Enabling urban systems transformations: co-developing national and local strategies

(2023) 5:5 Webb et al. Urban Transformations https://doi.org/10.1186/s42854-023-00049-9 RESEARCH Urban Transformations Open Access Enabling urban systems transformations: co‑developing national and local strategies Robert Webb1* , Tayanah O’Donnell2, Kate Auty3, Xuemei Bai4, Guy Barnett5, Robert Costanza6, Jago Dodson7, Peter Newman8, Peter Newton9, Eleanor Robson10, Chris Ryan11 and Mark Stafford Smith12 *Correspondence: 1 Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions (ICEDS) and Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, HC Coombs Building, 9 Fellows Road, Acton, Canberra, ACT2601, Australia Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Abstract Transformative urban development is urgent to achieve future sustainable development and wellbeing. Transformation can benefit from shared and cumulative learning on strategies to guide urban development across local to national scales, while also reflecting the complex emergent nature of urban systems, and the need for contextspecific and place-based solutions. The article addresses this challenge, drawing on extensive transdisciplinary engagement and National Strategy co-development processes for Australia. This includes generation of two frameworks as boundary objects to assist such transdisciplinary strategy development. An ‘enabling urban systems transformation’ framework comprises four generic overarching transformation enablers and a set of necessary underpinning urban capacities. This also built cumulatively on other sustainability and urban transformation studies. A complementary ‘knowledge for urban systems transformation’ framework comprises key knowledge themes that can support an integrated systems approach to mission-focused urban transformations, such as decarbonising cities. The article provides insights on the transdisciplinary processes, urban systems frameworks, and scoping of key strategies that may help those developing transformation strategies from local to national scales. Science highlights • Transdisciplinary national urban strategy development is used to distil generic frameworks and strategy scopes with potential international application. • The frameworks also build on other published framings to support convergent, cumulative and transdisciplinary urban science. • The ‘enabling transformations’ and ‘urban knowledge’ frameworks include the perspective of those developing sustainable urban systems strategies. • The enabling framework also informs ‘National Urban Policy’ and ‘Knowledge and Innovation Hub’ strategies, and prevailing power imbalances. • The knowledge framework can help frame urban challenges, missions and knowledge programs. Policy and practice recommendations • An urban ‘transformation imperative’ and ‘strategic response’ can be co-developed from local to national scales. © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Webb et al. Urban Transformations (2023) 5:5 • Local initiative is crucial to drive urban strategies, but sustained national leadership with coherent policy across sectors and scales is also key. • Diversity in engagement participation and processes generates whole-of-urbansystems and local-to-national perspectives. • Urban solutions are context-specific but generic frameworks can help collaborative issue framing and responses. • Collaborative issue framing informed by generic frameworks can bring broader perspectives to context-specific and contested policy and practice issues. Keywords: Urban systems, Cities, Transdisciplinary, Transformation, Enablers, Cumulative knowledge, Learning, Power Introduction Well-managed urbanisation is increasingly critical to achieving national and global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN 2015). The percentage of the world’s population living in urban areas is projected to increase from 55 to 68% by 2050, adding 2.5 billion people to the urban population (UNDESA 2019). Urban outcomes significantly impact all 17 of the SDGs (UCLG 2016) and related global commitments on climate change (UNFCCC 2015 Paris Agreement), disaster risk reduction (UNDRR 2015 Sendai Framework) and biodiversity (UNCBD 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework), as well as social equity and many other urban issues (UN-Habitat 2016, 2020). Addressing such challenges concurrently and with increased urgency will require translation of SDGs to local scales (OECD 2020) and relatively rapid transformational changes to urban systems, processes and outcomes. Cities can be understood as complex and emergent social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) with the understanding that ‘social’ also includes cultural, economic and governance, ‘ecological’ includes climate and biophysical, and ‘technological’ includes engineered and built environment dimensions (Zhou et al. 2021; McPhearson et al. 2022). These are interconnected across sectors and scales (local to international), providing a challenge to siloed and spatially uncoordinated decision-making (Bai et al. 2016a). Given the diversity of local histories, cultures and contexts, specific urban solutions also need to be context-specific and place-based (Corburn 2009; Dixon and Tewdwr-Jones 2021), and guided by local communities’ shared visions and exploration of future pathways (Bai et al. 2016b; McPhearson et al. 2017; Hajer and Versteeg 2019). The complex, systemic and cross-scale nature of urban challenges means that transformative change requires both top-down (national/state) and bottom-up strategies (Ehnert et al. 2018; Romero-Lankao et al. 2018), with solution-oriented transdisciplinary engagement (McPhearson et al. 2022). A national urban systems transformation strategy, co-developed with local-to-national scale and cross-sector stakeholders, can therefore be an important step forward. Notwithstanding the multi-scale complexity and diversity there is also understandable interest in interdisciplinary convergence and cumulative knowledge-building in urban science (Ramaswami et al. 2018; Acuto et al. 2018; Bettencourt 2021; Zhou et al. 2021) and broader sustainability science (Irwin et al. 2018; Pauliuk 2020; Newig and Rose 2020). Th (...truncated)