The real crisis is about who has power. Every major challenge we face - housing, transport, the cost of living, climate breakdown, democratic exhaustion - has the same root cause: power has been concentrated upward and outward, away from everyday life. People are not disengaged because they are apathetic; they are disengaged because they have been locked out of meaningful control over what makes a good life. This is a democratic failure that goes deeper than electoral turnout. When democracy is reduced to a vote every few years and decisions about land, infrastructure, energy, and the future are made elsewhere, it has stopped working.

Our institutions reflect this dysfunction. First‑past‑the‑post systematically distorts political reality and silences millions of votes, as extensively documented by the Electoral Reform Society. An unelected second chamber appointed by patronage lacks democratic legitimacy, a point raised repeatedly by constitutional scholars and parliamentary committees. Meanwhile, extreme centralisation has stripped towns, cities, and regions of the power to shape their own futures, leaving them responsible for managing crisis without resources. The answer is not tinkering around the edges, but a democratic reset.

That reset would begin with proportional representation, a reform supported by nearly half of the UK population according to YouGov polling. It would mean abolishing the appointed second chamber and replacing it with a democratic institution rooted in rotating citizens’ assemblies, drawing on models already tested through Climate Assembly UK and analysed by the Institute for Government. These assemblies would be permanent, randomly selected, paid, and properly supported — not symbolic consultations, but bodies with real authority over long‑term decisions on climate, infrastructure, care, and land use. Democracy would cease to be something done to people and become something people actively participate in.

This democratic failure is also visible in our places. Towns and cities have been hollowed out and reshaped by property speculation, luxury consumption, and long commutes, all sold as progress. In reality, this model has produced congestion, pollution, inequality, and social decay while draining everyday life of meaning and control. The alternatives are not abstract or unrealistic. They are already being implemented in cities around the world through the idea of 15‑minute towns and cities, popularised by Carlos Moreno.

A 15‑minute city means homes, work, education, care, shops, and green space located close together. It requires frequent, affordable, publicly owned public transport, walking and cycling treated as core infrastructure, and streets designed for safety, access, and social life rather than traffic speed. Far from restricting freedom, evidence shows it expands choice and reduces forced travel.

This is not culture‑war provocation. It is about whether people can live decent lives without burning time, money, and carbon simply to exist. Delivering it means public ownership of rail and bus services, a process already underway through Great British Railways. It means major investment in cycling networks and safe streets, alongside a nationwide Vision Zero strategy — pioneered in Sweden and proven internationally — that treats road deaths as preventable.

Housing must also sit at the centre of any serious response. The problem is not a lack of units but a lack of secure, affordable homes. That means ending corporate land banking and taking land out of speculation through community land trusts. It means a mass programme of green social and self‑build housing, street‑by‑street retrofitting, rent controls, limits on second homes, and a clear rejection of housing as a financial asset rather than a social good.

Renewing democracy means tackling extreme wealth inequality. That requires serious debate about wealth taxation, land value taxation, and reform of inheritance loopholes, as explored by the independent Wealth Tax Commission at the LSE.

Revenues must flow directly into a national programme of renewal: care services, hospitals, schools, youth and play facilities, and local services hollowed out over decades. They should help fund universal basic income pilots, minimum free quotas for housing, energy, and transport, and dignified, welcoming facilities for migrants in communities across the UK.

Finally, the government must acknowledge that the climate and nature emergency demands system change. It cannot be addressed through nudges or targets while the economic model driving extraction remains intact. What is required is mass public investment, public and community ownership of energy, and a deliberate shift towards an economy organised around care, repair, and sufficiency. That means replacing GDP with frameworks like Doughnut Economics, now being tested by cities and governments worldwide and developed by the Doughnut Economics Action Lab.

The choice facing politics is no longer between moderation and radicalism. It is whether to commit to redistributing power, democratising ownership, and rebuilding the infrastructures of everyday life.

PCPs create a framework in which the council and community organisations co‑create, co‑manage and sometimes co‑own public assets. This represents a major shift from existing Community Asset Transfers (CATs), which typically only consider community involvement when an asset is surplus or difficult to sell. PCPs instead encourage a more proactive and collaborative mindset: involving communities early, aligning use of assets with citywide priorities, and unlocking forms of social and environmental value that simple disposal cannot achieve.

Our research highlights that a reliance on selling public land and buildings to fill budget gaps poses long-term risks to the city’s civic infrastructure. At the same time, Leeds is home to an array of community groups eager to contribute to climate action, food growing, wellbeing, nature recovery and inclusive neighbourhoods. PCPs provide a route for these groups to shape the places they care about, and a way for the council to support creativity and innovation even in a time of fiscal constraint.

To ground the model in real practice, we examined examples from across the UK. Plymouth Energy Community demonstrates how shared governance can create community-owned renewable energy schemes that cut emissions, address fuel poverty and reinvest profits locally. Northern Roots in Oldham shows how an ambitious eco‑park can combine biodiversity, skills development and green enterprise. Leeds itself has several emerging PCP‑style projects—from Cross Green Growing Together to Seacroft Forest Garden and the Imagine Leeds climate hub—that illustrate how unused or overlooked spaces can become valued community assets when collaborative models are embraced.

Across our conversations with third-sector organisations and council officers, several themes consistently came up. PCPs can relieve pressure on overstretched public budgets while ensuring assets remain in public stewardship. They can improve trust and communication between communities and the local state, helping residents feel a sense of ownership over the city’s future. And they unlock the skills, passions and lived experience of local people—something increasingly vital in tackling climate, health and social inequalities.

To help Leeds take steps toward this PCP model, our report sets out four core recommendations:

• Develop a meanwhile‑use approach for disused land and buildings. Create a clear route for civic and community groups to temporarily use vacant assets awaiting redevelopment or disposal, allowing social and environmental value to flourish during in-between periods.

• Standardise leases and licences across the Council Simplify and streamline partnership processes so that community groups face a clearer, quicker and more transparent route to working with Leeds City Council. We have already created a community facing guide that can be found here.

• Create a formal PCP framework Leeds City Council undertakes a consultation to assess the use and viability of longer-term PCPs, and ultimately develops a citywide policy that sets out what shared stewardship could look like.

• Trial PCPs through the Team Leeds approach Pilot the model using Leeds’ strong ecosystem of civic organisations and climate action groups, allowing learning, refinement and scaling.

Implemented together, these steps could help Leeds preserve its public estate, support community-led initiatives and build the collaborative infrastructure required for a resilient future. Ultimately, we hope our work encourages wider debate about the future of public assets in Leeds. PCPs offer more than a new management framework—they offer a chance to reimagine how councils and communities work together, strengthening the civic fabric of the city and supporting communities to thrive.

To cite this policy report, please reference: Berthet, M.A., Chatterton, P., Tatham, P., Brunk, R. (2025) Developing public-civic partnerships: A new model to support the Leeds Ambitions. Report no. 1, Policy Leeds, University of Leeds. https://doi.org/10.48785/100/410

I recently sat down with Hannah Kettle‑Pettavel for her WHAT in the World podcast. Listen to the full podcast here (36 mins)

What unfolded was an energising conversation about something I care deeply about: how we move through our cities, and how transport shapes every aspect of our daily lives. Hannah and I talked about bikes, buses, planes, and the wider systems that hold our cities together. Transport, I suggested, is really a “keystone issue”—change it, and you can change the social, economic, and environmental fabric of urban life.

What struck me during our conversation was how clearly transport connects with social justice. Mobility isn’t just about infrastructure or efficiency; it’s about who gets access to opportunities, who breathes clean air, and who gets to feel safe and supported as they move around their community. We talked about how shifting our transport systems can build healthier, fairer cities and support broader climate ambitions, including work linked to initiatives such as the University of Leeds Climate Plan.

Hannah’s podcast aims to bridge research and practice in sustainable travel, and it is a great space to explore issues together -how academic insights meet lived experience, policy change, and on‑the‑ground action. We touched on examples like emerging bus franchising plans and Vision Zero strategies that show how cities can boldly rethink mobility.

For me, the conversation was a reminder of why transport matters so much. When we get it right—prioritising people, communities, and wellbeing—we unlock the potential for cities that are not only more efficient but more compassionate, connected, and resilient. It was a pleasure to share these ideas with Hannah - give the podcast a listen and feel inspired about what’s possible when we start reimagining the way we travel.

The Lilac project Leeds

In my evidence paper, I emphasise that community‑led housing provides a powerful framework for shaping future UK New Towns. Drawing on my long‑standing research into urban sustainability and democratic urbanism, I argue that New Town development must move beyond conventional, speculative, market‑led approaches and instead embed ecological design, community ownership, and participatory governance at its foundation. In my view, models such as cooperatives, cohousing, Community Land Trusts, and self‑build initiatives demonstrate convincingly that places can be simultaneously low‑carbon, affordable, socially cohesive, and governed by the people who live in them. These approaches also generate wider co‑benefits linked to community energy, local food systems, shared mobility, and circular economies.

A central point I stress is that New Towns require a zero‑carbon placemaking approach. I argue that their success depends less on their geographic location and more on the deeper principles shaping their form and function. This means a decisive shift away from high‑carbon materials, car‑dependent layouts, and the separation of living, working, food production, and services. Instead, I advocate dense, well‑connected, mixed‑use and regenerative design principles, underpinned by ambitious building standards such as the Living Building Challenge. I highlight the importance of nature‑based solutions, passive building design, and distributed renewable energy systems owned at local or community scale. Drawing on examples from continental Europe and emerging UK practice, I underline how community‑owned energy systems can enhance resilience, reduce bills, and reinvest value locally.

I also stress the substantial design and architectural innovation emerging from collaborative housing projects internationally. Examples such as Vauban in Freiburg, BO1 in Malmö, BedZED in London, and our own Lilac project in Leeds show what becomes possible when residents are active shapers of place. These projects demonstrate how natural materials, shared spaces, car‑free environments, and socially rich public spaces can be embedded into neighbourhood design. I argue that custom and self‑build initiatives—common in several European countries—offer important lessons for diversifying supply, unlocking local skills, and enabling small builders and citizen groups to participate in high‑quality development.

A related concern I raise is the structural barrier created by concentrated land ownership and speculative land banking in the UK. I argue that unless New Towns tackle these issues directly, affordability and community benefit will remain out of reach. I therefore advocate a much stronger role for community landownership, cooperative tenure, and intermediate housing markets that de‑commodify land and lock affordability in place permanently. Community Land Trusts, community businesses, and mutual ownership models—already delivering results in the UK, US, and Europe—offer credible pathways for securing land for long‑term public benefit.

I also place strong emphasis on nature recovery and biodiversity enhancement as foundational rather than optional elements of New Town planning. Given the widespread degradation of ecological systems, I argue that New Towns must prioritise rewilding, permaculture, biophilic design, urban agriculture, and blue‑green infrastructure. I outline how food production, carbon sequestration, climate resilience, and biodiversity enhancement can be integrated into everyday urban form. In doing so, I highlight the need for biodiversity banks, rewilding strategies, strict nature‑based design codes, and training pathways that support ecological land management at scale.

In terms of governance, I argue that democratic participation must be structurally embedded in how New Towns are planned, delivered, and managed. Community‑led housing shows that when residents have meaningful power over decisions, places are more equitable, cohesive, and resilient. I therefore advocate mechanisms such as citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, live planning laboratories, and governance structures that elevate under‑represented groups. These tools, I believe, can help build accountability, foster innovation, and ensure New Towns reflect the needs and values of the people who will live in them.

Finally, I highlight the need for new delivery models underpinned by robust metrics and long‑term environmental accountability. I suggest the use of carbon budgets, Doughnut Economics, land value reform, and community‑controlled development processes to ensure New Towns meet social and ecological goals. I also draw attention to innovative initiatives such as We Can Make and WikiHouse, which show how legal, financial, and technical frameworks can be re‑engineered to place communities at the centre of housing delivery.

Overall, I argue that community‑led housing should be understood not as a niche alternative but as a catalyst for re‑imagining New Town development. Combining ecological design, affordability, participatory governance, and community ownership offers a viable and urgently needed pathway for responding to the intertwined challenges of climate breakdown, inequality, and the housing crisis.

Our article begins by outlining the foundations of the Doughnut model as developed by Kate Raworth. The Doughnut represents a “safe and just space for humanity” bounded by an ecological ceiling defined by planetary boundaries and a social foundation based on social minimum standards, often linked to the SDGs. The model has been widely taken up by municipalities and civil society groups, supported by the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL), which created the four‑lens “Portrait of Place” approach. This unpacks a locality’s relationship to global ecological processes, local ecosystems, global social impacts and local social conditions. Since 2020, the methodology has been used in cities such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Glasgow, Portland, Melbourne, Philadelphia and Sydney, along with Leeds, where we were closely involved (see our Leeds study here). The rapid uptake of the model constitutes a notable achievement in translating a heterodox economic concept into applied, place‑based governance.

Our paper situates itself within an emerging academic literature exploring Doughnut economics, but identifies an underdeveloped discussion concerning how the Portrait method intersects with the concepts of degrowth and decoloniality. For us, this is a significant oversight given the scale of the polycrisis, which demands forms of transformation that exceed the incremental or technocratic adjustments still characteristic of most policy responses. We note the growing recognition, in both academic and activist contexts, that deep‑rooted inequalities, extractive economic systems and historical power relations rooted in colonialism are central drivers of ecological breakdown and social injustice. Degrowth and decolonial approaches are presented as bodies of thought offering more radically transformative orientations that could meaningfully expand what the Doughnut model makes visible or thinkable.

We therefore first clarify how degrowth and decoloniality are approached conceptually. Degrowth is framed as a heterogeneous movement encompassing academic scholarship, grassroots experimentation and political mobilisation, but unified around the argument that economies oriented toward unending GDP expansion are incompatible with ecological limits and social justice. Degrowth perspectives foreground the structural impossibility of absolute, global decoupling of GDP from resource use at the required scale, and propose instead a voluntary, democratically planned reduction of energy and material throughput in wealthy economies. We aim not for austerity but for improved wellbeing through redistribution, reorientation of provisioning systems, collective sufficiency, reduced inequality, and diverse non‑market forms of organising. We highlight proposals associated with degrowth, such as universal basic services, work‑time reduction, progressive taxation, decommodified housing, community‑led enterprises and localised provisioning systems.

