Unmaking Cities Can Catalyse Sustainable Transformations

Why urban innovation is not enough to create sustainable cities

Andrew Karvonen (Lund University) explains why innovation has limitations for achieving systemic change. What is also needed is a process of unmaking (i.e. phasing out existing harmful technologies, processes and practices) whilst ensuring inequalities, vulnerabilities and economic hazards are avoided. Researchers have an important role to identify what needs dismantling, identify advantageous and negative impacts and work with stakeholders and local governments.

Contemporary cities are in the grip of an ‘innovation imperative’ (Batty 2018, McGuirk et al. 2022). Urban stakeholders from the public, private, and third sectors as well as civil society are developing and implementing a wide range of novel solutions to make cities fit for purpose in the 21^st century (Angelo & Wachsmuth 2020, Montero 2020). The discursive power of innovation is evident in current agendas such as smart cities, nature-based solutions, 15-minute cities, and circular urban economies that include seductive visions and strategies to demonstrate how cities can be reinvented to be more sustainable, just, and liveable.

However, it is not clear that urban innovation is sufficient to resolve our current ecological, social, and economic crises. Introducing a new smart energy grid or a local food sharing programme can have significant but selective impacts and rarely results in widespread changes in cities. The limitations of innovation have been documented in urban experiments, laboratories, testbeds, and related forms of situated innovation where substantive changes have been realised within the prescribed space of action while the learnings are rarely upscaled or amplified to catalyse widespread impacts (Peng et al. 2019). In other words, there is a persistent mismatch between the promise of urban innovation and the need for deep urban transformations.

Proponents of urban innovation often assume that the introduction of new structures, processes, and norms will automatically crowd out and supercede existing conditions. However, evidence on the ground suggests that unsustainable features are deeply embedded in the physical and cognitive fabric of 21^st century cities. Even after significant disruptions (e.g. COVID-19, earthquakes, economic collapse), cities have been able to bounce back and return to ‘business as usual’ (Florida et al. 2023). Innovations tend to be layered on top of the existing urban fabric while allowing existing infrastructures, institutions, and ideologies to operate in the background. This suggests that we cannot simply innovate our way out of the current unsustainable conditions, something more is needed to transform our cities.

A small group of scholars from Sustainable Transitions and related fields have considered the limited ability of innovations to achieve broader systemic changes. To address this, they argue that innovations need to be complemented with the purposive removal of old systems, structures, and practices. They have developed concepts variously labelled as destabilisation, phasing out, exnovation and deliberate decline that serve as the flipside of innovation (Koretsky et al. 2022, Turnheim 2023). Collectively, these ‘unmaking’ processes involve the systematic dismantling of outdated discursive, material and organisational elements to provide opportunities for innovations to take root and propagate. They draw upon Joseph Schumpeter’s famous notion of ‘creative destruction’ while placing a particular emphasis on the importance of purposive destruction processes (Kivimaa and Kern 2016).

There are multiple well-known examples of phasing out harmful technologies, substances, and processes beginning in the 1970s with CFCs, DDT, nuclear power, and continuing today with incandescent lightbulbs and coal-fired power plants. These actions were often implemented at the national and transnational scales through a combination of immediate bans and gradual phaseouts over several years or even decades (Trencher et al. 2022). Today, these unmaking processes are being applied to urban change processes to support degrowth, decarbonisation, net zero emissions, post-capitalist economies, and other agendas. A growing number of local governments are partnering with local stakeholders to develop and implement regulations, programmes, physical changes and information campaigns to reduce carbon emissions, automobile use, resource consumption, environmental pollution and other unsustainable urban processes. In the transportation sector, this involves the removal of on-street parking, restrictions on fossil-free vehicle use in city centres, and the conversion of vehicle lanes for other purposes (Graaf et al. 2021, Wetzchewald 2023). With respect to energy provision, new regulations are being used to prevent new connections to natural gas networks (Akerbloom 2024) and local governments are weakening the influence of dominant electricity service providers (Matschoss and Heiskanen 2018). And in the agrifood sector, stakeholders are using information campaigns to question the existing social norms about meat-based diets and the overreliance on global food chains (Mattioni et al. 2022).

Devising and implementing unmaking processes is difficult because proponents need to confront the narrative of progress that underpinned the rise of the modern city and continues to fuel urban innovation activities. The subtractive logic of unmaking is sometimes interpreted as an unwelcome return to pre-modern times, an assault on personal choice and freedoms, and an appeal for involuntary personal sacrifice and the acceptance of an impoverished future. The recent populist critiques of the 15-minute city are a vivid example of the political implications of disrupting incumbent structures and processes (Caprotti et al. 2024). On the other hand, unmaking cities can be framed as a corrective agenda to address the outdated and harmful practices that continue to dominate contemporary cities. This is akin to a ‘spring cleaning’ of cities to sweep out the old and provide a tabula rasa to construct new pathways of urban development.

To support urban unmaking processes, researchers and practitioners need to identify those infrastructures, institutions, and imaginaries that need to be dismantled and then develop processes to achieve this without exacerbating existing social inequalities, economic precarities, and environmental vulnerabilities. This is a tall order given the inherently entangled character of cities. For instance, disrupting automobile use would go a long way towards achieving multiple sustainability goals. However, there are multiple vested interests who actively work to uphold this sociotechnical system while blocking or slowing any proposed changes (van Oers et al. 2021). At the same time, automobiles provide multiple benefits related to speed, convenience, and accessibility and there are many individuals and groups whose livelihoods are dependent upon this form of transportation with no viable alternatives.

The unmaking of cities holds significant promise to accelerate and deepen innovation processes by removing existing systems, structures, and processes that impede the realisation of more sustainable futures. As Wanvik and Haarstad (2021: 2108) conclude, ’transformation is the process of not only becoming (what we want to sustain) but also unbecoming (what we want to dismantle).’ The unmaking processes that are emerging in various cities around the world provide inspiration and the practical means to destabilise those path dependent systems and practices that continue to support unsustainable conditions. Local governments are the most obvious group to lead unmaking processes because they have the necessary regulatory authority and legitimacy to invoke changes on behalf of the general public. However, they need insights and support from a wide range of urban stakeholders to diagnose and address the advantages and disadvantages of specific unmaking actions and to identify the intended and unintended impacts on different stakeholders. Collectively, the tandem dynamic of destabilisation and innovation could emerge as the foundation for a new mode of urban governance that simultaneously leverages destruction and creation to catalyse sustainable urban transformations.

References

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