City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

circulated ideas that have begun to be put in practice, with learnings that loop back into networks that the next generation of innovators will benefit from. To this extent they are the 'writing on the wall' – the portents of future trends embedded within the constraints of existing socio-technical systems. However, the case studies are also fundamentally limited. Due to the absence of relevant documented evidence they are not written in a way that directly demonstrates in quantitative terms the link between infrastructure change and more sustainable resource flows through cities/ urban systems. The case studies are descriptive overviews that confirm that there are many examples of initiatives aimed at managing resources more sustainably (e.g. water, solid waste) or at minimising environmental damage (e.g. primarily by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions). It is going to take some time to train enough researchers (especially in the developing world) to master the tools of material flow analysis so that more case studies can be compiled that relate directly to the core argument of this report. Unfortunately, it was not possible to cover all urban-related issues in-depth in this report. The rural-urban nexus with respect to a wide range of resource flows into cities that originate in rural areas, such as biomass, water, energy, building materials, industrial minerals and metals will not be addressed here. This is a subject for further research, but it is logical to assume that when cities make more efficient use of the resources they require from outside their boundaries, their pressures on the various sources and sinks will be reduced.

broadly understanding infrastructural transition typologies, and distinguishing between newly built and retrofitted infrastructures, as well as between specific infrastructure networks and more integrated cross-network changes toward urban sustainability. The four transition types are analysed and compared, drawing on examples from the case studies in the Annex of the report. These insights are used to formulate a set of considerations for assessing progress toward urban decoupling, and lead into conclusions and recommendations as to how decoupling can be encouraged. The Annex presents a set of 30 case studies that support the perspectives presented in the report. These cases were selected to showcase innovative and visionary approaches to sustainable infrastructure change across a broad range of contexts, and are intended to demonstrate the abundance of options available that could inspire leaders of other cities to embrace creative solutions. While the approaches adopted in the case studies are not necessarily recommended for implementation in other contexts, they can be used to inspire new thinking about infrastructural solutions that leverage existing strengths and resources to address social and environmental needs in an innovative manner. Furthermore, due to the fact that quite a few of these cases have not been properly documented, not all the case studies are based on independently verified information. When read together, the case studies may not in and of themselves amount to much from a quantitative perspective. Nevertheless, their significance lies in the fact that they are concrete expressions of widely

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