Moving Forward with Sustainable Urban Planning

Cities are where the future of sustainability will be won or lost. With more than half the world’s population already living in urban areas – and that share expected to reach 70% by 2050 – the way we plan, build, and govern cities will shape global progress on climate, equity, and resilience for decades to come. Sustainable urban planning is not just a design exercise; it is a strategic necessity that connects affordable housing, clean energy, and effective governance into a single, forward-looking framework.

How urbanization connects to the Sustainable Development Goals 🔗

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) calls for making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. But urban issues don’t end with one goal. Integrated urban planning has a ripple effect across health and wellbeing (SDG 3), affordable and clean energy (SDG 7), decent work (SDG 8), climate action (SDG 13), and more. In fact, UN-Habitat notes that two-thirds of the SDGs’ 234 indicators have an urban dimension, meaning cities are the frontline for nearly the entire sustainability agenda.

The housing crisis at the heart of SDG 11 🔗

One of the most pressing targets within SDG 11 is ensuring access to adequate, safe, and affordable housing for everyone by 2030. The reality remains far from this ambition. As of 2022, roughly 1.1 billion people lived in slums or slum-like conditions, according to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. An additional two billion people are projected to need urban housing in the coming decades. Up to three billion people worldwide currently struggle to afford a place to live.

Slum populations are heavily concentrated in three regions: Central and Southern Asia, Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. These numbers point to a structural failure in how cities have managed growth. Without deliberate planning for affordable housing – through zoning reforms, subsidised construction, and inclusive land-use policies – urbanization will continue to deepen inequalities rather than reduce them.

Clean energy as an urban SDG priority 🔗

SDG 7, which focuses on ensuring access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy, is deeply interlinked with urban sustainability. Cities account for roughly 60-80% of global energy consumption and produce around 75% of carbon emissions. Meeting SDG 7 targets in cities means not just expanding electricity access but fundamentally changing how that energy is produced and distributed. This is where the energy transformation becomes critical – and why SDG 7 and SDG 11 must be pursued together, not in isolation.

Energy transformation: moving cities beyond coal 🔗

The shift away from fossil fuels in urban areas is no longer a distant aspiration – it is actively underway, though not fast enough. At COP28 in 2023, governments signed a historic agreement signalling what the International Energy Agency (IEA) described as the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era. Nations committed to doubling energy efficiency improvements by 2030 and tripling the deployment of renewable energy capacity within the same timeframe.

Cities are uniquely positioned to lead this transition because of their high population densities, concentrated infrastructure, and role as centres of economic activity and innovation. The IEA’s 2024 report on urban energy transitions emphasized that cities can act as transition accelerators, pushing the pace of change faster than national-level policies alone can achieve.

From coal plants to clean energy hubs 🔗

One of the most tangible signs of the urban energy shift is the repurposing of old coal and gas power plants into clean energy facilities. A Carnegie Endowment tracker has catalogued nearly 170 such repurposing projects worldwide. These sites are being converted into hubs for renewable energy generation, battery storage, hydrogen production, and even advanced nuclear installations.

In the United States and Australia, the most common approach involves installing battery storage and solar or wind capacity at retired plant sites. In Europe, projects tend to combine multiple technologies – renewables alongside hydrogen and manufacturing – creating an integrated approach that aligns decarbonization with industrial competitiveness. In China’s Xiong’an district, geothermal energy has successfully replaced coal-generated district heating, reducing costs for residents while creating new local jobs.

Renewable energy solutions for cities of every size 🔗

Large metropolises often attract headlines for bold climate pledges, but IRENA (the International Renewable Energy Agency) points out that small and medium-sized cities – home to about 59% of the global urban population – face distinct challenges. They typically lack the financial resources and regulatory capacity of major cities but are growing faster than any other urban category. Policies that work for them need to be tailored: rooftop solar incentive programmes, energy community models, and municipal-level strategies can all make a difference.

For example, the municipality of Kasese in Uganda developed a sustainable energy strategy with support from IRENA’s SolarCityEngine tool, which helped local authorities evaluate rooftop solar PV potential for homes, businesses, and public buildings. In Serbia, the town of Bogatić adopted geothermal energy for its district heating system, and the visible cost savings and pollution reduction have inspired other municipalities to follow suit.

The built environment and transport 🔗

Buildings and transport together represent the largest share of urban emissions. According to a PwC analysis, the built environment alone is responsible for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions, while urban transport adds another substantial share. Addressing these two sectors is essential for any meaningful reduction.

Solutions include electrifying public transport fleets, integrating photovoltaic elements into building design, deploying heat pumps at scale, and investing in smart grids that can manage the growing share of variable renewable energy. Cities that take a holistic approach – treating energy supply, building performance, and mobility as interconnected systems rather than separate silos – tend to see the greatest impact.