Decoloniality, by contrast, is rooted in anti‑colonial struggles and intellectual traditions that critique the ongoing legacies of colonial domination in shaping knowledge, power and material relations. Decolonial approaches emphasise that colonialism is not merely historical but persists through global political economy, racialised inequalities, and dominant epistemologies that marginalise Indigenous and subaltern perspectives. We highlight concepts such as Quijano’s “coloniality of power,” the racialised structuring of global capitalism, and the way climate and ecological vulnerabilities are produced through centuries of extractivism and dispossession. Decolonial thinking foregrounds the experiences of those subjected to racialisation, exploitation and marginalisation; challenges Eurocentric and technocratic framings of climate response; and calls for transformations that privilege non‑Western knowledges, more‑than‑human relations and global justice.

Having outlined these traditions, we discuss their relationship to the Doughnut model. Many scholars interpret Doughnut economics as aligned with post‑growth or even implicitly degrowth perspectives, especially given Raworth’s scepticism about green growth and absolute decoupling. However, Raworth’s “growth agnosticism” is presented as a pragmatic rhetorical strategy that avoids alienating mainstream audiences. Some critics see this as a limitation, as it avoids directly confronting the growth imperative; others interpret it as an entry point for broader systemic critique. Decoloniality, meanwhile, is much less explicitly embedded. Although DEAL’s guidance increasingly references colonial legacies, we argue that the Doughnut still largely reflects a Western epistemological framework—for example in its reliance on the SDGs and planetary boundaries, or its visual metaphor of the “doughnut.” We highlight emerging efforts to adapt the model in culturally specific ways, such as using a spiral in Māori contexts or a peace symbol in China.

The core of the article examines each of the four Doughnut lenses, reviewing existing Portraits and identifying how degrowth and decolonial approaches could deepen them. Let’s have a look at each in turn.

For the local‑social lens, which evaluates whether local residents are thriving across dimensions such as housing, health, education and equality, we note that most existing portraits rely heavily on SDG‑derived indicators and avoid overt references to degrowth or decoloniality. While understandable—given the desire to maintain broad stakeholder engagement—this risks reproducing assumptions about growth‑led wellbeing and ignoring the local manifestations of racialised or colonial power relations. Degrowth perspectives would shift the analysis from access‑based indicators (e.g., employment levels) toward assessing the quality, sufficiency and distribution of foundational goods and services, while questioning whether local economic strategies rely on extractive growth logics. Decolonial approaches would foreground experiences of racialised harm, structural inequalities and local expressions of coloniality—such as policing disparities, housing displacement, precarious labour markets, or the effects of migrants’ transnational climate vulnerabilities. We emphasise that such analyses could make visible uneven social harms previously obscured within the ostensibly neutral framework of SDG benchmarking.

The local‑ecological lens, which examines the state of local ecosystems and their capacity to support life, shows slightly more innovation across existing portraits, but remains limited by data availability and technocratic framings. Degrowth and decoloniality push this lens toward recognising multi‑species ethics, the intrinsic value of nature, and the historical logic of colonial domination embedded in practices of enclosure, extraction and ecological degradation. We argue for indicators that recognise uneven access to nature, the legal rights or personhood of ecosystems, and the centrality of Indigenous and community governance of land. We highlight practices such as rewilding, biomimicry, and nature‑based solutions not merely as technical interventions but as parts of a deeper rebalancing of human‑nature relations. The Sydney Doughnut Portrait’s centring of First Nations knowledge is a promising example.

For the global‑social lens, which assesses how a locality’s consumption patterns harm people elsewhere through supply chains, we note that this is the least developed lens across all existing portraits despite its conceptual importance. The dominant method relies on global footprinting techniques to downscale data on labour rights violations, forced labour, malnutrition, pollution exposures and other harms embedded in international trade flows. The Leeds portrait identified, for example, that over 21,000 child labourers were implicated in supply chains supporting the city’s consumption. While this lens clearly touches on issues central to degrowth and decoloniality—extractivism, global inequality, racialised exploitation—we argue that existing analyses stop short of addressing these structural drivers. Degrowth perspectives would challenge local dependence on globalised consumer supply chains, explore ways to reduce consumption, and identify compensatory mechanisms for global justice. Decolonial approaches would explicitly link present‑day supply chain harms to colonial histories and advocate for solidaristic mechanisms such as reparations, climate finance, global twinning, and internationalist coalitions. We highlight the Barcelona portrait as one of the few attempts to integrate decolonial analysis more systematically.

The global‑ecological lens, which evaluates a locality’s contribution to exceeding planetary boundaries, is the most empirically developed due to available data. Portraits consistently show severe overshoot across all boundaries, driven largely by affluent consumption. Degrowth and decolonial perspectives jointly emphasise that overshoot cannot be addressed without reducing material throughput in wealthy economies and acknowledging the historical roots of ecological crises in colonial extraction. We stress the unequal distribution of responsibility: for example, the Leeds portrait found that while average residents consumed five times the safe per‑capita carbon budget, the highest‑income group consumed eleven times more. Even the lowest‑income quintile exceeded safe limits threefold, illustrating the pervasive ecological intensity of life in high‑income contexts. We argue that this lens should directly inform local strategies for sufficiency‑based economies, redistribution, reduced luxury emissions, support for climate migrants, and deeper engagement with global solidarity networks.

In the conclusion, we emphasise that degrowth and decoloniality offer two main contributions to the evolution of the Doughnut Portrait method. First, they help reveal the interconnectedness of the four lenses, cautioning against treating degrowth as solely an economic issue or decoloniality as only a global one. Instead, both perspectives must permeate thinking across local and global, social and ecological domains. Second, they open debates about the political character of the Doughnut: whether it remains a broadly palatable tool for centrist or mainstream coalitions, or becomes a more explicitly radical instrument aligned with anti‑racist, anti‑capitalist or anti‑colonial agendas. Overall, we note that these orientations are not mutually exclusive: in practice, contexts may call for minimalist (broadly accessible) or maximalist (structurally transformative) uses, and both can coexist within the broader Doughnut ecosystem.

Overall, our article argues that the Doughnut model represents a valuable foundation for rethinking local futures amid the polycrisis, but that its potential will be enhanced by explicitly incorporating degrowth and decolonial insights. Doing so could help reorient place‑based strategies away from growth‑centred paradigms, bring structural inequalities and historical injustices into sharper focus, strengthen the global‑social and global‑ecological lenses, and reshape local governance to foreground wellbeing, sufficiency, multispecies flourishing and global justice. The most lasting contribution of integrating these approaches may be epistemic: decentring economic growth as the organising principle of local strategy, and cultivating broader imaginations of what economies could be beyond the dominant growth‑colonial mindset.

Spatial planning is no longer merely a technical activity; it has become a strategic intervention that shapes a city’s direction, rhythm, and values in the face of deepening social and ecological crises. In this conversation, we discuss the possibilities of this transformation with Paul Chatterton, who has made a significant impact on urban studies in recent years. Chatterton’s radical yet equally feasible proposals for rethinking cities offer a strong foundation for anyone seeking to approach planning from a new perspective today.

Paul Chatterton is a Professor in Urban Futures at the University of Leeds; an academic, writer and activist who questions traditional urban planning approaches and advocates for transformative systemic change. His work focuses on urgent crises surrounding cities, such as the climate crisis, social inequalities and ecological collapse. He adopts an approach that supports collaborative production and transformation processes, working with a wide range of people, from activists to policymakers, students to local communities and private sector representatives.

Over the past twenty years, he has been involved in numerous practical initiatives, ranging from anti-fossil fuel campaigns to the establishment of housing cooperatives and the organisation of climate camps. He has authored ten books and over fifty academic articles. Works such as Unlocking Sustainable Cities and How to Save the City not only offer a critical framework for the crises facing cities, but also propose concrete and actionable pathways for transformation.

Miray: I would like to start with your intellectual foundations. I came across Unlocking Sustainable Cities years ago, and the book has influenced both my professional and academic work. Your writings serve as a bridge between critical urban theory and practical, people-centred action. You bring together different practices for rethinking cities and strive to create a collective learning space from these experiences. So I would like to ask: What inspired you to start working in this field and, in particular, to write Unlocking Sustainable Cities and your more recent book, How to Save the City?

Paul Chatterton: My initial sources of inspiration came more from grassroots and local community movements. I was trying to learn about community-based management and self-organising practices; I was particularly thinking about how people could run their own affairs and manage their own lives in times of crisis. As an activist 20–30 years ago, this was what interested me most. At the same time, I was questioning the limits of the existing governance and economic systems. What could we do to achieve the transformation we desired? This led me to explore the relationship between the state and the economy, what kind of economy we wanted, and who was actually building this new society and economy. That was my starting point. I then followed many social movements in Argentina and Mexico. I spent time observing and volunteering in local communities, seeing how they built community-focused, independent structures in areas such as health, education and construction ( ).

When I returned to Britain, I encountered John Holloway’s “within-against-beyond” approach, as outlined in his book Change the State Without Taking Power. This framework acknowledges that existing institutions will not change completely in the short term, while also prompting us to consider ways of working within them, maintaining a critical distance, and creating alternative spaces for developing different models and practices. For me, this approach became an important starting point for how transformation might be possible. This threefold perspective also underpins my work on change.

Then I began to explore the question: where should we resist and where should we build alternatives? Therefore, in my book, I tried to highlight the negative aspects of our ways of life in cities through four or five key areas: housing, transport, nature, democracy and the economy. These are actually the areas that form the basis of our capacity to live well. So what should we stop? What should we resist? And then what should we create, strengthen and expand? Let’s take the issue of nature, for example. There are nature-destructive practices that view nature as a resource, approaching it as something independent of human welfare and freely consumable. Instead, how can we establish a structure that fosters a completely different relationship between humans and nature, one that prioritises a circular economy? How can we create a system where people position themselves in a completely different relationship with nature?

I was actually trying to get people to take the causes seriously and build solutions from there. Because one of the biggest problems is what we call the “knowledge-action gap.” The level of knowledge is very high, but our actions are very low. So how can we align these? Most of the time, we know how big the crisis is, but the solutions we produce do not match this seriousness. That’s why the book was actually a process of matching. If the challenge we face is truly as big as we say it is, then our solutions need to be of the same scale and seriousness. Similarly, I tried to explain that institutions, governance models and financing mechanisms also need to be reshaped in a way that is consistent with this challenge.

So what do serious solutions—what I call ‘emergency-style solutions’ in the second book—actually look like? We no longer have time for small, incremental, or narrowly focused solutions. We need transformative systemic change. This is a huge challenge for urban planners and practitioners: to start thinking about fundamentally changing the urban system.

Then the question arises: how does this transformation manifest in different areas? For me, housing is an important example. In Leeds, I developed a community project called the Lilac Housing Project, built using straw bale construction techniques. I also live in one of those houses. We built twenty straw bale houses and established a cooperative.

But the real question is: How can we scale up and spread these kinds of micro-projects? We have tremendous niche innovations at our disposal; so how do we transform these into system-level change? How do we change the financing, the institutions, the behavioural patterns, the ecosystems—in other words, all the elements of the system—and create a broader transformation?

This is what excites me most right now, because I see many people stuck with only micro-solutions; these cannot trigger large-scale system change. Moreover, we are often pushed towards limited, top-down interventions focused on consumer behaviour.

Miray: You chose to use a manifesto format for your first book. Why did you specifically choose this form, and do you think it works?

Paul: A manifesto is essentially a text based on political principles; it is political from the outset. In this respect, it sharply distinguishes itself from technocratic government reports or think tank documents, which often operate in disconnected fields and lack a political orientation. A manifesto forces us to think across systems; it positions us as holistic and integrated practitioners who must address complex and interconnected problems.

One reason I chose the manifesto form was that they serve as meeting points that bring communities together around debate. Manifestos are not an end in themselves; they are part of a journey designed to spark debate that triggers local change, provokes and disrupts familiar patterns. This is why I have received such positive feedback; because a manifesto allows you to put forward ideas that stretch to the furthest reaches of the horizon. While policy reports often confine you to the comfort zone of ‘what is currently possible’, a manifesto allows us to ask how we can rapidly advance towards an idea that seems like a goal for 20–30 years from now.

One of the fundamental functions of manifestos is that they enable collective production—that is, they create the necessary ground for discussion to produce solutions together with other stakeholders. This function is critical today because in many parts of the world, the political centre is no longer producing viable solutions; the resulting vacuum is increasingly being filled by populism. What we need is a revitalised social movement that can embrace radical yet feasible ideas that can genuinely improve life.

Miray: How do you approach the concept of strategy in your work?

Paul Chatterton: For me, strategy consists of a structure I call the “four spirals” in the book. It may sound a bit technical, but it actually refers to the four fundamental sectors that make up our society: the public sector, the private sector, the community sector, and the research sector. These four sectors have always come together in some way to produce change; there is constant communication between them. However, today, the way these four areas come together serves no purpose other than to reproduce the status quo. Therefore, the same actors need to form a completely different alliance that will break the status quo and aim to create a “new reality”.

Therefore, the public and private sectors must come together and declare: “We will no longer reproduce the existing order; we will use our resources and strategies to create a completely different reality.” This is because each contributes different and complementary elements to the process: the public sector has legal authority and policy-making power; the private sector can provide investment, employment and technical knowledge; the community sphere brings people, local resources and practical skills; and the research sector offers analytical insight and expertise. Therefore, all these actors need to sit at the same table with equal say.

Power relations need to be reorganised and all these actors need to be placed on an equal footing. Only then can they say, “We will not repeat the current order; we will do things differently now.” We can see small examples of this in some places around the world: in cities like Curitiba in Brazil, Bologna in Italy, or some cities in the Global South, we see these four areas coming together and saying, “We can do this, but we need to form a coalition that breaks away from the status quo.” I call this a “breakaway coalition,” meaning a coalition that breaks away from the existing order to forge a new path.

This cannot be achieved through the efforts of activists alone; the four sectors I mentioned must act together. This is precisely my strategy. In my second book, I present a ten-point plan containing radical ideas that such a breakaway coalition could implement.

