Building Resilient Cities, Part 1: The Role of Charter Cities in a Changing Climate

Climate change is rapidly transforming humanity’s relationship to the natural world.  Higher global surface temperatures, increasingly extreme weather events, and rising sea levels are not merely environmental concerns, but pose direct threats to the very fabric of our societies. 

As epicenters of population density, economic opportunity, cultural exchange, and innovation, cities have immense potential to confer resilience to households, nations, and the whole of human civilization¹. However, the compounding challenges of climate change and rapid urbanization are undermining the growth of resilient, productive cities, particularly across the Global South.  

Charter cities offer one promising solution. These “new cities with new rules” present an opportunity to construct well-governed, sustainable cities from the ground up. Ultimately, charter cities may hold the key for building resilient urban centers which are capable of propelling human prosperity far into the future.  

Cities matter for climate resilience

Cities have a vital role to play in climate-resilient development. For one, “sustained economic development does not occur without urbanization.” Urban agglomerations give rise to the skills, knowledge, experimentation, and innovation necessary to propel long-run growth. Productive cities can generate the capital necessary to finance investment in climate adaptation and mitigation initiatives. They can also spur innovation in green technologies and serve as experimentation grounds for new climate policies.   

Second, cities also provide new economic opportunities for households, allowing those who have been negatively impacted by climate change to engage in occupational and/or spatial adaptation. Access to jobs and high per capita incomes in cities also improve households’ ability to withstand and adapt to external climate-related shocks.  

Third, well-financed and -administered cities can also decrease households’ vulnerability to climate change through reliable, high-quality public service provision, such as water and sanitation services, electricity, and waste management. Sound infrastructure and dwelling construction further increase resilience by ensuring buildings are designed to withstand climate-related hazards.  

Compounding challenges  

Nonetheless, in almost every corner of the globe, urban centers are embroiled in an ongoing battle against climate change. Extreme heat exposure in cities has increased as rising temperatures and heatwaves spawn intense urban heat islands. Urban flooding has resulted in loss of human life, as well as lasting damage to health, livelihoods, and property. Urban infrastructure, “including transportation, water, sanitation and energy systems have been compromised by extreme and slow-onset events, with resulting economic losses, disruptions of services and negative impacts on wellbeing.”  

Already, climate change has wreaked untold difficulties upon urban centers, yet the challenges cities currently face are only expected to intensify as the climate crisis worsens over the coming decades. This is particularly true for urban centers across the Global South, which are disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change due to geographic, economic, and institutional circumstances. 

The challenge of resilient urban development in the Global South is further heightened by the rapidity of urban growth. By 2050, cities are projected to accommodate over 70 percent of the world’s population, with over two thirds of urban population growth concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and India.  

Not only is the pace of urbanization substantially faster than the historical precedent – with “full urbanization…[occurring] in a span of about 30 years as opposed to…100-150 years [in today’s developed countries]” – but it is also occurring at comparatively low levels of income, productivity, and infrastructural development. 

Many cities are sorely underequipped to accommodate the influx of residents, particularly as climate change amplifies the economic, social, and environmental challenges of rapid urbanization. Cities across the Global South are already straining under urbanization pressures, which threaten to undermine social cohesion, urban productivity, economic growth, and resilience.  

Consequently, unsustainable urbanization “could make the world’s society and economy increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change…,[particularly] urban centers…in developing countries.”  

Charter cities as a solution 

The importance of cities in the battle against climate change necessitates new and innovative solutions to ensure sustainable urban growth and promote resilience, particularly in the Global South.  

There are three main questions to consider: (1) how can the urban exposure to external climate shocks be decreased?; (2) how can the city’s absorptive capacity be strengthened through its built, economic, and social systems?; and (3) how can adaptive capacity be improved through institutional quality?² 

Charter cities offer one innovative, viable strategy to promote resilience, complementary to efforts to upgrade and retrofit existing cities. More specifically, charter cities can help address each of the three questions for how to build urban resilience: 

1. Charter cities can help direct urban growth away from climate-vulnerable zones through strategic location decisions. Pre-emptive urban expansion through satellite cities in in-migration hotspots can also help decrease exposure to changing environmental conditions. 
2. Charter cities can introduce stronger built systems, rooted in sustainable foundations. Climate-conscious infrastructure and good urban planning in new cities can not only improve the built absorptive capacity of the city, but it can also generate positive feedback loops in economic and social spheres, increasing resilience of the urban system.
3. Charter cities can instigate administrative and regulatory reforms that not only enable economic development, but also help improve processes for service provision, long-term planning, and adaptive policy-making.  

This is not to say that the creation of a new city is not without its own substantial challenges. Even from the outset, identifying a greenfield location which is well-connected and unlikely to be negatively impacted by climate change is a daunting proposition. New city construction is also undeniably expensive and may meet significant political resistance, even if it does not undermine existing elite entrenchment. There is a serious risk of creating exclusive elite enclaves which further exacerbate economic, social, and environmental inequalities.  

Nonetheless, charter cities still have immense potential to help direct urban growth, while providing the planning and good governance necessary to effectively manage rapid urbanization and leverage it into economic development. This blog series and the accompanying white paper will explore the ways in which charter cities can support urban resilience in the Global South, above and beyond the benefits of urban growth alone, while taking seriously these immense challenges for new city construction.  

Ultimately, ushering in the growth of resilient, productive cities across the Global South is one of the most pressing issues in our world today. Charter cities can help us harness the inherent virtues of cities – their density, diversity, dynamism, and redundancy – to propel us into the future.  

As physicist Luis Bettencourt compellingly argues, “cities are [humanity’s] master niche: the primary environments where an open-ended, sustainable future for our kind and for life on earth may be imagined and constructed.” It is up to us to create the conditions within which such a future can be realized.