City-Level Decoupling-Full Report

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

7.4 Accounting for wider

intermediaries involved in effectively organising resource flows through infrastructure and mobility networks. Central to this is the need to understand the particular urban dynamics of resource flows – the key drivers, the distributional inequalities, different access, tensions and pinch points and ecological consequences of flows. This provides the analytical context in which city leaders can combine an understanding of the relations between projects or sets of experimental projects with an understanding of how existing infrastructure regimes need to be reshaped to overcome outdated approaches that may hamper decoupling. Accelerating the wider application of decoupling can follow two main pathways. The first is the development of experimental projects that teach lessons that can then be incorporated into the development of further projects. This requires sufficient flexibility within the existing infrastructure regime to accept, even encourage, innovations. For example, the Barking Riverside development within the wider Thames Gateway development in outer London envisages 10,800 new homes with significant sustainability commitments. As one of the largest housing projects in the UK, it is clearly experimental and high impact. While the learning that will be generated from such a project will be important, its replication will require that the wider urban system is managed in a way that allows such developments to take place. Another example is the self-built housing project described in the Malawi case which was allowed by authorities simply because no alternative was available; this ground-breaking experiment could help inform future urban planning when economic conditions improve, if it is allowed to do so. The second pathway concerns how social learning from niches and experiments can be applied at the urban scale and used to reshape the existing infrastructure regime – often located at other governmental and governance levels – in order to reshape the regime to accelerate the development

benefits and contextual appropriateness in evaluations of success

The case studies show how a wide range of criteria, including equity, justice, employment, and accessibility, shape the wider social visions and expectations underpinning the initiatives. Contextual features and locally contingent drivers reshape generic landscape pressures and drivers, such as the economic crisis, climate change, and energy security. Analysing how locally based intermediaries re-interpret these pressures and make them relevant in specific local contexts according to particular issues, problems and opportunities is key to understanding the ways in which resource flows become amenable to social intervention even if the overall environmental impacts are relatively modest. Three issues are central to an understanding of the potential of managed urban transitions. First, resource flows need to be related to local context so that opportunities can be found for reshaping flows that may be driven by other economic, social and local agendas. Second, these opportunities provide test-beds for designing, demonstrating and testing experiments in re-orienting resource flows that produce positive social benefits - despite the sometimes marginal environmental benefits. Third, in the longer term, intermediaries can learn from their experience and involvement in multiple projects about the success of different types of intermediation, and accelerate these to achieve more significant environmental impacts. 7.5 How decoupling in cities can be assessed and accelerated in the future The case studies have indicated the types of urban framework required to link material flows to a socio-technical understanding of the institutions, producers, users and

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