Miray: What you’ve described makes me think that the strategic plans prepared by municipalities, the tools we use to transform, reproduce and shape urban spaces, have now evolved. Inspired by your work, I feel that the history of strategic planning is transforming into something else. For example, in Barcelona, these plans have moved beyond being mere documents and have become a kind of contract among stakeholders.

Do you think it is possible to transform planning processes, particularly for municipalities and the public sector, through your strategies and manifesto approach?

Paul Chatterton: The interesting thing is that the right people are not all in the right places; there is a fragmented structure. It’s as if we are a multi-headed hydra, with a few people in different places, but no truly critical mass in any one place. That’s why networking is so important.

Still, some elements are emerging. For example, the idea of ‘post-growth planning’ or ‘post-growth cities’ is gaining traction. Many cities are now asking, ‘What comes after growth?’ and experimenting with this.

Consequently, many people are exploring what the post-growth era means in practice using Kate Raworth’s “doughnut economy” approach. However, these are generally developed Western European cities. Take Geneva, Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Sydney, Bristol, Vancouver... They are all drawing up doughnut economy portraits and seeking answers to the question, “How can we operate within a safe and fair space for humanity?” This is wonderful. But you would expect such things from these cities; they are high-income places with strong social capital and established institutional structures. Yes, these cities can and will reduce their social and ecological impacts…

What really interests me, however, is a broader group: the rapidly growing cities of the Global South. For example, Accra in Ghana, Kinshasa, Lagos... The rapidly exploding cities of the majority world. Lima, Mexico City, wherever. How can we support coalitions in these cities that could disrupt the global colonial development model? Because what happens there affects us too, and this is not an abstract issue. The massive emissions and consumption practices emerging in the cities of the majority world will have devastating effects on everyone— ; just as the reverse is true. So for me, the issue is developing a global mindset.

So when Amsterdam says, “We’re going to take a very different path, we’re adopting the doughnut economics approach,” we have to ask: How much will this actually transform high consumption habits in Amsterdam? How much will it reduce how much people fly, how many frequent flyers there are? So, to me, what we need is to develop a global mindset about how we affect each other. To understand that we are all in the same boat and that problems arising in one place affect everyone. High consumption, high pollution, high carbon emissions, excessive fertiliser use... All of these become global issues that concern the entire planet, and we all have to deal with them. Therefore, one of the most important lessons to be learned is that global solidarity among people is essential for a radical agenda. Rather than sharing innovations related to economic growth, sharing lessons about how we affect each other is much more vital.

Miray: In Turkey, we were always taught to look at urban planning approaches in the West, but this never really worked. We try to imitate them, but our global position and our social and cultural tools are completely different. That’s why we always feel like we’re trying to innovate in a stifled environment. We are currently in a very serious political and economic crisis, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to get things moving, to produce, to imagine something new. Five or ten years ago, most of us were building networks and developing progressive ideas. Today, there is a collective depression, and even imagining something new has become difficult. What advice would you give to policymakers, innovators, and activists working in such a repressive and restrictive environment?

Paul Chatterton: This is a really important point. Because right now, there is a serious level of physical pressure and political violence that directly prevents new ideas from emerging. In such darker times, when we don’t feel very optimistic, I believe our role is to initiate and sustain as many ‘hope projects’ as we can. Because these are the seeds of the new era that will emerge in five or ten years’ time. You mentioned that fluctuation: a more optimistic period five years ago, a more pessimistic environment today... So now, when conditions change, what can we do to gain momentum for the next five to ten years? It could be creating a policy framework; it could be supporting activists; it could be protecting some land, setting aside some resources... It could be anything related to how we can protect the small powers we have. But at the same time, keeping ideas alive and growing within civil society is an integral part of this work.

So, how can we sustain things like your magazine, these kinds of ideas? Because there are periods when these ideas rise and fall. Our task is to keep these ideas alive. That way, when conditions become favourable again, these ideas will still exist and we can grow and strengthen them. Because people have a tendency to say, “I give up”; this is very understandable and normal up to a point. But what we need to do is institutionalise hope.

It is not enough just to hope; we need to create institutions that will sustain hope. That is, structures that institutionalise hope... These institutions can take many forms: policy documents, social centres, meeting places, gatherings... As long as we keep saying what we need , those ideas won’t disappear. They won’t become controversial or extreme. Because if we stop saying them, those in power will fill that void with their own discourse. That’s why the issue is being able to preserve hope even in the dark.

Miray: What was the most inspiring local action or transformation example for you?

Paul Chatterton: I think it might be what I saw years ago in Argentina, in the piquetero movement following the 2003 financial crisis. At that time, people began rebuilding the urban fabric with their own hands. By establishing social centres, running occupied factories, organising street protests... They used the void created by urban collapse to show that alternatives were possible. That was truly exciting.

In these moments of collapse and abandonment, how can we use what we have to truly demonstrate an alternative way of life? That is an extremely exciting question for me. To give a more recent example, I have just returned from Ghana, where I spent a week working with some community activists in Accra. The scale of the challenges there is completely different from the minority world in Europe: very high levels of pollution, widespread shanty towns, completely informal economies, problems accessing clean water...

But what really struck me were the lessons from Pan-African organising. Because I was hosted by Pan-Africanist youth organisations there. Their core message, the most critical message in terms of decolonisation, is this: they want to embark on a process of self-liberation. This means we must accompany them as “allies”. The key point here is to allow them to build their own power structures. This way, they can steer their own development journey.

And we, the “Westerners,” must truly let go of them, withdraw from their lands. Just as you said about Turkey or other places: People have the right to produce their own solutions to their own problems. We just need to eliminate the structural conditions that hinder this right, especially debt and unequal trade relations. One of the most important lessons to be learned about solidarity is to do our homework where we live, to see our impact on other parts of the world, and to say this: we must respect the right of people living in colonised parts of the world to determine their own future. They have the right to solve their own problems, and they can do so, provided we lift the burden from their shoulders, cancel their debts, and engage in a serious discussion about reparations. Because people want to produce their own solutions. They want to shape their own journeys. As long as we are the main obstacle to this, nothing will change.

Miray: I would like to share an example we are working on in Istanbul. There is a historic garden, Piyalepaşa Bostanı, which has been used with the same agricultural techniques for about 600 years. When the municipality wanted to turn it into a car park at one point, neighbourhood organisations, grassroots movements and cultural heritage groups protected the area.

Now, an alliance has been formed between the family working in this garden, neighbourhood organisations, and heritage institutions. In order for this area to continue agricultural production and also serve as a public space, an ecological learning area, and a place for collective production, a “joint management” model is being negotiated with the municipality, with the Istanbul City Council acting as a mediator. We have prepared guiding principles and are working to institutionalise this partnership. Such initiatives are becoming increasingly rare, but we are determined to sustain this example.

My question is this: How do you assess these small-scale, community-based co-management models? Do you think they can become meaningful strategic tools for transforming cities in such difficult political and economic conditions?

Paul Chatterton: It is crucial to show people that “this can be done.” This example is particularly valuable precisely because it does two things simultaneously. On the one hand, you are not just dealing with the food issue, but simultaneously with many issues such as food, housing, agriculture and sustainable living. So there is a multi-layered structure, and at the same time you are involving different stakeholders in the process. That is why it is a real system transformation project, and that is what is exciting about it.

It also rebalances power dynamics at the local level, as you make demands of the municipality and alter the power relationships there. This is precisely what such projects should do: shift the discussion from “managing public resources” to the concept of commons. Whether it’s food commons or life commons... It demonstrates that these can be managed by the community.

Because what local governments are doing right now is selling public assets. And as they are sold, nothing remains. Probably the same in Turkey, right? Constant selling, selling, selling... And this is happening at an incredible pace. When nothing is left, there is nothing left. In other words, all assets are gradually turning into private property controlled by only 1% of the population, who are not interested in social services that serve the public good. This is a serious problem. Because then we have no resources left to manage crises.

Miray: What path would you recommend to urban planners who want to do transformative work for the future?

Paul Chatterton: First of all, I think it starts like this: think big, start small, and start now. We need comprehensive discussions about the problems we are going through, yes, but often we get stuck in those discussions. Everything feels too heavy.

That’s why we need to experiment. Right now, without delay. Whether it’s taking ownership of a piece of land, designing a policy, or entering into dialogue with the council... We need to take action without hesitation. Start small and make a concrete intervention. Because people find hope in examples. When we have something to show, our social networks also grow stronger.

This is exactly what we need: Hope springs not from words, but from tangible examples. From things that make you say, “Look, someone tried it and found another way.”

That’s why the most critical thing for me is to establish a recurring cycle: try, learn, try again, learn again. And to do this without delay. Because we need thousands of small experiences. Some will develop, some won’t, but what matters is that these attempts are made.

I’m sitting in my straw bale house in Lilac Grove. It’s a cooperative. It’s a housing community of 20 houses. So they’re all made of straw bale. So 13 years ago a merry band of us got together and we thought, look, we want to, we want to live differently, we want to produce a different kind of housing to bring up our kids and have a most satisfying life. So we bought an old school site in for Leeds City Council that had just been knocked down, surplus requirements, and we contracted some builders. We were self-builders. We wanted to build our own houses. So we looked into new building methods. Ultimately, we built, took about four or five years to get them all together, and there’s three aspects to it. So it’s called LILAC. LILAC Grove. So LILAC is an acronym, as always a nice colour. It stands for Low Impact Living Affordable Community.

So the low impact bit is the straw. Our homes are made from naturally carbon-sequestering material: straw, timber and lime. The affordability bit is really exciting. We pegged the value of our houses to wages and not house prices. So they remain permanently affordable. So that’s a really exciting bit because in this age of housing crisis, right, where people can’t afford their housing, that’s a really exciting wow factor.

The development of the LILAC housing scheme also came with a unique funding model. It’s a model called a Mutual Home Ownership Society, or MHOS. Now it’s a little bit like home ownership, but just mutual home ownership. So what you do is you acquire the build cost of your home, so there’s no developer profit. So instantly it’s 20 or 30% cheaper because we built our own houses, right? And so we translate that debt into equity. Now each of those equity units, say for example in a house that’s £200,000 build cost and 200,000 equity shares, right? Now each of those equity shares, the value of it is linked to national wages and not house prices. So it goes up sustainably with your wage, but it doesn’t skyrocket up, so it becomes unaffordable.

But can these new ideas also be used on existing housing stock?

One of the big things is that we’re always being pushed into building new schemes, you know, like new housing developments. But actually we need to look at what’s in front of us in terms of existing housing stock. There’s going to be lots of dilapidated terraces and underused properties, especially in low income communities. Working with those low income communities to set up community-owned businesses and community land trusts so the residents themselves can be self-builders to regenerate those streets and neighbourhoods themselves, right? So investing in the people that are there, investing in the housing stock that’s there to create a circular economy, a new cycle of prosperity where you’re training people to regenerate houses. You could take a whole terrace, you could make one of them a library, you could make the end one a sauna if you want or a meeting space. You could make high-quality zero carbon living units. You could communalise the gardens and make an allotment. You could make a car park on one side so there’s space for kids to play. So the exciting thing is you could retrofit the most average street in Britain into like a whole laboratory of solutions for people.

We will compost the city centre, returning its massive resources to the subsoil of the community. The outer estates shall retain control of their resources.

City centres are engines of growth and prosperity, generating huge amounts of wealth and employment. They are full of shops, workplaces, cultural facilities and important government institutions. They certainly seem part of the solution, making life in Leeds more fulfilling. But they are also part of the problem. Let us explain. The more city centres suck in wealth, power and investment, the less is available in other parts of the city. Leeds city centre has grown so massively and successfully over the last twenty years that it has starved other areas of investment in comparison. Around the city centre, what we call the rim, is like another world. Even though it is only 10 minutes walk from the heart of the city, many communities there are disconnected, starved of investment, employment opportunities and vibrant institutions. The city centre is home to 29% of all the jobs in Leeds. There are many consequences to this. The most obvious is the unsustainable commuting patterns of thousands of people traveling, largely by car, to the city centre every day, and then back home again. The concentration of activities has made land prices rocket to such an extent that only large corporate firms can afford to buy or rent land. On the back of these astronomical land prices, developers build upwards, peppering the skyline with huge towers. City centres become the playgrounds for the rich and wealthy, with new developments featuring boutique shopping, hotels and corporate office space.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Like any good gardener will tell you, you can use what already exists to build something new. The city centre is for everyone, not just a wealthy corporate elite. These resources can be reused and recycled for the benefit of everyone. City centres are for the many, not the few. The banks, offices, empty building lots and yuppie flats should be returned to the people of Leeds and not just to be used to make a wealthy elite even wealthier. And rather than having one centre, Leeds needs many centres. Imagine a world where you worked near your home, where every high street, not just the city centre, was full of vibrant and interesting shops. Each centre should have its own government offices, cultural venues, cafes, workplaces and homes. With energy prices likely to get more scarce and expensive it’s inevitable that we are going to have to relocalise life anyway. Each neighborhood would be connected with first class, fast and affordable transport links. This will overcome the stigma of whether you live in the buzzing centre, or a deprived outer estate. It will be nothing more than the reinvigoration of community and democratic life across the whole city. Our city deserves nothing less.

Private banks shall become public seed banks. They will act as seed distribution and horticultural resource centres.

We all know the trouble we have had with banks. Obscene levels of speculation, obscure financial products, immoral commodity trading. Since the 1970s they have been deregulated and given a free hand to become filthy rich. This wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if they had recycled some of their profits back to ordinary people and institutions. Instead they have evaded taxes, built up huge fortunes, and paid out ludicrous wages and bonuses. When their chickens came home to roost in the financial crashes of 2007 and 2008, instead of punishing and regulating them for their irresponsible behaviour, the Government rushed to bail them out to the tune of £500 Billion, using tax payer’s money. Now we are in a situation where public services are being slashed to pay for the bailout of the thoroughly greedy and immoral banks. While ordinary people struggle to make ends meet, and frontline services suffer, the banks have gone back to business as usual, taking risks and paying themselves huge bonuses.