Holistic urban governance: why collaboration matters 🔗

Even the best-designed urban plans will fail without effective governance to implement them. Sustainable urban development requires coordination across multiple levels of government – local, regional, national, and international – as well as active engagement with the private sector, civil society, and citizens themselves.

The multi-level governance challenge 🔗

One of the key barriers to sustainable urbanization is the disconnect between national policy ambitions and local implementation capacity. National governments set climate commitments and regulatory frameworks, but it is cities that must translate these into tangible projects on the ground. In turn, cities often lack the mandates, resources, or financing to act without national support.

The ICLEI UrbanShift project addresses this gap directly. Working across nine countries, the programme organized National-Local Dialogues on multi-level governance, producing co-developed Country Roadmaps that outline how different government levels can collaborate more effectively on high-impact urban sustainability actions. These roadmaps are jointly owned by national and local governments, giving them practical legitimacy.

Integrated approaches to planning and policy 🔗

Sustainable urban governance is not just about coordination between government levels – it also requires integration across policy sectors. Housing, energy, transport, water, waste management, and public health are all deeply interconnected in urban systems. Treating them in separate silos leads to conflicting policies, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities.

The New Urban Agenda, adopted at Habitat III in 2016, provides a framework for precisely this kind of integration. It offers guidance on how to align planning, design, finance, and governance so that efforts across sectors reinforce rather than undermine each other. For instance, investing in public transit reduces emissions (supporting SDG 13), improves access to jobs (supporting SDG 8), and lowers air pollution (supporting SDG 3) – all at once.

The role of citizen participation 🔗

Governance that works for sustainability must also be participatory. Top-down planning has clear limitations; it often misses local needs and can lack the buy-in needed for long-term success. The OECD’s work on sustainable urban development highlights how SDG frameworks can help reshape urban policies by identifying place-based priorities and fostering coordination that overcomes institutional fragmentation.

Cities such as Madrid have experimented with systemic collaborative platforms – multi-stakeholder arrangements that bring together city councils, universities, businesses, and civil society organizations to co-design climate neutrality roadmaps. These platforms go beyond traditional consultation processes; they distribute leadership and decision-making across diverse actors, creating shared ownership of urban sustainability goals.

Smart governance and digital tools 🔗

Digital technologies are increasingly enabling better urban governance. Real-time monitoring, predictive modelling, and data-driven decision-making can help cities allocate resources more efficiently, track progress against sustainability targets, and engage citizens more effectively. However, technology alone is not a solution. Research consistently emphasizes that smart governance must be balanced with attention to equity, data privacy, and institutional capacity. Without these safeguards, digital tools risk deepening the very inequalities that sustainable urban planning seeks to address.

Financing the sustainable city 🔗

None of these transformations come free. The IEA estimates that global annual investment in electricity grids alone needs to more than double – from roughly USD 330 billion to USD 750 billion by 2030 – to stay on track for net zero. About 75% of that investment will be needed at the distribution level, which is where cities operate. Public-private partnerships, municipal green bonds, innovative procurement programmes, and international climate finance all have roles to play in closing this funding gap.

South Africa’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Programme (REIPPP) offers a useful model. By setting ceiling tariffs and offering 20-year power purchase agreements, the programme attracted private investment that has delivered over 6,000 MW of renewable generation capacity, primarily from wind and solar. Many of these projects were specifically designed to serve urban and peri-urban communities.

The path forward 🔗

Sustainable urban planning is not a single solution – it is an ongoing process that requires balancing competing demands, adapting to new information, and maintaining commitment across political cycles. The three pillars discussed here – aligning urbanization with the SDGs, accelerating the energy transformation, and building holistic governance frameworks – are interdependent. Progress on any one of them reinforces progress on the others.

The evidence is clear that cities have the potential to be powerful engines of sustainable development. They generate over 80% of global GDP, concentrate innovation and talent, and are where policy meets daily life. But that potential can only be realized through deliberate, inclusive, and well-governed planning – not through organic sprawl or piecemeal projects.

What do you think? Can cities in developing countries – where most urban growth is happening – realistically leapfrog fossil fuel-dependent infrastructure, or will financial constraints lock them into unsustainable patterns? And how can ordinary citizens move beyond awareness to meaningful participation in the planning decisions that shape their urban future?

References

1. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/cities/
2. https://unhabitat.org/programme/sustainable-development-goals-cities
3. https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal11
4. https://www.iea.org/reports/empowering-urban-energy-transitions
5. https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2025/04/coal-gas-power-plant-green-energy-map-data-carbon-clean-tracker
6. https://www.irena.org/Energy-Transition/Policy/Renewable-energy-policies-for-cities
7. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/esg/the-energy-transition/sustainable-cities-tackling-climate-change-through-urban-energy-transition.html
8. https://iclei.org/e-library/multilevel-governance-for-integrated-urban-planning/
9. https://www.urbanagendaplatform.org/new-urban-agenda-localize
10. https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/sustainable-urban-development.html