Helping cities reinvent themselves
An initiative helping cities regenerate underutilised sites in a climate-friendly way shows the wider economic and social benefits of climate action
I recently visited Madrid to speak at the IE University School of Architecture and Design, and had the pleasure of visiting a Reinventing Cities site there—an excellent example of the impact of this programme.
The fact that change has been one of the defining aspects of cities for millennia is well understood. The constant movement of people, businesses, and ideas makes cities diverse, vibrant, and innovative, but also leaves them vulnerable to the undesired effects of boom-and-bust cycles. Since the Industrial Revolution and the onset of modern capitalism, the frequency and severity of these cycles has increased, leaving cities that lose their dynamic spark at risk of entering the so-called urban doom loop, whereby:
Notable examples of this vicious cycle are Detroit (and the US Rust Belt more widely) and the former manufacturing centres in the North of England, who suffered particularly as the world economy became more integrated, or “globalised”, in the second half of the twentieth century.
While this doom loop is hard to stop once in motion, it is largely preventable if the warning signals are picked up early enough. Forward-looking city leaders can help places continue to thrive while also rejuvenating and regenerating underutilised areas. And many are doing it. To support them and to meet the ever-growing need of decarbonised and resilient urban development, in 2017 C40 Cities launched Reinventing Cities—a program that encourages innovation in the built environment and supports projects that go well beyond business as usual in their environmental and social outcomes. The program has already seen three successful editions of this international competition and a new one will be launched in the new year.
In the programme, cities identify sites with under-utilised potential and ask the private sector to put forward innovative, climate-friendly solutions. A jury of city, C40 Cities and independent experts picks the most promising proposal, with a focus on environmental ambitions and responsiveness to local needs.
Reinventing cities—in action
As mentioned above, I visited one of the Reinventing Cities winning projects earlier this month, the Campus for Living Cities in Vallecas, Madrid, part of the campus of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
The project aims to deliver a net-zero carbon building (the biggest cross-laminated timber structure building in Spain to date) that, once in operation, can be energy-positive and act as a catalyst for the Vallecas area. This last aspect is crucial, as at present the relative isolation from the surrounding urban fabric is one of the main challenges of the project site (the buildings that already exist on the site are in good condition but have very low occupancy compared to their capacity). The Campus for Living Cities project aims to solve this by introducing new uses and improving the links with the Villa de Vallecas to the South. These include student housing, (the first student housing onsite for the prominent engineering school Esculea Politecnica Superior, part of the Autonomous University of Madrid), a theatre, indoor and outdoor sports facilities and an extension to the existing life-science building to make space for a start-up incubator and accelerator. Biodiversity is also enhanced on site by green roofs, micro-habitats that create habitats for animals, insects and plants with a total green area of 22,700 m².
The project is not completed, yet some of its objectives are already being met. During my visit, I was told that owners of nearby sites (including the City of Madrid) were looking at redevelopment of their under-used industrial land—effectively proving that the city’s vision in selecting the Campus site was acting as a spark for wider positive effects locally.
The Campus for Living Cities highlights the importance of bold city leadership in re-invigorating areas of our cities that lack the necessary vibrancy that make them welcoming and prosperous. Reinventing Cities projects are proof that similar regeneration efforts can be promoted across the world while ensuring outstanding environmental standards are met—effectively helping the climate while helping the local economy create shared local prosperity.
🎧 Three new episodes the Cities 1.5 podcast
Since our last newsletter, we have been busy with the second season of our podcast Cities 1.5 (here on Apple Podcasts and Spotify) and published three new episodes:
I had the privilege to discuss ecological economics with award-winning economist Professor Tim Jackson in our latest episode (available on Apple Podcast and Spotify).
We covered climate communication, and how cities can shift the narrative (listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify).
We discussed how cities can strive for climate justice and resilience, topics that we will cover in depth in an upcoming issue of our Journal for City Climate Policy and Economy (listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify).
🏙️ Free courses and learning resources
We have two exciting updates from our colleagues at UrbanShift (an initiative managed in partnership with the UN Environment Programme, the World Resources Institute, C40 Cities, and the ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability).
They have just launched their city academy: eight self-paced, free, online courses on essential topics for creating more sustainable and equitable cities. If you’re interested in accessing urban climate finance, circular economy strategies, nature-based solutions—among many others—you should sign up and share it with your contacts.
They have just published a fantastic guide on Public-Private collaboration to accelerate sustainable urban development, drawing from case studies of thirty Global South cities.
📚 What we are reading
David Miller: I’ve just started The Singularities by John Banville.
Francesco Mellino: if you have time for a great yet depressing long-read, the New Yorker has a fantastic piece on carbon indulgences offsets.
I’ve also managed to get hold of a copy of Climate Capitalism (the author kindly invited me to the London book launch upon reading our latest newsletter). The book has a strong storytelling element that is often lacking from non-fiction, climate writing. This makes it a pleasure to read. Rathi is an expert in climate communication and, almost as a bit of provocation to his environmentalist readership, he dismisses modern capitalism’s tendency for wealth and power accumulation as a systemic issue that is too hard to solve within the timeframe we have for climate action. Though I understand that the focus of the book is about preventing a climate catastrophe, this is disappointing and somehow limits the author’s scope to greenhouse gas-related climate solutions, ignoring the wider planetary impacts of human activity.