These are clearly not the kinds of banks we need. Instead, we will ensure that all banks cease speculation and money trading and instead deal in something much more useful and down to earth: seeds. Banks will become public seed banks. You will be able to pop down to Natwest for some sunflower seeds or HBOS for some courgette seeds. In addition, rather than a polite assistant trying to sell you a new mortgage or loan that you don’t need, there will be horticultural experts at hand giving advice on sowing seasons, companion planting and the latest broad bean recipe. Cash machines will even give out seeds after hours.

There will only be parks for people, not cars.

We probably don’t notice how car dependent we all are. In the UK around 85% of journeys are made by car and one quarter of all journeys are under two miles. More and more city space is taken up by roads. Over the last few decades, our cities have been carved up and dehumanised by roads and car parks. Leeds embraced this in the 1960s in its drive to become a motorway city, building sunken motorways and carparks in the sky. Slowly over the decades our cities have become so car dependent that it is very difficult to function without a car. Work, shopping and leisure have all been redesigned around the needs of the motorcar. This squeezes out space for people.

To balance things up, Plan B suggests that all car parks are demolished and replaced with public parks. All parking bays will be turned into herbaceous borders and vegetable plots. Cheap and frequent public transport, a well maintained cycle and walking infrastructure, free bikes and refreshment pitstops will flourish making the car almost redundant throughout the city. City streets will be places of pollution free and peaceful encounter.

The culture of consumption will be entirely replaced by the consumption of culture.

Leeds has been carpet bombed by big brand shopping. It is almost impossible to find something to do in the city centre which is not about spending. Almost every inch of space is dedicated to getting you to shop, shop, shop. The negative effects this all has are huge. Our high streets have been devastated by big corporate money. The number of local outlets will have dropped by nearly a third in the two decades to 2010. Shopping also makes us feel inadequate, that we have to constantly compete and keep up with others. It gets us into debt as we are constantly reminded that the only way to be a normal person is to max up to the limit on our credit cards. And it makes us forget that cities are not just about shopping. They are also places of debate, encounter and free leisure where we can become richer and fuller people, not by shopping but by talking to our fellow citizens.

So the ‘buy buy buy’ mentality will be replaced by a range of cultural activities. Primark will become a free public baths, and Argos will become an arena for kids entertainment. Shops will be handed over to small scale and local traders, each developing their own goods and fares in their workshops. Shops selling unnecessary consumer goods will be replaced by workshops repairing and making things that are of use to the people of the city. Leeds will see a cultural renaissance and jobs bonanza as all citizens, not just big developers and retailers, use their creativity and skills to make and trade and prosper.

We will remove all housing from the market. Homes will be provided co-operatively, on a ‘pay-as-you-live’ basis.

The single most important thing is in our lives is having a decent and affordable place to live. Over the last few decades housing has become a huge area of financial speculation. As a result, house prices have mushroomed, with the average house price to income ratio in the UK now standing at 4 to 1. Most people starting off in life can’t afford to get on the housing ladder, and publicly owned, social housing has been so squeezed and reduced that it is seen as an option for only the most poor and needy. This is one area that is too important to be left to the market.

Digital signs will be fitted to all new buildings displaying their true price and level of occupancy.

One of the most shocking aspects of living in a city like Leeds is finding out seeing the huge prices of new buildings that get constructed. Skyscrapers come with £100 million price tags and huge profits for the developers, while new hospitals and schools funded by under the private finance initiative cost far in excess of what they should due to huge consultant’s fees and interest repayments. The development boom in cities has led to huge profits for the development industry while it has delivered little in the way of socially useful infrastructure or local people. Most of what it has built has benefited the corporate and hospitality sectors, while schools, hospitals and community centres crumble.

The teenagers shall inherit the Corn Exchange.

The Corn Exchange is on of the best loved buildings in Leeds. It was a building of hustle and bustle at the centre of corn trading in previous centuries, full with hundreds of merchants noisily buying and selling. These days it is especially loved by the city’s teenagers. An assortment of goths and skaters used to gather on its steps every Saturday, chatting, meeting, eating, playing. But the security staff, police and building managers hated it. The kids just weren’t spending money. They were harangued and hassled until they had to leave, leaving the steps clean and tidy for those wanting to spend, spend, spend. Then the managers of the Corn Exchange decided to cancel everyone’s leases and rent it to one of the city’s booming restauranters, Anthony’s. The hustle and bustle of the individual shops, boutiques and craft stalls were replaced by the sterile clinking of the knives and forks of wanna be middle class diners eating over priced, global cuisine in the over-hyped must-east destination of the north’.

At birth, every child shall be given a fruit tree and the rights to one acre of common land.

Trees have many benefits. They bring beauty to our cities, they offer shade and they help cool urban areas, which is particularly important in the light of climate change. A recent study found that the presence of trees in cities actually increased consumer spending as shoppers were happier. Fruit trees are the best. If planted across the city, people could freely munch on apples, pears, plums, damsons for a good part of the year. There are in fact over 7,000 edible species of fruit and vegetable which can survive in this country. It makes you wonder why we mainly find apples form New Zealand or the USA in supermarkets. So at birth, under Plan B every child will receive a fruit tree and it will be planted, so when they grow up they can eat well and share the surplus with their friends.

There will a Jubilee. Leeds becomes the ‘City of Generosity’. Those whose debts are not their fault, shall have their debts cancelled. The history of inter-urban competition is reversed, cities will compete to cancel debts.

Across Britain debt is huge. Debt is now bigger than our salaries and for every £1 we earn, we borrow £1.02 on credit cards. Clearly something has to change. The idea of Jubilee is an old one. Every fifty years all debts would be wiped clean and all slaves set free.

Pollution by advertising will cease, with all existing billboards becoming public notice boards, art space or educational displays for out-of-home learning.

Advertising intrudes on every aspect and almost every moment of our lives. An average person sees 6,000 adverts a day. These adverts pollute our minds, encouraging us to buy things we didn’t even know we wanted. Huge companies now make vast profits selling advertising space on billboards.

There will be relaxing places to sit in the streets, that are not owned by coffee chains or bars.

City centre streets have been made into beautiful pedestrian streets over the last few years. But have you noticed there just aren’t enough seats to sit on? Many street cafés have emerged, but for the pleasure of sitting at these tables you have to buy something. Even the right to sit down freely in public is being taken away. Thousands of office workers every lunch time trying to get some fresh air away from work scurry around, unable to find a place to sit down and eat sandwiches.

True local governance by all citizens shall replace the accountants and asset managers of the current City Council. Conflicts are debated, transformed and resolved in public deliberation spaces, under talking trees and at city lunches in all neighbourhoods.

Something’s wrong at city hall. In Leeds there’s 99 councilors and 700,000 people – that’s one councilor for every 7000 people. Do you ever feel you don’t see your councilor much? Then you would be right! Many don’t even live in their ward. But even most of these 99 councilors don’t have much power in the city. Only a handful of super councilors make the real decisions along with overpaid officers who are more intent on balancing the books, selling off the public’s assets and making efficiency savings than running the city in the interests of the people.

Participatory councils shall decide the worth of jobs in Leeds, not bosses.

It always amazes us that those who seem to do the most important jobs in the city get paid the least, or at least don’t get paid enough. The nurses, the binmen, the school dinner ladies. On the other hand, city bankers, chief executives and fat cat bureaucrats walk away with the salaries contributing little to the real well being of the city.

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In the episode, I discuss themes from my book, Unlocking Sustainable Cities: A Manifesto for Real Change arguing against the isolating nature of contemporary cities and propose a transformative approach to urban sustainability through key systems like transport, energy, nature, and community, with an emphasis on creating a more compassionate and social city.

To do this, I argue for a radical shift in how we design and inhabit urban environments, asserting that in contrast to the isolation of the modern city we need to prioritize community and well-being over efficiency and economic growth.

My main argument centres around:

• A critique of Current Growth-based Urbanism: where the prevailing model of city development has led to fragmented, isolating environments where consumerism often takes precedence over genuine social connection.

• The Need for Compassion: advocating for building “compassionate cities” that prioritize the needs of vulnerable populations, enhancing social infrastructure, and a sense of collective responsibility.

• Transformative Urban Systems: I outline practical pathways for change across major urban systems like: Transport: Moving away from car dominance toward accessible public transport, cycling, and walkability to reconnect neighborhoods; Energy: Transitioning to localized, community-owned renewable energy systems; Nature: Integrating more green and blue spaces to improve well-being and biodiversity; Community: Emphasizing the design of physical spaces that facilitate interaction and collaboration, such as community hubs and shared spaces.

I end the podcast by exploring A Manifesto for Real Change which you can read here. It’s a call to action to move beyond superficial sustainability to implement systemic changes that foster a truly social and resilient urban future. Ultimately, creating a sustainable city is about creating a social city where people thrive together.

Thanks to Ambrose Gillick.

I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.

Extinction Rebellion also emerged as a citizen movement to raise the alarm on inaction given the scale of the global crisis. Finally, the UN IPCC’s report back in November 2018 highlighted the real lack of progress towards the internationally agreed 1.5° target. This gained wide popularity through its bold 2030 targets for GHG emissions reductions, translated into the idea that ‘we have 12 years to save the world’.

This novel ‘climate emergency’ framing amplifies the scientific and policy understandings on the causes and consequences we have known about for some time. It has become clear that global and local society needs to shift to an emergency footing to have a good chance of meeting the 1.5° Paris target in a fairly rapid timescale. Inaction will lead to a whole basket of increasingly severe negative impacts throughout this century including food shortages and crop failures, extreme weather events, mass migration, the spread of diseases, civil unrest, and disruption to energy and transport infrastructures.

Action will have to be rapid and transformative across a range of areas including transport, housing, food and diet, waste, industry, retail, planning, land use and education, creating annual GHG reductions in double digits and shifts in policy and activity patterns that are without historical precedent. This is a wake up call. Given the scale of task ahead, we cannot move fast enough. The intention of this document is to add much needed discussion and direction on this challenge of rapid city redesign.

Image Credit: James McKay

CITY CLIMATE EMERGENCY

This climate emergency is also a ‘city emergency’. Most of the world’s population will soon be urban. Cities are locked in to high energy throughputs, are responsible for about three-quarters of global GHGs and energy use, have ecological footprints larger than their city limits, and remain locked in to high-growth, high-consumption lifestyles.

In the context of growing awareness of the severity of climate breakdown, the central role cities play in this, and the lack of rapid action, municipalities around the world are declaring ‘climate Emergencies’. To date 40 municipalities in the UK have signed such a declaration. Worldwide around 50 million now live in cities that have declared emergencies. This is an exciting addition to city level action through, for example, the C40 Leadership Group and the Global Covenant of Mayors.

Tackling head-on the way we live in, manage and design cities makes sense in terms of responding to the climate emergency. Changing city life offers significant and immediate GHG reduction potentials. It also offers a range of co-benefits. City redesign can address long standing urban problems - poverty, segregation, planning blight, air quality, environmental degradation, land ownership, and citizen disengagement.

This discussion document is intended for all those who are interested in supporting city redesign in the face of the current climate emergency. It focuses on four action areas of a city roadmap that respond to the 1.5° GHG reduction challenge. Together, they represent ideas towards a Civic Plan for a Climate Emergency that can be used by policy makers, researchers, civic and business leaders alike to start to understand and take action on the scale and nature of the task.

THE 1.5° CITY DEFINITIONS & CHALLENGES

The overarching framing is how to redesign city life, infrastructures and institutions to meet the target set at the UN talks at Paris in 2015 - to hold global temperature rises to no more than 1.5° of global warming. The IPCC is clear that to meet this challenge it will require transformative and unfamiliar action. Global society has to reach zero GHG emissions by 2050. The task has to start immediately with year on year action working towards this zero end point. Delaying only makes our ability to reach zero carbon by 2050 even more difficult.

But we have much less idea what this means for cities, and especially the smaller neighbourhood scale. This is a significant challenge if declarations for a climate emergency are to be translated into meaningful civic action and public policy, that point to identifiable year on year targets and noticeable changes in daily practices. Exactly how much carbon, what changes, by when, by whom and how? These are the questions we need answers to, and where resources and insights are required.

The task is complicated on a number of levels.

First, the scale of the task requires system redesign. We have run out of options to keep on making adjustments. What is required is fundamental redesign of city systems such as food, energy, retail, local services, transport, housing and work. The requirements for change embedded in these sectors will often be unfamiliar to established city actors and officials. They will need broad cross sector teams to co-produce solutions.

The level of change required not only changes the scale and direction of particular city systems. It also changes how they function. So for example, there will not just simply be less journeys made by cars, or shorter food miles or business supply chains. As changes become deeper and widespread in the 2030s, city systems will start to functionally change. This difficult to understand from the current model of globally-connected high-growth city development. High growth targets, linear throughputs and extraction, will be replaced by a more localized, steady state and circular economy, and a focus on the type of development, resilience, well-being and quality of life.

Second, cities do not represent a level playing field. Cities with higher levels of GHG emissions need to act quicker and more boldly. Those with historically lower emissions, especially in the global south, are able to reduce their carbon use more gradually, especially to support zero carbon technologies and infrastructures, and converge around a common global average. While we have to achieve an average citizen carbon emission profile of around 3 tonnes of Co2 equivalent per person by 2030, what is clear is that many city dwellers across the world, mainly in the global south, already live below this. Many advanced northern cities and rapidly expanding global south ones, especially those with poor transport systems, urban sprawl, and rapidly expanding middle-classes, have emission profiles which if left unchecked commit the world to well over 3° of global warming. This is a rapid wake-up call that prompts a new purpose for city life in middle and high income countries.

Third, rapid GHG reductions have to go hand in hand with delivering a range of co-benefits, especially those associated with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and SDG Goal 11: ‘making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. Rapid city carbon transitions need to be based on a commitment to social equality in terms of outcomes and procedures, and rebalancing who has benefited from growth historically.

