The Problem
Sustainable cities aim to achieve renewal, regeneration, beautification, resilience and be modern. Yet, competing priorities between city stakeholders can give rise to persisting and complex tensions, which are challenging for urban planners to address. Ecological groups, businesses, communities and government have their own, often contrasting, views on urban development. While ecologists are concerned about the environment and more green spaces, businesses want to attract more people and investments, whilst communities are interested in safety, traffic reduction, convenience and job opportunities among others. How can all these priorities be achieved simultaneously?
Urban growth is generally understood to happen at the expense of the environment. Planning a green, sustainable city for everyone is incompatible with increased traffic. Tensions can surface between creating spaces for parks versus spaces for development, between increasing populations versus decreasing traffic congestion. In addition, tensions can arise between short and long-term priorities, and between the ideal picture of the future city versus the existing city organisation.
One example of a city that has used ongoing contradictory tensions to trigger positive change and innovation is Paris. Like many large global cities, Paris has in recent years faced a persistent tension between the need to reduce CO2 emissions while also increasing residents’ quality of life. Facing major constraints including scarce resources, limited space and the COVID19 pandemic, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, had to think outside the box and devise a creative solution that would simultaneously accommodate both environmental and human needs. The result was a novel approach to urban development, and inclusion as finalist in the 2021-2022 WRI Ross Centre Prize for Cities.
The Solution
In trying to navigate tensions between urban growth and the environment, in 2020, Mayor Hidalgo implemented a plan to achieve both reduced emissions and a higher quality of life for residents. She did this by turning Paris into “a town where everything you need can be found within 15 minutes of your home, on foot or by bike.” The ‘15-minute city’ proposes a desirable proximity for residents, redefining an urban landscape so that everyone in the neighbourhoods can be close to public services.
Offices and neighbourhood co-working hubs were established, and remote working and flexible hours encouraged. Urban farms were promoted to encourage more locally grown food. By moving away from a binary ‘either-or’ solution, she was able to thus reimagine and repurpose the city’s infrastructure, and by encouraging multiple uses for existing infrastructure she was able to improve residents’ quality of life and to reconnect neighbours. This ‘both-and’ approach included conversion of parking spaces into cafés; conversion of roads into cycle pathways; encouraging libraries and stadiums to operate outside standard hours, nightclubs to double up as gyms during the day. Rather than school infrastructure being constrained by term timetables, Hidalgo succeeded in remodelling school court yards to function as parks and play spaces that were open to everyone in the holidays and outside of school hours. Previously faced with traffic congestion and air pollution which had been killing 3,000 people a year, Paris has built upon this successful leveraging of contradictory tensions and now has an ambitious goal to cover 50% of the city’s surfaces to with parks and green roofs by 2050.3,4
Embracing rather than avoiding the contradictory tensions between environmental considerations, resident quality of life and economic considerations required a fresh mindset where seeming ‘either-or’ choices were re-framed as’ both-and’ solutions.
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