound and fast green transitions.
Recommendations
On the basis of this study, we suggest that urban policy-makers and planners must take residents’ priorities seriously and incorporate essential, everyday human needs as a central aspect of sustainability transitions. This means that securing basic human needs is not simply of secondary priority or morally desirable but is, in fact, democratically demanded and the basis for pursuing more comprehensive and profound sustainability transitions. With respect to the energy transition, practitioners could achieve these goals by prioritizing measures that address residents’ immediate concerns, such as reducing energy costs (especially for low-income residents), improving energy efficiency in housing, and ensuring equitable access to renewable energy solutions. Additionally, fostering participatory processes that incorporate diverse resident perspectives can help align energy policies with local needs and build trust in the transition. If these democratic discrepancies remain unaddressed, cities may find themselves struggling to implement meaningful sustainability transformations, risking political backlash. Specific actions to address these challenges could include integrating energy transition policies with measures to lower living costs, such as ensuring affordable access to renewable energy; implementing housing retrofitting programs that avoid displacement and rising housing prices after energy retrofitting; and fostering participatory processes to co-produce policies that align with the priorities of urban residents.
Cover image: Fiona Kauer, photograph of Marseille, one of the eight cities studied in this research.
This blog post is based on the work presented in Kaufmann, D., Wicki, M., Wittwer, S., & Stephan, J. (2024). Democratic discrepancies in urban sustainable development. Nature Sustainability, 1-10.
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Suggested citation: David Kaufmann, Michael Wicki. “Urban transformations need to address basic needs to be effective”, Energy Blog @ ETH Zurich, ETH Zurich, November 25th, 2024, https://blogs.ethz.ch/energy/urban-transformations/
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