Fourth, confusions can emerge over definitions and timescales and these have important effects. Many cities declaring climate emergencies have set their sights on carbon neutral by 2030 targets. Others are using zero carbon targets and timescales with various dates between 2030 and 2050. Cities in the global north are usually ahead of the carbon reduction game compared to their host nations. Therefore, they potentially have the ability, base lines and leadership to create roadmaps that can get to zero carbon earlier than the 2050 target. But the important point is to avoid cherry picking timescales to make the task more or less easier. There are marginal differences between endpoints within a decade range. They all require immediate, far reaching and rapid action. Targets need to be meaningful not aspirational.

Whether targets refer to zero carbon or carbon neutral is important. Zero carbon concerns getting as close to zero emissions as possible, taking into consideration remaining residual emissions that cannot be eliminated easily. Negative emissions activities that actively sequester carbon emissions address this residual element, and these can come in various forms – but again we need to be wary of big tech geoengineering options compared to more localized, nature-based solutions which are more accountable and offer co-benefits.

In contrast, carbon neutral targets can open up unintentional easy wins and short cuts through emissions offsetting and trading, for example buying-in carbon savings from other locations or activities and delaying city-based changes. This is an understandable route given the difficult and unpopular changes that a zero carbon city roadmap entails. Cities adopting ‘carbon neutral’ targets need to watch for these issues and build towards real zero carbon changes detailed below, that also offer a host of co-benefits for citizens.

Fifth, the task is made more complex when Scope 3 emissions are considered. Scope 1 and 2 refer to direct GHG emissions and indirect electricity emissions that can be accounted for by activity in a given city. Scope 3 refer to other indirect emissions that result from consumer and travel activity outside city boundaries and outside the control of the city. In middle and high income cities with high consumption activities, Scope 3 can be sizeable. Air travel and the purchase of consumer goods and services from outside cities is huge. The growing levels of aviation use for business and leisure, big brand, fast fashion, and global corporate-led retail is of particular concern here. But cities are currently not required to account for them as part of target setting. This makes meeting zero carbon targets a more manageable task. It also allows a city to overlook and permit the unchecked growth of emissions from these activities, as well as the range of dis-benefits around debt, air pollution and the loss of local retail. At the moment, emissions from air travel and those from the flow of global goods are not clearly accounted for. Bringing them back onto a city balance sheet changes changes the nature and scale of the task. It focuses policy attention on localization and significantly restricting externally dependent consumer habits and aviation.

CITY CLIMATE EMERGENCY. FOUR ACTION AREAS

CITY ACTION 1. CREATE ZERO EMISSION CIVIC ENERGY

The first action area relates to the city energy system. Most cities are locked in to ageing centralised, corporate-controlled and externally dependent energy system unfit for the challenges ahead. Through their buildings, leisure, tourist and retail habits, transport, workplaces, producer and consumer services, cities are vast non-renewable energy users. Current city energy systems lock citizens into a brown energy commodity that is designed for profit rather than creating an energy commons that underpins a flourishing life for all. The negative results are localised pollution, increases in greenhouse gases, fuel poverty and high utility prices.

Beyond the low hanging fruit of energy efficiency gains and the introduction of low carbon technologies, the challenge is to embark on a large-scale shift to a city energy revolution based on an 100% municipally owned, green and affordable energy supply. Municipal energy companies modelled on the German Stadtwerke can generate from 100% renewable sources within a city-region and replace corporate energy provision. Innovation needs rapidly unleashing across distributed energy networks, district heating, local smart grids, community energy, zero emissions community-led developments, Combined Heat and Power (CHP), onshore wind, solar photovoltaics, anaerobic digestion, energy storage technologies, and the new skills that will underpin these. New planning regulations and mass retrofit programmes are needed to ensure every single building becomes zero carbon. This alone is no easy task, but needs to be a policy priority with its own city directorate.

A vast transfer of currently brown energy subsidies, taxation and legislative change underpins this. The new civic energy sector means the age of the large power plant is replaced with a constellation of distributed but highly connected small and medium zero emission and affordable energy providers. Every home, garden and street becomes a micro power station. The potential is huge. Part of the equation is also demand reduction as city life becomes more localised and less energy dependent. Civic action will also play a role in reinforcing the need for a moratorium on fossil fuel investments and extraction.

CITY ACTION 2. CREATE A CAR-LITE, SOCIALLY JUST MOBILITY PLAN

The second area of action is mobility - the urgent task of how and why we need to unpick city life from fossil-fuel automobile dependency. The rise of the private fossil fuel automobile has brought a basket of negative consequences; road deaths, air pollution, GHG emissions, geopolitical conflict, consumer debt, status anxiety, obesity, the decline of public street life.

In just over one hundred years, the car has seen a spectacular growth – from only a few thousand to over one billion. While ‘car culture’ feels entrenched, it’s history is so brief it can be reversed. But this requires action across culture, infrastructure, work, organisation, behaviour, finance, marketing, and politics. In particular, it requires vast shifts in subsidies to green and affordable mobility and planning decisions that prohibit all new private car based activity. Driverless cars may yield emissions gains. But they will not address the decline of public street life, status anxiety and debt.

Action in this area goes beyond addressing the technical issues of street redesign, and the low hanging fruit of options like bike lanes, and mass rapid transit; although these are essential first steps. Given the high levels of emissions tied up in transport, to meet 1.5 targets, cities need a radically different approach to mobility - to create a socially just, zero-carbon, city-owned mobility plan. This shifts mobility away from the car by eliminating the conditions that make cars necessary.

By 2030, half of all journeys will need to be taken by bus, bike or walking. All remaining vehicles will be EV. These kinds of ambitions involve comprehensively redesigning the automobile out of cities through the roll out of city-region mass transit linking all settlements with non-road mobility options, the implementation pro-walking, car free neighbourhood planning, micro-mobility options around e-Bikes, the reinstallation of integrated neighbourhood transport interchanges, the progressive closures of roads as other options come on stream, and the remunicipalisation of mobility ownership and regulation. The co-benefits of this mobility transition are huge in terms of air quality, road safety, local retail, health spending, journey times and costs, and a quality of life.

CITY ACTION 3. CREATE A NEW CITY ‘NATURE DEAL’

The air, water and land ecosystems that cities and their citizens depend upon are being intensely degraded, and resources are being rapidly depleted. Access to natural areas is restricted by urban sprawl, dereliction, retail, highways and industry where residents have little connection with the natural systems that underpin daily well being.

The challenge is to comprehensively get nature back at the heart of city development, to purify air, capture carbon, reverse species decline and offer wellbeing effects. Restorative and regenerative practices need to be central to urban policy and planning decisions. This includes approaches such as rewilding, permaculture, urban agriculture, continuous productive urban landscapes, and blue-green infrastructure. Natural systems need to be revalued not as a degradable, replaceable and free resources but playing key roles in create climate safe and resilient cities.

Biophilia is emerging as an urban design approach which can replicate the experiences of nature into cities in ways that reinforce the connection between people and nature. Biomimicry is also being used in cities to emulate the complex engineering and design principles found in the natural world in ways that can tackle climate breakdown, water stresses, air quality and biodiversity loss. Practical applications are readily applicable and need to be central to urban development through hybrid natural-city features through living walls, rooftop farms, vertical gardens, water-centric design and breathing buildings.

CITY ACTION 4. CREATE CITY COMMON-WEALTH

The contemporary city is marked by a growing gap between the haves and the have nots, a deep and lasting sense that for many urban residents, city development is not benefiting them. Civic democracy faces a perfect storm of budgetary cuts, increasingly complex problems and a legacy of silo working. All of this is eroding public confidence in the ability of municipalities to take effective action. City economies no longer attempt to distribute wealth and address income and social divisions. Instead, large capital enterprises are facilitated to extract wealth and privatise land and assets.

This challenge area involves significantly shifting the function and role of the city economy so it can support community wealth building activities. Retaining and recirculating city wealth at the neighbourhood level is an effective way to create capacity amongst cross-sector civic teams so they can co-create socially just, climate safe initiatives. Civil society is bursting with potential, initiatives and skills which are effective in responding to the climate crisis and building community resilience.

Examples include citizen housing, common ownership of assets, citizens forums, participatory budgets, local procurement through anchor institutions, tenant and renters unions, workers co-operatives, community-based and open-source digital manufacture, neighbourhood enterprise and maker spaces, crowd sourced city plans. New city wide institutions can retrain and reskill those in the construction industry to roll out a house by house retrofit and insulation programmes. Job to job transitions will be required to meet the task of zero carbon, socially-just city roadmaps. Trade Union partners will play a key role here.

Significantly, there will need to be large scale rezoning and reallocations in land use to support GHG removal activities and the mass shift to plant based diets. Planning frameworks will need to be redesigned around metrics linked to city carbon budgets and SDG indicators. Drawing on windfalls from changes in taxation and subsidies, the role of municipalities shifts towards enabling this civic wealth and climate resilience building.

MOVING FORWARD

Declaring a climate emergency at a city level is an important initial step in responding to current events. It sets a tone and sense of purpose. Its needs to be owned by a cross party coalition and multi-sector city partnerships. But the hard work starts after this. City leaders and citizens need to carefully understand the transformative and ‘step change’ nature of the changes needed in different areas of city life as explored above. Changes will be required that will be challenging, unfamiliar and far reaching.

To facilitate these, important missing pieces of the jigsaw include a common understanding of the challenges and solutions, enabling changes in daily practices, and broad participation and engagement with city residents. Two proposals emerge in this context.

A CLIMATE EMERGENCY HUB

A first step is creating a Climate Emergency Hub. Key to unlocking rapid and meaningful change in cities is a broad and comprehensive understanding of the challenges faced and the kinds of solutions that will work. While the urgent scientific and policy messages around the climate emergency are readily available, they are inconsistently understood and applied locally.

The Hub fills this gap. It initiates collaborative learning, peer-to-peer exchange, in-depth training, demonstration, information sharing and coproduction. It involves basic foundational training in key issues around the climate science of the 1.5° target as well as how these are translated into ‘step change’ city public policy choices. Playing a key role here will be community based knowledge about what works supported by expert research knowledge about the detail of the challenges and technical issues. City wide commissions or forums along with university and research partners will be vital in terms of creating a knowledge base, networking, linking and supporting.

Key to the work of the Hub will be understanding change that is both rapid and deep, but that also is economically feasible, socially fair and ‘brings people along’. It will focus on the positive vision for change and the co benefits that can be delivered. A key element will be sharing demonstration and replication, setting aside city land and assets to rapidly prototype, share and learn from emerging best practice. These kinds of hubs will have a bigger impact through a network of venues spread across a locality.

CLIMATE EMERGENCY CITIZENS ASSEMBLIES

In the context of an emergency, we need a new kind of civic politics. After declaring a climate emergency at a city scale, a second essential element is to reach out far and wide across diverse communities. While much is known about the technical issues of carbon reduction roadmaps, the challenge is engaging the hearts and minds of citizens, understanding, listening and empathising with fears and concerns, gathering ideas for positive action, and getting to grips with the kinds of changes in everyday practices that need to be made within institutions and neighbourhoods. This ultimately leads to the creation of a ‘Citizen Climate Emergency Plan’ and neighbourhood-based structures which can create ownership of the challenges and translate these into action on the ground.

A citizens assembly can be supported by online platforms such as those used during the West Midlands and Manchester mayoral elections

http://www.peoplesplangm.org.uk/

. The assembly would be formed from a broad spectrum of city voices. Established forms already exist such as the ‘Democracy Matters’ citizens assembly model. In this format a Citizens’ Assembly is a group of people brought together, broadly representing the diversity of the population, to deliberate on issues. The design of a Citizens’ Assembly provides an opportunity for a cross-section of the public to hear from experts and campaigners and to engage in considered, thoughtful and reasoned discussion of the issues, while calibrating action to the challenges. The end goal of the assembly is to work closely with the municipality, to make recommendations and play a scrutiny and oversight function, holding elected leaders to account on key milestones and deliverables.

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The above represents a brief introduction to key issues and action areas. The aim for municipalities in the wake of COP30 now is to act meaningful and set up mechanisms and processes to begin substantial debate and action planning on the first critical decade ahead. Clearly, there are limits to the powers and resource base of UK cities, and these limits needs to be addressed urgently. City plans need to be supported by national climate plans, with a commensurate transfer of resources and powers. There needs to be national alignment through favourable national primary legislation to fundamentally shift the allocation of subsidies, infrastructure planning and taxation.

From this needs to emerge a new positive vision for city and town life as they embark on a 1.5° zero carbon roadmap. Foundational to this is understanding, listening to and connecting with the real and everyday concerns that people have in the context of rapid change. Positive changes and co-benefits in well-being, mobility, homes and neighbourhoods, workplaces and finance need to be highlighted and celebrated. City leaders and citizens need to come together and jointly own the actions and benefits associated with the changes ahead. While this is a climate emergency, it has the potential to be deeply positive, addressing many of the stubborn problems that have plagued cities for generations. From hereon, every year counts. We need to think big, start small, but act now.

A pause has been forced on urban life. Quiet roads, empty skies, deserted high streets and parks, closed cinemas, cafés and museums – a break in the spending and work frenzy so familiar to us all. The reality of lockdown is making ghost towns of the places we once knew. Everything we know about our urban world has come to a shuddering halt. For now.

The lockdown will, at some point, end. Urban life will begin to hum again to the familiar rhythms of work, leisure and shopping. This will be a huge relief for us all. Yet our towns and cities will never be the same. Indeed, things might get worse before they get better.

But it’s also the case that other crises haven’t gone away. Our relatively brief lockdown won’t solve longer-term urban problems: dependence on fossil fuels, rising carbon emissions, poor air quality, dysfunctional housing markets, loss of biodiversity, divisions between the rich and the poor, low paid work. These are going to need our attention again.

The coronavirus crisis has offered a new perspective on these problems – and the limits of the way we have run our urban world over the last few decades. Cities are key nodes in our complex and highly connected global society, facilitating the rapid flow of people, goods and money, the rise of corporate wealth and the privatisation of land, assets and basic services. This has brought gains for some through foreign travel, an abundance of consumer products, inward investment and steady economic growth.

But we are now seeing a flip side to this globalised urban world. A densely connected world can quickly turn a localised disease into a pandemic; large areas of the economy are run by large corporates who don’t always meet basic public needs; land and resources can lie empty for years; and low paid workers in the informal or gig economy can be left exposed with little protection.

