Search online for “The world’s most inclusive cities” and you will get a list that looks something this: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Montreal, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore, Seoul and Auckland. Keep scrolling and you’ll spot a few US cities, including Washington, DC; Seattle; and Boston.
While the criteria used and individual cities’ rankings change from survey to survey, the same names appear consistently. What cities don’t appear on these lists? Those in Asia and Africa, where the UN projects that 90% of the world’s population growth will occur through 2050 – an increase of 2.25 billion people. These are also the same areas where one-third of all urban residents already live in slums – a massive challenge for local and national governments to tackle in tandem with inclusivity.
As a result, inclusivity advocates fear that in the areas where population growth will be greatest, the need to provide housing will leave social and economic facets of inclusivity untouched – creating challenges that will be much more difficult and expensive to retrofit in the future.
What is an inclusive city?
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) offers one of the most comprehensive definitions of an inclusive city, describing it as “a safe, livable environment with affordable and equitable access to urban services, social services, and livelihood opportunities for all city residents and other city users.” The goal of an inclusive city, the ADB says, is to “promote optimal development of its human capital and ensure the respect of human dignity and equality.”
The World Bank elaborates on the concept, explaining that inclusive cities involve “a complex web of spatial, social and economic factors”:
Inclusive city characteristics:
1. Spatial: Residents should be able to access affordable housing, water and sanitation. The urban poor should not be relegated to unsafe land, such as abandoned landfills and flood-prone areas. If everything they need – including work – is not available within a 15-minute walk or bike ride, they must have ready access to affordable, reliable and safe public transportation.
2. Social: All marginalized groups, including women, immigrants, indigenous people, those with disabilities and the elderly, should be actively engaged and included in planning decisions to ensure that cities meet their needs. Crime and violence must be minimized, and successes from other cities should be replicated in the developing world.
3. Economic: All citizens must have easy connections to jobs, housing, public transport, recreation, culture, green areas, shopping and more. As the population grows, job creation is essential, and skill building that helps citizens gain and advance in jobs creates new opportunities for marginalized populations.
Traditionally, the World Bank observes, cities have focused primarily on spatial challenges, with programs such as affordable housing projects and bus networks. However, these projects are often conceived without input from the people they are supposed to help. Without sufficient understanding of where and how services should be provided, and absent job training and fair wages, such programs are doomed to fail.
To create truly inclusive cities, the World Bank says, government officials and city planners must ensure that all three pillars – spatial, social and economic – are addressed in an integrated, comprehensive way. Doing so is critical to meeting at least five of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals: providing decent work and economic growth; supplying clean water and sanitation; addressing industry, innovation and infrastructure; reducing inequalities; and creating sustainable communities. Achieving these goals will help in achieving others, such as ending poverty and hunger.
One way to design a more inclusive city is through the power of virtual twins, which we will explore by visiting cities that are striving to do exactly that.
Inclusive city design and planning in the developed world
Even the world’s most inclusive cities are far from perfect. Adding new functionality to existing infrastructure – widening sidewalks to accommodate walkers and strollers, adjusting crossing signals to give the elderly sufficient time to cross streets, creating bike lanes protected from automobile traffic, providing navigation cues for pedestrians, and making amenities and services readily available to all – is a difficult business. This is especially true where cities must transcend barriers specifically built to segregate low-income and minority populations.
New York City’s troublesome past
In New York City, planner Robert Moses laid the foundation for some of the city’s greatest features. However, an article by Active Sustainability also outlines how Moses drew the 1930s maps that spawned the term “red-lining”, because they signaled to bankers where not to invest by outlining minority and immigrant communities with red ink. He also designed several overpasses for the Long Island Expressway that were too low for buses, keeping affluent Long Island and its beaches “off-limits to the poor and people of color, those who mostly used public transport.”
Rebecca Chau, a senior experience designer for design consulting firm Arup, uses Moses as an example of how most Western cities were designed by and for “the default male gaze” – affluent, able-bodied men who had no awareness of or interest in making cities work for those unlike themselves.
“It is not only women who are impacted [by their choices], but everyone who exists outside this narrow definition of normal,” Chau wrote. “It is women, children, the elderly, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, people of colour and many others who often must adapt themselves, their routines and ambitions to fit.”
