Competitive Cities: From Brown
to Green
Shahid Yusuf
World Bank Institute
World Bank, Washington, D.C.
August 21, 2009
Presented at the UNESCO Future Forum:
“Moving Towards a Green Economy and Green Jobs”
Why Competitiveness Determines
Sustainability
• Cities need to attract industry and services in
order to generate growth and employment.
• Competitive economic base determines elasticity
of fiscal revenue and access to financing from
capital markets.
• Competitiveness helps ensure that a city’s
imports of goods and services are balanced by
exports.
• Both Brown and Green cities must be
competitive.
What Makes Cities Competitive?
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Low input costs
Factor productivity
Business culture and business climate
Industrial composition
Innovativeness
How Is Competitiveness Realized?
• Size of city and industrial diversity affects scale, agglomeration
and urbanization economies.
• Mix of industries and services affects productivity growth,
R&D intensity and patenting.
• Supply and quality of technical, vocational and scientific skills
determines industrial diversification, technological upgrading,
labor productivity and innovation.
• Municipal leadership, private-public partnerships and
effective use of the internet/ICT improves the business
climate by reducing transaction costs.
• Quality and technical excellence of infrastructure cuts costs
and contributes to productivity.
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of R&D
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What Are the Characteristics of
Competitive Cities?
• Location
• Size
• Concentration of manufacturing activities
• Presence of high quality urban innovation system
• Good logistics, public services and ICT infrastructure
• Adequate social and recreational amenities
However, Brown industrial cities:
• Are energy and water intensive, and sprawling
• Are greatly dependent upon auto-mobility
• House industries that release large quantities of GHG and
other pollutants
Sectoral GHG Intensity
What Are the Attributes of a Green
City?
• Low energy intensity to lessen GHGs achieved through
spatial compactness, limited dependence on autos, and
composition of productive activities.
• Low water and resource intensity with the help of lean
technologies and emphasis on recycling and reuse.
• Reliance on renewable materials and energy sources.
• Focus on knowledge intensive, relatively weightless
activities producing high value exportable goods and
services.
• Abundance of social and recreational amenities which
can raise quality of life, but contribute little directly to
urban GDP.
How Can Competitive Brown
Industrial Cities Become Green?
• Main Challenges:
– Renewing and greening stock of infrastructure
(including energy) and housing.
– Transforming physical shape of city to make it
compact and more vertical, polycentric, mainly
reliant on public transport and with amenities
(e.g. green spaces) which sustain livability as
densification increases.
– Changing industrial composition to favor activities
with lesser resource and GHG footprints, while
not sacrificing value added and competitiveness.
How Can Competitive Brown
Industrial Cities Become Green?
• Main Challenges:
– Redesigning, cost effectively, products,
processes, supply chains and infrastructures so
as to cut energy, water and material inputs and
facilitate recycling and reuse.
– Switching significantly from fossil to renewable
energy sources.
– Creating a smart, wired urban society with a
rich culture of innovation to spur economic
performance.
What Will It Take?
• A change in mindsets, and visionary leadership
combined with focused grassroots initiatives.
• Huge upfront investments which partially erase and
reshape urban-industrial legacies and point cities in
new directions.
• Raising relative prices of energy (carbon), land and
water to induce conservation.
• Standards (e.g. ISO 14000) for ‘green compatible’
processes plus enforceable certification procedures;
IP protection and technology standards to promote
innovation.
What Will It Take?
• Labeling of carbon content, type of energy used
(renewable or not) and use of bio based/recycled
material.
• Data gathering plus appropriate ‘ecometrics’ for tracking
the progress with greening the urban economy.
• A redirection and substantial increase in innovation, plus
some breakthroughs in energy, materials and water
technologies.
• Political resolve, willingness to take risks, mobilize
financing and commit to long term and complex projects.
Green Pathways
Source: Chris Yingchun Yuan, LMAS Presentation, 2009
Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability © 2009
Are There Success Stories To Light
The Way Forward?
• Numerous examples associated with urban transport
greening, urban recreational amenities (e.g. in Curitiba,
Toronto, Zurich, Freiburg and Fukuoka; and by companies
such as Intel, Dell, UPS and Starbucks) and redesign of
products and processes which have diminished GHG
emissions.
• No examples as yet of urban-industrial transformations on the
scale required and on the time scale that is desirable.
• Sustaining economic momentum of a major city while making
it a “Green eco-city” remains to be achieved.
• Viability of custom-built eco-cities not yet established (e.g.
Dongtan, Tianjin Eco-City, Huangbaiyu, and Masdar in Abu
Dhabi.
Thank You