This model has the perfect conditions for creating a crisis like coronavirus. It’s also really bad at dealing with it. So something else is required to guide us into the future. The old story – in which cities compete against one another to improve their place in the global pecking order – was never great at meeting everyone’s needs. But now it’s looking very risky, given the need for increased cooperation and local resilience.

After coronavirus, a key question emerges: what in essence, is a city for? Is it to pursue growth, attract inward investment and compete against global rivals? Or is it to maximise quality of life for all, build local resilience and sustainability? These are not always mutually exclusive, but it’s a question of regaining balance. Beyond politics and ideology, most people simply want to be safe and healthy, especially faced by future threats, be they climate, weather or virus related.

Over the last 20 years as an urban geographer, I have been learning what needs to change to make cities more sustainable, green, fair and accessible. Recently, I described this in a book alongside a guide for civic leaders on how to tackle the climate emergency. Now, the lockdown has thrown us all into a real-time laboratory full of living examples of what a more sustainable future might look like. We have a perfect opportunity to study and explore which of these could be locked in to build sustainable, and safer, cities.

This has already started. Many things have become possible in the last few weeks. In many places, rapid changes have been unleashed to control the economy, health, transport and food. We are surrounded by fragments of progressive urban policy: eviction cancellations, nationalised services, free transport and healthcare, sick pay and wage guarantees. There is also a flourishing of community-based mutual aid networks as people volunteer to help the most vulnerable with daily tasks. Yesterday’s radical ideas are becoming today’s pragmatic choices.

We can learn a lot from these crisis-led innovations as we create more permanent urban policy choices to make life more pleasant and safer for all. Below I discuss a few key areas of city life that are currently providing some options.

Breaking car dependency

Many people around the world are currently surrounded by much quieter streets. This presents us with a huge opportunity to re-imagine and lock in a different kind of urban mobility. Some cities are already doing so: Milan, for example, has announced that it will turn 35km of streets over to cyclists and pedestrians after the crisis.

Streets with fewer cars have shown people what more liveable, walkable neighbourhoods would look like. When lockdown is over and society returns to the huge task of reducing transport emissions and improving air quality, we need to remember that lower car use quickly became the new normal. This is important. Reducing traffic levels, some say by up to 60% between now and 2030, may be key to avoiding dangerous levels of global warming.

As I have previously outlined, this reduction would address many longstanding urban policy concerns – the erosion of public space, debt, the shift to out of town retail centres and the decline of local high streets, road deaths and casualties, poor air quality and growing carbon emissions. Accessible, affordable, zero-carbon, public transport is key to supporting a less car dependent urban future.

This crisis has revealed the significant inequalities in people’s ability to move about cities. In many countries, including my own (the UK), deregulation and privatisation has facilitated corporate operators to run bits of the transport system in the interest of shareholders rather than users. Millions face transport poverty, where they can’t afford to own and run a car, and lack access to affordable mass transit options. This has taken a new twist during this crisis. For many vulnerable people, whether there is a transit system to access hospitals, food and other essential services can be a matter of life or death.

COVID-19 has also highlighted how key workers underpin our daily lives. Creating good quality affordable transport for them is therefore crucial. Some awareness of this existed before coronavirus: in 2018 one French city introduced free buses, while Luxembourg made all its public transport free. But in the wake of the current crisis places across the world have been creating free transit, especially to key workers and for vulnerable people.

To meet ambitious targets for emission reductions, there needs to be a significant shift away from personal car use within a decade or so. The pandemic has offered insights into how this could be achieved through limiting car use for essential uses and those with mobility issues, with affordable public transport becoming the new norm for most people in cities.

Building active travel networks across regions also makes more sense than ever. Bikes have been seen by many places as better options for getting around. Walking and cycling infrastructure can play a huge role in getting people around effectively and also making them healthier.

The inadequacies of pedestrian space have also been revealed, especially for effective social distancing. To build in future resilience, there’s a strong rationale for creating generous pavements and sidewalks that take space from motor vehicles. And, given there are around 6,000 pedestrians killed or seriously injured in road accidents every year in the UK, a roll out of lower speed limits could help reduce hospital admissions and make a contribution in future epidemic management.

The lockdown has also brought about significant reductions in air pollution. One study estimated that the lockdown in China saved 77,000 lives just by reducing this pollution. Such reductions are particularly key given that worse air quality could increase the risk of death from COVID-19. Given the health and social care costs associated with dealing with poor air quality, current increases in cleaner airneed to be locked in to reduce the burden on health services for the future.

Aviation has taken a hit, with total flights declining by more than half during the crisis. This offers a glimpse of the types and volumes of flying that might feel surplus to requirements in the future.

Cities will need to move quickly to lock in these lower mobility expectations, especially low car volumes, less aviation, quality affordable mass transit and active travel. We are all living the reality of simply travelling less, and shifting activity online. This is a huge opportunity to review working practices, leisure and retail habits, and argue for spending to support affordable and sustainable travel for all.

The socially useful city

We have become used to the shortcomings of the modern city economy – low paid and precarious jobs, independent businesses squeezed out by large corporations, land and resources shifting from private to public hands, growing divisions between rich and poor neighbourhoods. Coronavirus has thrown many of these into stark relief.

Low earning workers, especially women, have few options but to continue working and be exposed to infection, hospitals struggle for basic equipment, those in higher income neighbourhoods have better spaces for exercise and leisure.

But what has been most staggering about the response to the crisis is the rapid uptake of measures that only days ago would have been unthinkable: mortgage and rent holidays, statutory sick pay, shifts to nationalise services especially health and transport, wage guarantees, suspending evictions, and debt cancellations. The current crisis has started to rip up ideas led by the free market.

We now seem to be revaluing what matters. Rather than being considered low skilled extras on the fringes of the economy, key workers, especially in health and food, are being revered for the role they play in supporting our wellbeing. Local shops are experiencing renewed support as they offer stronger personal connections and commitment to their community. These tendencies are an opportunity to restructure high streets and create diverse local markets which can meet community needs and build resilience to weather future crises.

This crisis has also highlighted who has enough money to live on. Beyond government job retention and self-employed income schemes, more radical propositions are emerging that are changing people’s relationship to work. A universal basic income is an idea that has come of age during this crisis – an unconditional, automatic non-means tested payment to every individual as a right of citizenship. The Spanish government has agreed to roll out such a scheme nationally as soon as possible, and there is sustained interest in many other places.

The idea of a minimum income guarantee is also gaining momentum; a renewed interest in the idea of a universal and unconditional safety net that can offer dignity and safety and offer options for more sustainable living.

The social economy can provide further insights for refocusing city economies after coronavirus. Made up of community businesses, co-operatives and voluntary organisations, this social economy creates goods, services and employment that are more locally based, and community grounded in a range of areas: renewable energy, sustainable housing, food and micro finance. They build in benefits including local employment and procurement, fairer pay, better conditions, sustainable resource use, democratic accountability, and a commitment to social justice.

Derelict buildings and land banked by large scale developers could be redeployed by community organisations to build local resilience through community farms, renewables and housing, as well as leisure, local biodiversity and carbon storage.

It’s also clear that parts of the economy, such as gambling and advertising corporations, bailiffs and corporate lobbyists, are less socially useful than others. There are signs of how the economy can change in positive directions. Many firms are temporarily shifting to more socially useful production, making, for example, hand sanitiser, ventilators and medical wear.

These short term glimpses of a more socially useful economy should provide inspiration when considering future urban economic planning. Factories might transition to manufacturing wind turbines, e-bikes, insulation panels and heat pumps. And excess downtown corporate office space or luxury apartments could be retrofitted to support socially useful activities – key worker accommodation, libraries, creches, day centres, colleges for transition skills, and co-working spaces.

A green urban commons

Further greening of cities after coronavirus would offer real and widespread benefits. During lockdown, many people are more aware how little green spacethey have access to on their doorsteps. Many are also stuck in cramped conditions with little or no access to outdoor spaces.

Quality public and green places need to be radically expanded so people can gather and heal after the trauma of this experience. Now is a good time to supercharge such plans. Diverse green spaces directly underpin our emotional and psychological wellbeing and offer a range of positive effects on carbon sequestration, air purification and wildlife preservation.

Neighbourhood design inspired by nature can support this. Interweaving the places we live with extensive natural spaces linked to active travel opportunities can reduce car dependency, increase biodiversity and create options for meaningful leisure on our doorsteps. They can also incorporate local food production and features to cope with flooding, such as sustainable urban drainage and water gardens, further increasing future crisis resilience.

There’s also a strong rationale for prioritising street-by-street retrofit. In the event of future lockdowns during cold months, warm, low energy and well insulated homes can help reduce other problems around fuel poverty and excess winter deaths.

This moment offers a real opportunity to lay the foundations for a new deal for nature and animals. This is more important now than ever. Animals and wildlife, normally in rapid decline, are finding ways to regain a foothold in this respite of human activity – but they may be further threatened when lockdown comes to an end. Ways to create a more equal balance with our fellow species include expanding habitats for wildlife, restoring damaged natural areas, reducing dependency on intensive animal farming as well as meat-based diets.

In addition, researchers are starting to understand how zoonotic diseases (those transferred from animals to humans) like COVID-19 may be a hidden outcome of the global scale of human development. A recent report by the UN Environment Programme explored how the rapid growth of urban populations across the world along with reductions in pristine ecosystems, are creating opportunities for pathogens to pass between animals and people. Regenerating and protecting natural spaces could be a key part of future disease resilience.

What next?

COVID-19 clearly presents a significant juncture. There is still trauma and loss ahead. There may be market collapse and a prolonged depression. There are also tendencies towards political and corporate bodies exploiting this crisis for their own ends.

For our urban world this could mean more of the negatives discussed earlier – insecurity, privatisation, division and authoritarianism. And as lockdown ends, there may be a rebound effect, as people understandably rush to embrace travel, work and consumerism, creating a significant emissions and pollution surge.

No particular urban future is inevitable. The future story, and reality, of our towns and cities is up for grabs. The positives that are glimpsed during this crisis could feasibly be locked in and scaled up to create a fairer, greener, safer urban future. We can all live well, and even flourish, in cities even if we have and do a little bit less of the things we have become used to. Revaluing what’s important – community, friendship, family life – allows us to see how much we already have that can improve our wellbeing.

Often ideas start to converge under a single banner. Many in this article can be understood through the idea of the Green New Deal – a proposed set of policies to tackle climate change and inequality, create good jobs and protect nature. It’s an approach which has a lot to offer cities after this coronavirus crisis. It points to an urban economy based on key foundations of public services, an economy operating within the ecological limits of our precious biosphere, with a social safety net for all. These ideas are now being seriously considered by some cities, such as Amsterdam, as they think about how to rebuild their economies.

How city governance responds in this crisis and afterwards will be key. There will certainly be a much bigger role for the state, and this might be more authoritarian as recent emergency powers over border controls, surveillance and enforced quarantines attest.

But there is a way of countering these tendencies – by creating an enabling, responsive, participatory state where solutions are reached with citizens, rather than imposed on them. A meaningful state-civil society contract means the state can act powerfully but also take the side of citizens, through, for example shifting assets, resources, taxes and welfare in their favour. We are seeing glimpses of this already through a new municiaplism, with Barcelona as one of the leading examples.

It’s difficult to predict how things will actually turn out in such a fast moving environment. What I have presented here are some glimpses of doable, commonsense actions that could be used to build sustainable cities out of the coronavirus crisis.

Ten ideas to improve cities

These can be summed up in ten ideas that cities could implement after this crisis:

1. Reallocate road space for daily exercise and active travel

2. Subsidise free buses for key workers, and re-regulate public transport to create affordable, zero-carbon mass transit

3. Trial wage guarantee or basic income schemes to make sure no one is left behind

4. Shift subsidies to promote socially useful production

5. Plan to ensure homes are warm and comfortable for any future crises

6. Allocate unused land for exercise, leisure, wildlife and biodiversity

7. Support community businesses and provide land to increase the supply of local food

8. Commit to speed reductions to reduce deaths and ease the strain on health services

9. Create more support for local businesses and invest in local shops and high streets

10. Use indicators to count the things that matter, especially unpaid care work, key workers, quality of life, and environmental protection.

Right now, as I write, the world’s eyes are fixed on COP30 in Belém, the 30th UN climate summit taking place in Brazil’s Amazon—the gateway to the rainforest. This gathering marks three decades since global climate negotiations began back in 1995. Progress towards any meaningful change has been slow, and carbon emissions continue to rise year on year. As delegates and activists debate how we respond to what is increasingly an emergency situation, my recent work with Climate Action Leeds asks how do we move beyond emergency declarations to build real, lasting resilience on the ground? In this post, I summarise a recent article I wrote with my colleague Dr Stella Darby that was published in the journal Sustainability on place based action and the climate emergency.

The Climate Emergency: Powerful but Problematic

Over the past few years, we’ve all heard the phrase climate emergency so often that it’s become part of everyday language. Councils declare it, campaigners shout it, and headlines splash it across the news. But what does it really mean to act like it’s an emergency? And—here’s the harder question—what happens when the sense of urgency starts to fade?

With Stella Darby I’ve spent the last five years deeply involved in Climate Action Leeds, a citizen-led movement aiming to create a zero-carbon, socially just, nature-friendly city by the 2030s. Alongside colleagues, I’ve interviewed activists, councillors, entrepreneurs, and campaigners, and reflected on our own experiences. What we found might surprise you: the term climate emergency is both powerful and problematic. It can galvanise action, but it can also create panic, burnout, and even reinforce the very systems we’re trying to change.

So, what’s next? How do we move beyond emergency mode and build something lasting? Here are three big lessons we’ve learned in Leeds that might help anyone working for climate justice—whether in a city council office, a community hall, or your own kitchen.

1. Reframe the Emergency: It’s Bigger and Longer Than We Think

When Leeds declared a climate emergency in 2019, it felt like a breakthrough. Suddenly, what had seemed fringe—talking about climate breakdown—was mainstream. You could walk into a council meeting and say “climate emergency” without being dismissed as extreme. That mattered.

