YOU have probably seen the annual rankings of the world’s cities by “liveability” or “quality of life”. It is intriguing to discover which come out top – and which bottom. After all, most of us have skin in this game: more than half of people around the world , and that number is growing. But you may also have wondered what “quality of life” really means. Which qualities? Whose life?
These same questions occupy Anu Ramaswami. Trained initially as a chemical engineer, she is now a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the M. S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton University, New Jersey. Her research focuses on what we can do to improve the urban environment, and she works closely with US cities as well as with the United Nations and national governments. It is fiendishly difficult to compare cities, she says – or even, for that matter, to define them.
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Ramaswami wants to persuade people that cities aren’t concrete jungles that stop abruptly at their official limits, but complex, dynamic systems that extend much further and, like living organisms, have their own metabolism. Only by thinking of them in this way can we start to make them more liveable, she says.
Laura Spinney: Urbanisation is accelerating as global population grows. Is that a good thing?
Anu Ramaswami: Many people point to cities as villains. I prefer a more nuanced narrative that says cities offer an opportunity for innovation. This typically generates more wealth and, to some extent, more well-being, but also inequality, which has its own implications for well-being. More than 90 per cent of the world’s GDP arises from urban activities, but its distribution is very uneven.
Cities have other drawbacks too, such as higher crime and air pollution. So the question shouldn’t be: is urbanisation good? It should be: since urbanisation is inevitable, can we urbanise in a more resource-efficient way? And how do we measure both resource efficiency and urban well-being?
You have pioneered a field called . Can you explain how it differs from more traditional urban planning?
To sum up what I do, I study how materials and energy flow through cities, shaped by people and policies, and their impact on human and planetary well-being.
Cities draw resources from everywhere, so instead of studying what’s happening inside the city boundary, and I study cities in their broader context – as sustainable urban systems. One way to do that is to consider the seven key provisioning systems that support them: shelter, water, food, energy, connectivity, sanitation and green spaces. Planners tend to focus on these in isolation; our goal is to study them holistically, including their interactions. We look at their impacts beyond the city too. So, for example, we might ask how inequality contributes to global greenhouse gas emissions. In practice, once we have assessed those transboundary impacts, we pick an administrative boundary – the greater metropolitan area, say – because we want our findings to be actionable.
In 2018, you co-authored , a report for the United Nations. It concluded that the materials used to build and sustain cities could be reduced by a factor of five, bringing huge environmental benefits. How?
The argument is that you need a cascade of actions to maximise efficiency. There are five levels of these. : with more compact land use, you reduce your mobility needs and your use of construction materials per square metre. At the next level, you deploy more efficient technologies, such as better vehicles. The third level considers synergies – efficiencies that cities offer through co-location, an example of which would be heat recycling through district energy systems. Next comes behavioural change: encouraging the use of public transport and the use of public spaces for, say, urban farming. And fifth is renewable technologies – building a capacity for regeneration into your city.
Planners might focus on different levels of the cascade depending on whether the city is old or new. For a new city, starting with a compact plan will be most important. Compact growth is harder to achieve in existing cities, but you can build up what we call “articulated density” around major transit corridors, which are the connective tissue in the porous matrix of a walkable, liveable city. London is an example of a city that has done well lately in building up articulated density.
In The Weight of Cities, you gave a striking statistic: China used more concrete between 2011 and 2013 than the US used in the entire 20th century. Are we heading in the wrong direction?
Nothing in China’s growth is surprising. A lot of urbanisation has yet to happen, and most urbanising countries will follow the same trajectory if, like China, they have steady population growth. In some countries, people are still migrating into cities from rural areas at a really rapid clip. There’s a rule of thumb that says you by the city’s annual percentage growth rate. A city that is growing by 10 per cent annually – as some Indian cities are – will have a doubling time of seven years. Such a city will have very large infrastructure needs, but it’s as important to ask how long that infrastructure will last as what materials will go into building it.
So, we are talking about a new philosophy of urban planning, but also about harnessing new technologies.