For city planners to have any hope of understanding and providing for the wide variety of people who live in a city, she wrote, they must talk to and involve representatives of all special groups – not just the majority.
Boston’s inclusive bus system
Bias isn’t always behind bad planning decisions. Sometimes, cities make the mistake of building new amenities based on old patterns. Arup confronted this challenge in Boston, where bus routes simply duplicated the trolley lines that served the city in the early 1900s.
Today, 50 cities and towns make up the extensive area served by Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MTBA), which uses a complex mix of subways, ferries, light rail and bus routes to serve more than 700,000 riders daily. Each town is responsible for funding and decision-making for parts of the system that lie within its jurisdiction. As Arup observes: “The resulting piecemeal improvements create a patchwork of transit conditions that complicate region-wide planning.”
MBTA worked with Arup to resolve the patchwork in a more inclusive way, specifically for its bus routes. The agency didn’t want to just rationalize the bus system. It also wanted to revise the system in a way that made it more inclusive: first, by defining routes to ensure low-income communities had better access to jobs, education and essential services; and second, to reduce traffic, emissions and energy consumption by making the system so attractive and convenient that it could lure commuters away from their cars.
Arup has been a pioneer in building sophisticated 3D models of city systems to analyze and solve such challenges. Such models, known as digital twins or virtual twins, involve artificial intelligence (AI) and parametric modeling, a computer science that allows designers to test the results of multiple design variations without human bias and project how they will function as populations grow and change. Planners use data from past operations to project future ones and test different approaches to solving complex challenges to arrive at the best solution. It is an approach that requires massive computing power, a challenge solved by cloud computing.
Arup used parametric modeling to solve MBTA’s twin goals, creating a virtual twin that modeled 90 million true-to-life commuter trips, including trips that involved transfers between several types of transport. The model “refined potential routes according to trip distance and duration, connection to rapid transit, and the ability to connect residential and commercial areas, and prioritizing issues such as equity and access.” The result? A 25% increase in bus services, including new access for 115,000 residents of color and 40,000 low-income households. The new system will be phased in through 2028. And as conditions evolve, so will the virtual twin, enabling MBTA to continuously refine its system to meet changing needs.
Making Sydney’s Opera House inclusive
Renovating existing buildings to be inclusive is an equally daunting task – especially when the building is as globally iconic as the Sydney Opera House. Inclusivity became a priority long after the soaring glass and concrete building opened in 1973 –and wasn’t even a concept when design began in 1959. As a result, concert hall levels above Level 2 – home to the most desirable seats – could only be accessed by a series of steep concrete stairs.
When the opera house began a 10-year renovation in 2013, its leaders challenged Arup, which engineered the original building, to add elevators, providing ready access to the upper tiers of seating to patrons with limited mobility.
“Cutting through the building’s long-spanned concrete beams would be challenging without creating a new support system,” the engineers explained in a profile of the project. “Instead, we helped create a tunnel design through the Northern Foyer’s staircase to house the lift shafts, providing access to each level.” To maintain the building’s iconic harbor views, even when patrons are using the elevators, Arup enclosed them in glass shafts.
Projects like the Sydney Opera House renovation are prime examples of the power of virtual twins, Anne Asensio, vice president of design experience at Dassault Systémes, told design and engineering magazine Dezeen.
“This ability to visualize any given element in 3D – it could be an object, a service, a system or an entire city – and play with all the physical rules within the conformity of science is an incredible power,” Asensio said. “We can use [virtual twins to] demonstrate other ways of designing a city: leveraging the participative action of citizens through immersive co-design of the city on one hand and, on the side of professionals, redesigning buildings to be resilient to climate or extreme temperatures, or rebuilding after the learning of a simulated tsunami.”
Inclusive cities in the emerging world
While cities in developed nations struggle with enabling inclusivity in well-established infrastructures, those in the developing world face an even bigger challenge: how to address inclusivity when so many of their residents live in slums and shantytowns hand-built from scraps of found materials.
“While urbanization has been recognized as a powerful force in support of economic growth and poverty reduction, it is equally true that poverty is rapidly urbanizing as more and more people move from cities,” the World Bank states in its Inclusive Cities Approach Paper. “Furthermore, most of the increase in urban population is taking place in Africa and Asia, regions that are home to some of the poorest countries in the world. Service provision in urban areas has not kept up with rapid urbanization.”