But here’s the catch: emergencies are usually short-term. Floods, fires, pandemics—they have a beginning and an end. Climate breakdown doesn’t. It’s not a single event; it’s a long, messy, interconnected crisis tied to centuries of colonialism, capitalism, and ecological destruction. Calling it an emergency risks narrowing our focus to carbon targets and quick fixes, while ignoring deeper injustices.

In Leeds, we’ve tried to broaden the frame. We talk about triple emergencies—climate, ecological, and social—and link them to everyday struggles like housing, food, and transport. One activist put it perfectly: “People are already in an emergency with housing and schooling. If we use the term climate emergency, it has to connect to their daily lives.”

This reframing matters because it shifts the conversation from panic to possibility. Instead of asking, “How do we stop disaster?” we ask, “How do we build a city where everyone can thrive?” That’s a much more hopeful—and honest—starting point.

2. Build New Forms of Place Leadership

If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that no single institution can tackle this alone. Councils, businesses, universities, community groups—they all have pieces of the puzzle. But too often, they work in silos, protecting their turf while the planet burns.

We need something different: disruptive, collaborative leadership that cuts across sectors and challenges the status quo. In Leeds, we’ve experimented with this through spaces like Imagine Leeds, a hub where activists, councillors, and entrepreneurs come together to plan and act. Think of it as an “acupuncture point” for the city—small interventions that unblock flows of ideas and resources.

This isn’t about waiting for saviours. As one youth activist told us: “No one’s coming to sort this out. We’re throwing ourselves at it with all we’ve got.” That spirit of collective agency—messy, imperfect, but determined—is what gives me hope.

Of course, this raises tough questions about power. How do grassroots movements work with the state without being co-opted? How do we avoid “green authoritarianism” where emergency politics become an excuse for top-down control? There are no easy answers, but one thing is clear: real change will require both pressure from below and reform from above. We need councils willing to share power and communities ready to take it.

3. Put Values at the Heart: Care, Repair, and Justice

Here’s something else we didn’t expect: talking about urgency often led us to talk about slowing down. Why? Because constant emergency mode is exhausting. It burns people out. It reproduces the same frantic, competitive culture that got us into this mess.

So we started asking: what values should guide climate action? At Climate Action Leeds, we settled on five—fairness, care, lived experience, acting together, and nature connection. Notice what’s missing: urgency. We dropped it because, as one partner said, “It reinforces dominant white patriarchal culture and normalises an unsustainable pace of work.”

Instead, we’ve embraced an ethics of care—for ourselves, for each other, and for the Earth. That means creating space for rest and reflection, not just action. It means recognising that people respond differently to crisis—some fight, some freeze—and meeting them with compassion. It means tackling activist burnout head-on.

Care also connects to justice. Climate action isn’t just about cutting carbon; it’s about repairing harm—historical, social, ecological. That includes acknowledging the whiteness of the environmental movement and promoting leadership from marginalised communities. It means allyship with those “least responsible but most vulnerable,” whether that’s a flood-hit village in Bangladesh or a food-insecure family in Leeds.

One activist summed it up beautifully: “What we’re really trying to do is encourage people to find their best selves and become more in relationship with the planet—to care for it and love it, like they do their loved ones.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

The climate emergency isn’t going away. But maybe the language of emergency has done its job. It woke us up. Now we need to move beyond panic and into purpose.

What we learned in Leeds offers three messages for those at COP30 in Belem:

• Reframe the problem: Connect climate to everyday life and longer histories of injustice.

• Reinvent leadership: Build coalitions that disrupt business as usual and share power.

• Live our values: Put care, repair, and justice at the centre of everything we do.

This isn’t easy work. It’s slow, messy, and full of contradictions. But it’s also full of hope. Because when we act together—not as isolated heroes but as a collective—we can create cities that are not just zero-carbon, but joyful, fair, and resilient.

The next decade could be defined by fear and fatalism. Or it could be a time of radical imagination and solidarity. We choose the latter. And we invite you to join us.

What do you think? Does the language of emergency still help, or is it time for something new? How are you building care and justice into your climate work? Let’s keep the conversation going.

The focus of the news clip I appeared on was an old mining community in South Yorkshire called Goldthorpe. The accompanying eye-grabbing news headline ran: “Our village had Britain’s nicest street – now we have rats, litter and arson.” The article contrasted the current misery and deprivation with happiness seen in the 1970s when there was a strong sense of community and jobs in the coal industry to back this up. When the presenter asked me how these communities had got into such a mess, I was fascinated by the absence of a broader understanding of the recent history of our country. I stressed that this is nothing unique to somewhere like Goldthorpe; in fact, there are dozens of places like this across the north of England and beyond. But this decline is an opportunity to tell a broader story of what’s happened in our country over the last 50 years. This is not a story that is commonly understood or talked about, but it is urgent that we own it and respond appropriately. It goes something like this.

Britain was ravaged by a deep process of deindustrialisation throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. This was a global story as emerging economies, especially in Southeast Asia, began to rapidly industrialise. A whole host of economic factors, including higher labour, energy and other costs at home and cheaper taxes and less regulation abroad, led industrial activity to rapidly shift from places like the UK to emerging economies in the Global South. Of course, countries like Britain had a choice and could have protected their rapidly declining industries. But this was the age of Thatcherism, and Margaret Thatcher from 1979 was a keen advocate of free-market monetarism. What we saw over the next 20 years under the Conservatives was little protection for declining industries, unlike some countries that adopted industrial policies to safeguard jobs, and a huge transfer of wealth and power from the productive sector to the financial sector. The City of London and the Southeast grew phenomenally at the expense of the old industrial heartlands. The interesting thing is that while this blew up the north–south divide to unprecedented levels, in a much longer view this was nothing new. The north–south divide has been around since at least the Roman occupation of Britain – feeding off the built-in differences in terms of soil, land, and climate either side of the divide - a diagonal line which roughly runs from the Bristol Channel to the Lincolnshire Wash.

While the end of Thatcherism and Blair temporarily stopped the relative decline of these deprived northern communities through a range of innovative social measures, not least Sure Start centres, the downward spiral continued in the age of austerity under the Tory-led coalition from 2010. Fifteen years of austerity and reductions in local authority budgets pushed already deprived communities to breaking point, depriving them of essential services, infrastructure, and people on the ground to make a difference. We also had the global financial crisis of 2008, which accelerated divisions of wealth between people and places to new heights, as trillions were shifted from the public sector to private wealth, mainly through quantitative easing to bail out a selection of banks.

The Brexit vote in 2016 was a huge show of dissatisfaction amongst the ‘have-nots’ in these deprived communities towards centrist governments who had failed to meaningfully respond to a deterioration in their living conditions. But the hard truth was that the process of leaving the EU was not about responding to the real structural causes of deprivation across England. We then come to the final factor: the Covid pandemic. Since 2020, there has been further huge transfer of wealth from lower-income to high-income groups as government’s artificially supported and inflated the cost of assets. Putting all these aspects together, it is completely understandable how communities like Goldthorpe are facing such deep-seated levels of deprivation. In fact, I am surprised that, given everything that has happened, it is not much worse.

While I only got a chance to say all this in summary, the next question was: what should we do about it? Again, the key thing is to match solutions to the scale of the challenge, and it becomes patently obvious what we need to do. It rests on four things. First is the recreation of a national industrial strategy where unions and workers sit down with government and industry to map out the needs of the nation and how we can develop meaningful work and embark upon a green transition. Second, there needs to be not just a reinstatement of local authority finances, but also a massive increase. This can ensure local authorities across the country are in the driving seat of implementing and leading people-centred changes across transport, energy, food, housing, education, and employment. Third, and to pay for all this, we need a wealth tax. This idea has come of age through people like Gary Stevenson, and ideas such as doughnut economics and community wealth building/, and is a sensible way to raise the kinds of billions we need to regenerate our country. Not only this, but we need to curb the spending habits of the country’s super-rich who are indulging in luxury consumption and pushing us to the brink of climate breakdown. When we have over 3 million high-net-worth individuals (with assets of up to £10 million), we know that something has gone wrong in the broader morals and ethics of our country. The final piece of the jigsaw is a massive renaissance of community power, not just tokenistically through the community ownership of pubs or post offices, but a significant transfer of power through the establishment of community enterprises, community cooperatives, and land trusts. We need to stop disposing of public assets and promote a wholesale shift of resources and power to community groups so they can innovate and bring forward solutions to social inequality, ecological breakdown, and rising carbon emissions.

“So no easy solutions then?” asked the presenter. Unfortunately not. I made almost exactly the same arguments 25 years ago in one of the first pieces I wrote as an academic. But while it is not easy, it is also not impossible. Part of the starting point is understanding the problems we are up against, owning a story of how we got here, and then coming up with the appropriate solutions. It’s an approach I’ve been taking in my latest book, How to Save the City. We need a strategy for change which understands the deep causes of social and economic inequality. We have to form breakaway coalitions of civic actors bringing together those from business, industry, government, universities, and community sectors to embark on a different path. As the Labour government announces their autumn budget, there is an opportunity to shift in the kind of directions I have mentioned above. It will be a long journey, but we need to take every opportunity to start to shift policy, debate, and action.

In this article I reflect on one of the defining issues of our age — how we move around our towns and cities in a way that can support wellbeing, reduce inequality, improve quality of life and the environment. I do this largely through my home city, Leeds, which like many places, finds itself in a transition between two transport ages: the car age of the motorway city, and the sustainability age of the active travel city.

Leeds ring road under construction in the 1960s. Source: Leeds Civic Trust.

Leeds eagerly embraced the modern era, building the UK’s first urban motorway, earning the reputation of ‘motorway city of the seventies’. Throughout the 1960s, city engineers and architects Charles Geoffrey Thirlwall and Edward Weston Stanley, as well as political leaders such as Frank Marshall, rolled out a comprehensive urban renewal plan that came to be known as ‘the Leeds Approach’. While this plan to its credit also focused on pedestrianisation, suburban centres and public transport, it was, in essence, a blueprint for perfecting a car based city. As it stated:

‘Because of…. the greater penetration and flexibility possible with public road transport the city has concluded that the development of this form of transport is more appropriate to conditions in Leeds than the extensive employment of local rail services or the provision of other forms of fixed mass transit facilities’.

The plan for the Leeds primary road network. Source: HMSO, Planning and Transport — The Leeds Approach (1969)

The whole city was re-imagined through what was, for the period, a bold and visionary approach. It brought many freedoms, establishing the car as the most effective means of getting around. But, largely beyond the horizon of its creators, the plan stored up rather than solved many major problems over the ensuing decades - congestion, air quality, social inequality, physical disconnection, road casualities and carbon emissions.

Fast forward fifty years and an equally ambitious new ‘Leeds Approach’ is required, but in a very different direction — an approach to planning and transport that reverses Leeds out of the motorway city and into a safer, sustainable active travel future.

The reality of today’s urban life — suburban car retail. Source: the author

Many aspects of city life (institutions, infrastructures, behaviours and resources) need changing in order for this kind of new reality to emerge. The middle of a transition is a difficult place to be. It can be marked by confusion, conflict and competing priorities which pulls a locality, its local politics and residents, in multiple directions. Cycle lanes, wider pavements and low traffic neighbourhoods sit alongside new arterial retail parks, relief roads and car-based volume housing estates.

The key to managing a successful transition is for a city leadership team to purposefully set a new course with a clear vision and milestones to get there — and sell the benefits to its citizens, with resources and institutions to back this up. Below I offer some reflections on what Leeds is doing, the opportunities of moving away from the motorway city, and the broader push for active travel as part of the COVID recovery.

COVID recovery and active travel

Towns and cities across the world are making real efforts to rapidly lay downactive travel (walking and cycling) infrastructure. This has been given recent momentum by COVID recovery transport plans. As public transport remains below full capacity due to social distancing, without a significant shift to active travel many car-reliant places could face imminent gridlock, as well as an acceleration of long standing problems of carbon emissions and air quality. We now also understand that long term exposure to transport-related air pollution can reduce lung function and lead to higher COVID cases. Switching from cars to active travel is no longer just a quality of life issue; it’s also a life saving one.

Given this context, in May 2020, the UK Government launched an emergency travel fund to promote active travel as part of its COVID recovery plans. It has made funding available to English local authorities in two separate phases to quickly bring forward their plans for active travel. The sums are modest given the scale of the task but the ambition and innovation is potentially high. To secure funding cities and towns have to evidence closing roads to motorised vehicles, and reallocating road space for walking and cycling.

Why active travel?

Let’s just recap on the broader challenges, and the reasons we need a shift. Active travel means getting about in a way that makes you physically active, like walking or cycling, but of course it also includes other means such as e-bikes, scooters and wheelchairs. It usually means short journeys, like walking to the shops or local school, cycling to work or to see friends and family, or cycling to the train station. 70% of all journeys in the UK are less than five miles. But for distances of between one and two miles, over 60% of journeys are still made by motor vehicles. So, the possibilities for converting journeys to active travel, especially e-bikes, are huge.

There’s also a compelling evidence base for shifting away from motorised vehicles to active travel. Here’s some figures from my home city, Leeds, which is currently the largest city in Europe without a mass transit system, and is highlighted as having some of the most unsafe air quality in the UK. Vehicles are the biggest source of outdoor air pollution in Leeds. When fewer people drive, air quality improves. Because of lighter traffic, outdoor nitrogen dioxide levels are up to 40% lower at the weekend.

According to analyis by Leeds’ public health team, between 2017–25, reducing people’s exposure to nitrogen dioxide and PM2.5 (the two major air pollutants) would result in an estimated 750 fewer deaths amongst those suffering from chronic conditions such as coronary heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), stroke, asthma, diabetes and lung cancer. Reducing its high pollution levels would save Leeds based NHS and social care up to £36 million between these same dates. Moreover, 337 people were killed or seriously injured on roads in 2018, and transport accounts for 43% of city carbon emissions. On top of all this, a typical vehicle driver loses forty hours per year stuck in traffic, although it is hoped changing commuting patterns post-COVID will change this.

Cycle-topia, Dutch style. Source: author

Encouraging more active travel is an obvious priority for towns and cities as it tackles this basket of problems; and it brings immediate benefits — improved public health from more physical activity and better air quality, increased road safety especially for children and those on foot, bike and wheelchair, improved local quality of life through more physical interaction, and reduced carbon emissions. If it goes hand in hand with good planning and design, it can also offer the quickest and cheapest journey times for the majority of trips we make.