Yes, which is why I think we need a new type of professional, who can combine concepts from urban planning and infrastructure engineering and look at both through a lens of industrial ecology or urban metabolism. That’s the kind of student I’ve been training in some of my National Science Foundation-supported programmes here in the US, and also, in a smaller way, through UN-sponsored training schemes. Many of my former students have gone on to work in city planning.
Are governments listening to you?
After Weight of Cities, I wrote a follow-up [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] region, which will be the next urbanisation hotspot after India and China. The aim was to show how the principles outlined in Weight of Cities could be applied in a specific regional context. That report got a lot of traction; with the UN, we presented it to urban planning agencies across the ASEAN region. The challenge, in fact, is not to get governments to adopt these ideas. It is whether it is even possible to do intentional planning when cities are growing so fast. We provided case studies to show that it is. in India, for example, has been able to plan ahead of its 15-to-30-year doubling time.
“Climate change is the most obvious threat, now and in the future”
Ahmedabad is part of the Indian government’s controversial smart cities programme, launched in 2015. Does that scheme fit with your ideas?
To begin with, the smart cities programme emphasised new technologies, such as sensors for monitoring water use. In 2016, I and others wrote pushing back against that tech-heavy approach, and arguing that it was more important to be “systems smart”, as Ahmedabad has been. But the programme’s definition of smart has evolved – for example, to incorporate social inclusion and equality – and it has turned out to be quite forward-thinking. I visited three of the smart cities in 2018, as part of a US-India collaboration supported by the US state department, and I was impressed.
Resilience to future threats is key to urban planning. How is it being built in to cities?
Climate change is the most obvious threat, now and in the future. In the US, many cities are designing storm-water systems that will withstand higher levels of flooding than we have seen so far, or planting trees to reduce heat stress, or thinking about how to keep the power grid functioning in conditions of extreme cold. There are other, more intangible forms of resilience, of course. This pandemic has taught us that low social inequality is one of them – and good city design can contribute to that.
From the start, you have taken a hands-on approach to implementing your ideas. In 2005, you phoned the office of the mayor of Denver, Colorado, and offered your help in developing a climate action plan. What happened next?
The mayor’s chief sustainability officer accepted! Eighteen months later, we had a plan and I am still collaborating with the city and county of Denver today. This was the first time a city took a transboundary approach to carbon accounting that considered all the key provisioning systems. The approach has since been taken up by other cities, as well as by the 500 members of ICLEI USA – part of .
You have used this bottom-up approach elsewhere too. Is that because you have found it the best way to get things done?
Yes. With Minneapolis, for example, we’re in the process of drawing up a food action plan that takes a transboundary approach to urban food policies. It’s a local adaptation of the 2015 , which has more than 200 signatories worldwide. In both Minneapolis and Denver, the community generates strategies which we – the academics – then shape and prioritise. It’s very much a two-way street, though, because the collaboration throws up new research questions. This kind of co-production isn’t new, but over the past decade, I’ve seen it evolve from a practice into a science. It has established procedures now, and the are better understood.
How can we evaluate urbanisation strategies without ranking cities?
The trouble with rankings is that you’re rarely comparing like with like, or looking at the whole picture. The rankings that get most airtime, such as [asset management firm] Mercer’s, were designed for expatriates and emphasise access to amenities. But a highly liveable city, in that sense, could also be completely undemocratic, and Mercer’s composite index wouldn’t capture that.
It would be more reasonable to compare cities on a single parameter, such as emissions per capita, but the problem there is that a city might score well because it has no industry and brings goods in from elsewhere. Comparing only industrial cities, or only commercial cities, might help. But it’s far more useful to compare a city to itself – to ask, for example, how its air quality has improved over time.
One of the UN’s 2015 calls for inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities by 2030. Is that realistic?
Just as with the UN’s , which had a horizon of 2015, having the goal is important. A lot was achieved with the MDGs. Where SDG 11 overlaps with other SDGs – to do with access to food, clean water and energy, for example – the trajectory is towards improvement. I’m less hopeful about reducing inequality because the trend is in the opposite direction. Then again, urban systems science offers us an opportunity to build more equitable cities in the future.
