Grand challenges in sustainable cities: urban innovation for global climate and sustainability goals—from policy agenda to research needs

Abstract

Urban innovation has emerged as a priority to address global climate and sustainability goals. As the world continues to urbanise, global organisations are encouraging cities to spearhead innovation to meet global carbon reduction targets and reduce inequalities (UN Habitat, 2022). Finding new ways to build, manage and live in cities is critical to provide all humans with adequate nutrition, shelter, access to products and services including mobility, leisure, health, energy, and education (UN, 2023). Focusing on the potential role of urban innovation is logical -cities drive innovation by bringing diverse people, knowledge and resources together (Florida et al., 2018). In many ways urbanisation represents the manifestation of new technologies and forms of social organisation, from the hydraulic cities of Mesopotamia 7000 years ago through to industrial and post-industrial cities today (Jacobs, 1969;Athey et al., 2008). However, while the link between cities and innovation is longstanding, the idea of 'urban innovation' as a specific activity to discover new ways to develop, manage and inhabit cities in more sustainable ways is recent, distinct and less familiar. This framing of urban innovation reflects established approaches to governance for sustainability, layered over the distinctive characteristics and capabilities of cities. In this paper we define urban innovation as a directed activity that takes place in and is driven by cities as a way to address local challenges that will contribute to the delivery of global climate and sustainability goals. The emergence of the urban innovation as an influential global policy agenda pushes cities once more to the front of the battle against climate change. This paper examines the emergence of urban innovation as a discrete and influential policy goal to deliver global climate and sustainability goals and outlines a research agenda to help achieve this.The paper is authored with leading global organisations in this space -the United Nations Climate Change Global Innovation Hub and the Global Covenant of Mayors. The United Nations is the leading global organisation coordinating international action on key challenges including climate change. The United Nations Global Innovation Hub for Climate Change promotes innovation as a catalyst for achieving global climate and sustainability targets. Their first global dialogue series focused on cities specifically because of their potential to integrate technological, social, and policy innovations. The Global Innovation Hub emphasizes systemic approaches to urban innovation, fostering cross-sectoral collaboration and community engagement to create sustainable, climate resilient development in urban environments. The Global Covenant of Mayors (GCoM) represents an alliance of more than 13,000 cities combatting climate change. Through its Innovate4Cities initiative, launched in 2019 in response to the Edmonton Cities and Climate Change Science Conference (Oke et al., 2022), the GCoM alliance outlines the knowledge gaps and action priorities for urban innovation, research and implementation, sharing data and best practices, and unlocking financing for scalable urban innovation projects. Both work closely with the Mission Innovation Urban Transitions Mission, which launched at COP 26 in 2021. This organisation empowers cities worldwide in their transition towards net-zero, resilient, and people-centred cities, mobilizing decision-makers across all levels of government to prioritize pathways enabled by clean energy and systemic innovation across all sectors and in urban governance (Urban Transitions Mission, 2024). The Urban Transitions Mission develops innovation systems capable of transforming cities to address climate change, including a focus on coordinating city level research and innovation challenges (European Commission, 2022).These organisations form part of a Global Innovation Alliance (GIA), which is engaging cities and relevant partners to build a worldwide urban innovation policy agenda for climate and sustainability goals. This policy agenda is complemented by the Global Research and Action Agenda on Cities and Climate Change Science, which provides a cross-sectoral, systems-based foundation for knowledge to enable urban innovation. This document launched at the Cities and Climate Change Science Conference in Edmonton, Canada in 2018, and in its latest iteration following the 2024 Innovate4Cities Conference, serves as an evidence base for the knowledge and innovation outputs being co-created by researchers, governments, businesses, and civil society (Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, UN-Habitat & University of Melbourne, 2024). These initiatives demonstrate the growing ambition for science to inform action and facilitates the exchange of knowledge to support stronger and more ambitious urban solutions and partnerships.The priorities and initiatives of these international organisations individually and collectively show that urban innovation has become central to the delivery of global climate and sustainability goals at multiple levels of governance. Urban innovation is being promoted as a way to develop solutions to challenges in sectors ranging from energy and transport to housing and social justice. By cutting across domains, and more closely engaging economic and knowledge production, urban innovation represents an exciting new way to create more sustainable cities. However, as Bai (2024) notes in relation to the potential of cities to deliver the SDGs, action on the ground requires clarity of roles. The term 'urban innovation' is used widely now in policy and research, but in different ways by different groups to mean different things, not necessarily with sustainability or justice and equity as core values. Realising the potential of urban innovation to deliver climate and sustainability goals requires greater clarity in defining what exactly it is, how it should be done in practice, and who is supposed to be doing it. Given the political weight and resource behind it, researchers have an important role to play in helping to ensure that urban innovation is an equitable and effective. Addressing rather than exacerbating inequalities and making sure successful innovations are actually transformative lie at the forefront of this challenge. This Grand Challenge article builds upon the high levels of current ambition and activity associated with key international initiatives like the Global Innovation Alliance and Global Research and Action Agenda on Cities and Climate Change Science to frame a broad and inclusive research agenda for sustainable cities and urban innovation.Innovation relates to the development of new services, products or processes that generate value through being of use to customers or users. The concept of innovation was arguably first framed as a place-based agenda in scholarship and policies relating to regional innovation clusters. These often developed near universities, most famously in the case of the Silicon Valley innovation cluster in California that grew up around Stanford University. The focus was on supply-side technology development though, with little consideration of the demands of cities and their residents. The emergence of the idea of smart cities in the early Twenty-First Century dramatically changed this, positioning innovation as a key element of place-making. Urban innovation became an activity focusing on how to deploy digital technologies to improve cities and urban services (Angelidou, 2015). Successful examples include the replacement of traditional incandescent bulbs with LED for street lighting, and the adoption of digital information and payment platforms for citizens to engage with municipal authorities. Evidence suggests that cities investing in smart city projects tend to generate economic benefits associated with traditional innovation, gauged through measures such as numbers of patent filings (Caragliu and Del Bo, 2019). A rapidly growing body of work from China suggests a correlation between the innovative capacity of cities and their environmental performance (see for example Tan, et al., 2022;Yang, et al., 2022;Guo, et al., 2023). Work in this context has also identified a positive relationship between the existence of a digital economy and the achievement of low carbon transitions in larger Chinese cities (Liu et al., 2024). However, it is the distinct idea of urban innovation as a directed process that brings different stakeholders together to develop solutions to problems in their own cities that has gained traction beyond smart cities. In relation to environmental policy, the need for practical action to complement international commitments on climate change and sustainable development, coupled with the emergence of world cities as major political actors (Bulkeley, 2013), has provided fertile ground for urban innovation to emerge as a potential driver of societal change. Urban innovation represents the culmination of a longer-term metamorphosis of cities from being framed as sources of sustainability problems to sources of sustainability solutions (Angelo and Wachsmuth, 2020). In principle, urban innovation offers a way to situate and address the United Nation Sustainable Development the context of cities and 2024). 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