John Batten, Global Cities Director
The 2018 edition of Arcadis’ Sustainable Cities Index (SCI) explores city sustainability from the perspective of the citizen. We seek to understand in more depth how different cities enable different citizen groups to meet their particular needs.
In many cities, citizens face huge challenges to meet their basic needs of survival, including shelter, access to food, water and warmth. Once these are met, the human need for community, managing society and moving from "A to B" take on far greater importance. Cities are powerful engines that bring people together and allow for resource sharing to meet collective needs. Our study highlights that emerging needs, such as digital connectivity, are being addressed in cities at all levels of sustainability.
A critical point is that human needs are fundamentally hierarchical in nature. And if certain needs are not met, for example if housing is too expensive, then dissatisfaction will follow. The SCI and other studies show that even highly developed cities can struggle to meet the basic needs of their citizens. As a result, the level of peoples' satisfaction associated with their purpose or well-being are undermined. Viewed from a citizen's perspective, a city that is highly ranked as sustainable but with elevated levels of congestion not meeting accessibility needs, is not truly sustainable.
This points to a series of core challenges for all cities that influence not only how they seek to improve their performance, but also how they prepare for a digitally-driven transformation. It is important to look at how cities maintain services at current levels of performance as they evolve, specifically if they use innovation to ensure that currently recognized needs and wants are met. Second, how they allocate new resources to meet changing citizen requirements - prioritizing initiatives to ensure that the greatest benefits are delivered. Finally, how do cities ensure that they are fit for the future - preserving resources so that the needs of tomorrow's citizens can be met as well as responding to changes in business models and economic circumstances.
In the 2018 edition of the SCI, we continue our exploration of the People, Profit and Planet dimensions of city sustainability, building a greater understanding of the underlying characteristics of cities that enable some to outperform their peers.