So, what’s happening in Leeds?

Leeds City Council has a long-standing ambition and programme of work to promote active travel, through CityConnect and Connecting Leeds. Since lockdown this has been given new momentum. The municipality started to use the Common Place interactive platform to gather ideas on active travel improvements across the city. The Create Streets social enterprise also created a similar map which informed the wider council led consultation.

Since May, I have been part of a new group supporting and informing the introduction of emergency active travel infrastructure in Leeds. The focus of this group has been the Government’s Emergency Travel Fund, to which Leeds, like other UK local authorities, has applied to support its Connecting Leeds COVID-19 Transport Response. There have been four action areas, all of which offer important learning in this broader transition to an active travel city.

The first is the School Streets Programme, closing selected roads around schools to create safe places, which is especially important now so schools can operate social distancing. A first wave of experimental closures around six schools have focused on closing approach and access roads. This is a useful step to building local consensus and community support. Given the challenges stated earlier, this programme needs to be rolled out to as many primary schools as possible, not only closing access roads, but filtering access on approach roads, and rerouting through traffic. This has to apply to main as well as residential roads, and the only way to do this is to start to design lower vehicle volumes across school neighbourhoods. Given the challenges for schools to open safely in the autumn with social distancing measures in place, and the clear links between air quality and children’s health, this is the right area for action, and has to be accelerated at pace.

The second area is more space for pedestrians, through pavement widening, mainly as a way to give people more space and to practice safe social distancing near shops and neighbourhood centres. Fixed barriers have been used as trials, placed mainly in parking bays. This intervention as way to make more space for pedestrians has its limits as barriers restrict filtered access, can be moved around, and have been misunderstood as part of road works.

The broader ambition to create more pedestrian friendly space is the right one, and the next steps to achieving this is to permanently filter and reallocate road space near residential shops, using more attractive planters, surface changes and filtered access. The case needs to be restated that the ‘pedestrian pound’ can bring in much more revenue to local businesses than those from offering car parking near shops. This is going to be a key area in any COVID recovery, as millions of people continue to homework and look towards their local neighbourhood to meet their daily needs. Indeed as the focus shifts away from city centres, neighbourhood shops are likely to see increased footfall. Creating pleasant car free zones that are around these shops that are well networked in to active travel and public transport will be key to their future vitality.

The third area is increased cycle lanes, using trial infrastructure such as orca wands, cones and even paint to quickly protect or further establish cycle lanes. Leeds has committed to 100km of lanes as part of emergency measures, with an ambition of 800km. These are large numbers, but have to be put into the context of a very large metropolitan district of 550km2. The use of emergency infrastructure should only be trials and transition to permenant infrastructure as sson as possible. Early trials highlight areas for improvement in existing cycle provision, in terms of width and continuity. The significant challenge ahead is to establish continuous cycle lanes on difficult and narrow routes that meet width requirements and are continuous without breaks. This will mean reallocating road space from motorised vehicles to cycles and pedestrians.

Reallocating road space may be the single biggest challenge in terms of a transition to the active travel city. It raises the long standing tensions between those who drive cars and those who ride bikes, further fuelled by historic poor design, competition over road space as well as the sensationalist media keen to draw fictitious battle lines between motorists and cyclists. Critical mass is key, laying down as many coherent routes as quickly as possible.

Rather than just strategic corridors to city centres, connectors and dense local cycle networks will start to crerate liveable neighbourhoods. One easy win is to re-mark neighbourhood road layouts to prioritise active travel, creating two way directional flows for bikes with single flows for vehicles. The ultimate aim is not to idolise cycling and walking, but to unlock its potential to offer the easiest, safest, quickest and cheapest options for short journeys.

Car-lite road layout, Netherlands. Source: author

The final, and perhaps most exciting area is Active Travel, or low traffic,neighbourhoods — closing and filtering residential streets to create safer home zones and more opportunities for walking and cycling. These trials take forward older home zone scheme ideas, and are also called mini-Holland neighbourhoods. A number are planned in Leeds communities, and there are advanced examples such as Waltham Forest. While these measures can bring benefits, given the lock-in to car dependency they can also generate early resistance and misunderstanding. Many people would agree to their benefits (less noise, less pollution, safe streets), but are less willing to accept changes that affect them in the short term.

What a 15 minute neighbourhood could look like. Credit: Chaz Hutton

Geographically, these active travel neighbourhoods have to be large enough to make sense, include a critical mass of local goods and services, all areas between distributor roads, and significantly push out through-traffic. This brings us to the 15 minute neighbourhood idea, pioneered by Paris, where the city is divided into districts in which local goods and services needed for daily life can be reached within 15 minutes on foot, bike or wheelchair, with filtered access for those with mobility or emergency needs.

How these neighbourhoods fit together within the city is key. Without lower car volumes overall within an urban location, active travel neighbourhoods can become gentrified bubbles building on established advantages of higher income groups. Many people will continue to live near major distributor roads, outside the benefits of active travel areas. Active travel neighbourhood planning also has to go hand in hand with creating the right density of local goods and services, and creating connecting routes between them so they don’t become disconnected islands. This will mean creating access points, crossings and filtering across major distributor routes, and ultimately reducing these. These trials need to be part of a broad plan to make every residential neighbourhood in a city or town an active travel neighbourhood. Otherwise the city will fragment into those with heavier and lighter car volumes.

Tips for the rocky road to the active travel city

There are some broader lessons for those involved in steering the transition from motorway city to active travel city.

First, the issue of consultation. Given the speed of emergency and trial infrastructure, doing broad and detailed consultation is difficult, and there will be backlashes. The key point here is to continue to put out clear messages about the medium term benefits, and stick to these. Given the entrenched nature of car culture, car advertising and a well organised motor lobby, hearts and minds will not be won overnight. Alternatives to the car have been so impoverished that initially they seem deeply unpalatable. With the right level of investment this will change.

We need brave and visionary politicians willing to put themselves on the frontline and argue for why these changes are right - with civic, business, research and community groups prepared to back them and make it happen. Coproducing solutions will also create buy in and understanding benefits. Such sudden shifts are difficult and disruptive. But this is an emergency, and the benefits will outweigh the problems stored up in the transport system. Working examples of changes will start to become the living evidence of the benefits. The key question to frame community engagement is — what can we all do given the challenges we face? This is about community education, and, as Extinction Rebellion would say, telling the truth.

The second issue is an ability and desire to rethink the whole travel network. This is a leap from where many highways engineers operate who traditionally design roads to maximise the flow of vehicles. To design the active travel city, the task goes beyond ‘highways engineering’, where road design comes first and other aspects such as local services, greenspaces and housing are secondary. The priority needs to be flipped. Neighbourhood design that maximises wellbeing and prosperity comes first, and an integral part of that is a public and active travel system that makes it work.

Redesigning the whole network for active travel. Source: author.

Separating vehicle flows from active travel neighbourhoods is central, through for example limiting, redirecting and making traffic flows one way in residential neighbourhoods, freeing up space for active travel. Ultimately, cities have to pursue a ‘replacement’ rather than ‘additional’ strategy. City space is a limited commodity and there simply isn’t room for everything. It either services motor vehicles or active travel/public transport.

Third, the broader point is that there needs to be a vision of an active travel and car-lite city, otherwise interventions will be localised set pieces that don’t build towards that vision. Creating an active travel city ultimately means less cars circulating. We might need up to 60% less vehicle volumes to avoid dangerous levels of global heating. That also means not planning for electric cars replacing the internal combustion engine in the same numbers. A key part of vehicle constraint is creating a planning system which stops loading urban areas with more car-dependent activities, be they arterial retail parks, volume housing estates, relief roads or suburban leisure.

Fourth, without safer roads and lower vehicle speeds, it is also less likely that there will be a continued uptake in active travel. This last point is key. Beyond 20mph limits on residential streets, much more effort is needed to slow down vehicles. Committing to Vision Zero, eliminating all road deaths and casualties is the first step. It is now well established that even small decreases in speeds have a significant effect on road deaths. Designating many more roads as 20mph will play a part here as will quietways and reducing speed limits on non urban roads. This will also help to create connected and safer walking and cycling routes out of built up urban areas.

Finally, key to making all this happen is creating a sustainable and active travel team who know where they are heading, own an ambitious vision and have the power to make it real. This will involve replacing traditional highways departments with a Sustainable and Active Travel Departmentwhich is placed at the top tier of decision making in the Chief Executive’s or Mayor’s office where it and can directly influence planning, asset management and city development. A key part of this vision will be to tackle transport poverty, and to make active travel options work for everyone, especially keyworkers, and disconnected, low income communities.

There is a mountain to climb; but much has already been done and there is new impetus. Yet, a city cannot do this on their own. More direct policy guidance and resources are needed from central and regional governments. The current £27 billion road building budget needs shifting wholesale to walking, cycling and public transport. An active travel city needs to be part of a new bold national spatial plan, led by a newly formed Department for Sustainable and Active Travel that replaces the current DfT.

Multi billion investments in rapid transit, bus re-regulation and integrated ticketing, as well as revenues from congestion charging and a workplace parking levy, are essential to get cities and towns off the starting blocks and replace vehicle journeys and reduce volumes. Without these foundations it will be difficult to unleash the potential of walking and cycling. Given the evidence base for active travel, it is a surefire way to support a green and equitable COVID recovery and build in resilience to the challenges ahead, be they climate, social, public health or financial.

The active travel city is an opportunity policy makers, politicians and civic groups can grasp. While many are clearly doing their best, as Greta Thunberg reminds us, our best is no longer good enough given the scale of the challenges we face. We will have to do the impossible. Our ‘transport impossible’ is to rapidly replace, with care and dialogue, the motorway city with the active travel city. Through bold action, we will all start to reap the benefits in the coming years. But the bigger prize is to lay down a healthier, affordable and safe transport future for the next generation. We have to think big, and start now. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

I was the guy in yellow with the push bike outside the Leeds General Infirmary last Monday evening. The shouting cyclist, the labour activist, engaging Matt Hancock as he left the hospital; but definitely not punching anyone, especially his advisor. I am a Professor and my office at the nearby university is only a few hundred metres away from the hospital. I also joined the Labour Party early this year because I spent some time analysing the different political parties and realised this was a crucial moment for our country. I spend my time teaching and researching how we can create a better world where we tackle the climate emergency and social injustice. I have recently published a book celebrating examples of communities trying to build a better world.

I’m writing this article because I want to put the record straight about exactly what happened, but also because I’m deeply embarrassed about how angry I was in public, especially outside a hospital which should be a place of calm, dignity and healing. I also don’t want anyone else to go through the personal hurt and risk that the misinfiormation and allegations around something like #punchgate can create.

At just after 4pm I was heading home, getting my bike from the store when I received a message from a friend saying that the Secretary for Health was at the hospital. I was on a tight deadline to get my children from an after school club. But I wanted to add my voice as a citizen concerned about the NHS. Many people I know work in the health profession and I get an insiders view about how it is being pushed to the brink in spite of their amazing efforts every day.

When I arrived at the hospital I had no particular plan. I found myself standing on my own wondering if it was all a joke. Then I bumped into two other people who said they were also waiting for Matt Hancock. There was no flash mob taxied in by the Labour Party as some claimed. It was thoroughly underwhelming. At that moment Mr Hancock walked out of the main hospital entrance.

I’m an experienced public speaker, but I am the first to admit that I wasn’t at my best. In the heat of the moment I shouted at him that he wasn’t welcome in the hospital, the city, or the country. My intention was to express that Conservative policies were not welcome. I am deeply embarrassed that I said somebody was not welcome, or made anyone feel unsafe. But at that moment, like many people in this country, I was overcome with anger, frustration and fear about what’s happening to our country. Outside the hospital all these emotions came to a head in sheer exasperation about what might happen to us, and our children’s future, if we wake up to a Conservative majority on Friday.

I regret my unfocused shouting when I should have said something much calmer and more measured. However, it’s what came next that mattered. #punchgate. This became a bigger moment after there was a misunderstanding which many of you will have seen on the video clip. As I was pointing my finger at the car as it drove away and looking in the other direction, Matt Hancock‘s adviser, also not paying attention, walked into my hand. Almost instantly reports started to circulate that I had punched him.

The terrifying thing for me is that if somebody had not captured the whole thing on their phone and uploaded it onto the Internet I could now be subject to police interrogation, legal proceedings about assaulting a government official, having my career and reputation thrown into question, and possibly facing a custodial sentence. What is upsetting for an ordinary citizen is that the media and politicians can use you as a pawn and circulate misinformation to their own advantage.

I have no idea how events unfolded after Matt Hancock’s car pulled away. But within minutes a BBC reporter came up to me and asked if I knew anything about who threw the punch. This seemed a ridiculous question. The reporter showed us the tweet from a senior BBC journalist saying that somebody had allegedly punched Mr Hancock’s advisor. What scares and confuses me is the rapid way that this misinformation was circulated widely from the Conservative party to the media and then out to the public, as fact. I immediately sent two short tweets to clarify that I had been present at the alleged incidence and that no punching had happened. I jumped on my bike and went home.

I am writing this because I want to set the record straight, not only in terms of what happened, but also in terms of wanting to apologise for being so angry in public. I want to help be part of a safer country, one where we can all live together and also tackle the huge challenges ahead. But I am really worried about where things might be going with this election. I have analysed the manifestos of the two main parties in detail. Based on my professional expertise, it’s clear that the Conservative manifesto is deeply unsafe - in terms of how it will treat the health and social care system, how it will increase divisions in housing and education, how it will allow large corporations to control the economy, asset strip public services, and create more privatisation, precarious jobs and pollution. Most terrifyingly of all, they don’t have any credible plan to tackle the urgent climate and nature crises when we have only one term of office left to take decisive action.

None of the other parties are perfect, but we have to do everything we can to stop this unsafe future unfolding on Friday and vote tactically. Whatever happens in this election, I have made a promise to myself not to be part of the anger and lies that are becoming normalised. No more #punchgates. I want a safe, green and happy future, for the many not just the few.