The report goes on to state: “In cities of developing countries, the urban poor often settle on land exposed to natural and man-made hazards, such as garbage dumps and polluted sites, due to their proximity to opportunities for economic growth.” [ . . .] women may face discrimination within their household, within the labor market and in regard to services [ . . .] “Most of the marginalized population often ends up in low-paying or informal jobs that do not provide a dependable stream or income and are often characterized by precarious working conditions [ . . .] Additionally, unaffordable transit fares and disconnect from the public transportation network further suppresses access to economic opportunities.”
Rapid population growth is overwhelming decision-makers in these cities, making it difficult to gain attention or funding for inclusion efforts – even though addressing those issues today will be far less expensive and difficult than adding them later to infrastructure that will be built over the next 20 years.
Inclusive city projects in Asia
Even in the face of such challenges, cases of success exist in developing countries. Examples from the World Bank’s Inclusive Cities initiative include:
- Vietnam, where low-income areas in Ho Chi Minh City were often flooded. Coupled with an inadequate sanitation system, the flooding caused serious health and environmental risks. Rather than forcing residents from their makeshift homes, as so often happens in “urban renewal” projects, the Vietnam Urban Upgrading project focused on upgrading what existed, and gave voice to marginalized citizens. Households in the upgraded area received certificates of tenure for their homes, and an NGO microcredit program provided home-improvement and income-generation loans. In all, 7.5 million urban poor received upgraded water and sewerage connections, plus roads, lakes, canals and bridges designed to minimize the risk of flooding.
- Cameroon, where the Inclusive and Resilient Cities Development project is helping seven cities improve 650,000 residents’ access to infrastructure, services and economic opportunities. Based on input from local residents, the investments include roads, street lighting, water supply, community centers, economic programs for the cities’ youth, and pilot projects to improve pedestrian mobility.
Brazil’s inclusive cities’ pioneer
Worldwide, many city leaders are drawing inspiration from the legacy of Jaime Lerner, a Brazilian architect who brought inclusivity to his town of Curitiba, in the Brazilian state of Paraná. As the first director of the IPUCC (Institute of Urban Planning of Curitiba), and later as the town’s mayor, he pioneered inclusive urban planning in Brazil.
With a focus on reducing urban sprawl, Lerner’s Pilot Plan of Curitiba “created a green belt around the city in sixty areas reserved for parks, specifically areas subject to flooding. Half a century later, the whole city enjoys 16 parks, 14 forests and over 1,000 public green spaces, many of which are dedicated to celebrating the multicultural history of the country.”
Lerner protected the town’s green areas by clustering development along an extensive network of mass transit that came to be known as the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. Today, the BRT concept has spread around the globe, with 168 cities worldwide operating BRT lines that carry more than 31 million people per day.
To make access to the BRT more affordable, assist with education, provide food and clean up the city, Lerner created the “Green Exchange” program. It allowed low-income residents to trade trash and recyclable paper for public transport passes, student laptops and food. In just a few years, residents exchanged 11,000 tons of trash for 1 million bus passes.
In the 20 years ending in 1995, the economy of Curitiba increased 75% more than the GDP of Paribá and 48% more than the GDP of Brazil as a whole. Walking and cycling account for 42% of daily trips in the city, while public transport accounts for 28%, giving Curitiba one of the region’s lowest traffic fatality rates and better-than-average air quality.
Final thoughts
Making cities inclusive comes with difficult challenges in both the developed and the developing world. However, with the UN, World Bank and dozens of other global organizations focused on giving voice to those who have been excluded from planning their cities, metropolitan areas are actively sharing proven inclusivity strategies from pioneers like Jaime Lerner, with the support of enlightened design and engineering firms like Arup. Together, with the ability to simulate, test and refine how cities operate on virtual twins, the chances of a more inclusive future are looking up.
Related resources:
- What is a sustainable city? A circular economy and other emerging characteristics
- Climate-resilient infrastructure is putting people first all over the world
- Does your city use data for smart, sustainable planning?
- How is the private sector keeping your private data safe? Exploring the sovereign cloud and more