[MCN] PNAS : Sustainable development in cities; development, growth, and inequality

[Lance Olsen]

PNAS 2017 ; published ahead of print May 1, 2017, doi:10.1073/pnas.1606033114
Sustainability in an Urbanizing Planet Special Feature - Social Sciences - Sustainability Science -Physical Sciences - Sustainability Science:

Heterogeneity and scale of sustainable development in cities
Christa Brelsford, José Lobo, Joe Hand, and Luís M. A. Bettencourt

Significance

Most nations worldwide have recently committed to solving their most severe challenges of sustainability by 2030, including eradicating extreme poverty and providing universal access to basic services. But how? Rapid urbanization is creating the conditions for widespread economic growth and human development, but its consequences are very uneven. We show how measures of sustainable development—identified by residents of poor neighborhoods—can be combined into a simple and intuitive index. Its analysis reveals that challenges of development are typically first addressed in large cities but that severe inequalities often result as patterns of spatially segregated rich and poor neighborhoods. A new systematic understanding of these processes is critical for devising policies that produce faster and more equitable universal sustainable development.

Abstract
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/04/25/1606033114.abstract <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/04/25/1606033114.abstract>
Rapid worldwide urbanization is at once the main cause and, potentially, the main solution to global sustainable development challenges. The growth of cities is typically associated with increases in socioeconomic productivity, but it also creates strong inequalities. Despite a growing body of evidence characterizing these heterogeneities in developed urban areas, not much is known systematically about their most extreme forms in developing cities and their consequences for sustainability. Here, we characterize the general patterns of income and access to services in a large number of developing cities, with an emphasis on an extensive, high-resolution analysis of the urban areas of Brazil and South Africa. We use detailed census data to construct sustainable development indices in hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods and show that their statistics are scale-dependent and point to the critical role of large cities in creating higher average incomes and greater access to services within their national context. We then quantify the general statistical trajectory toward universal basic service provision at different scales to show that it is characterized by varying levels of inequality, with initial increases in access being typically accompanied by growing disparities over characteristic spatial scales. These results demonstrate how extensions of these methods to other goals and data can be used over time and space to produce a simple but general quantitative assessment of progress toward internationally agreed sustainable development goals.

neighborhoods <http://www.pnas.org/search?fulltext=neighborhoods&sortspec=date&submit=Submit&andorexactfulltext=phrase> slums <http://www.pnas.org/search?fulltext=slums&sortspec=date&submit=Submit&andorexactfulltext=phrase> urban services <http://www.pnas.org/search?fulltext=urban+services&sortspec=date&submit=Submit&andorexactfulltext=phrase> spatial correlations <http://www.pnas.org/search?fulltext=spatial+correlations&sortspec=date&submit=Submit&andorexactfulltext=phrase> inequality <http://www.pnas.org/search?fulltext=inequality&sortspec=date&submit=Submit&andorexactfulltext=phrase>


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“The individual scientist can survive for a long time by lying low in the valley of specialized intellectual interest ... We in science must get up and face the wind, confront the future.” 

William Bevan, “The Sound of the Wind That’s Blowing.”

American Psychologist. July 1976

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