City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

City-Level Decoupling: Urban resource flows and the governance of infrastructure transitions

shacks in Khayelitsha to subsidised housing in the Kuyasa settlement. Although they provided an improvement in living conditions, the houses were energy inefficient and costly to live in. Meeting the occupants' energy needs via conventional methods was difficult for the City of Cape Town due to financial, ecological and energy supply constraints. The Kuyasa project addressed this by providing low-cost, energy efficient services and insulation to individual low-income households to improve their inhabitants' quality of life in a manner compatible with the City’s commitment to reducing reliance on coal-fired electricity. At the same time, the project provided sustainable employment and skills development opportunities for the local community.

In Chennai, India, an acute water crisis in 2003- 2004 created pressures for the development of a more sustainable approach to water management in the city. Following the water crisis, in the neighbourhood of Thiruvanmiyur, in southern Chennai, the community-led Puduvellam (meaning 'New Water') initiative restored the defunct historic Marundeeswarar temple tank as a means of recharging groundwater. It also strengthened the essence of democracy by creating the foundations for partnerships between state, civil society and community actors, and across class and caste divides. Significant population growth and changing economic consumption patterns in recent decades in Curitiba, southern Brazil, have resulted in pressures on the city’s landfill due

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In Seoul, Republic of Korea, pressures from urbanisation and the frequent flooding of the polluted Cheonggyecheon River underpinned a project to demolish a highway and restore the river that once ran through the site. Objectives included recovering the flow of the river, reintroducing biodiversity into the area, creating a space where people and nature could interact, rehabilitating significant historical and cultural sites, creating a centre for business and finance, and uplifting the area while restoring

to mounting non-organic waste. Working with poor communities, the Curitiba government developed a low cost but effective waste recycling scheme, loosely translated as 'Garbage that is not Garbage' (Lixo que não é lixo). Similar trends have had an impact on other cities, for example in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. In Cape Town, South Africa, the government’s Reconstruction and Development Programme to house people relocated the poor from

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