The Challenge
Beyond the horizon
The current gap between the practice and imagination of sustainable urban and regional development can be traced to the tragedy of the horizon, mentioned by Mark Carney in 2015. In his speech, Carney focused on the immense risks that climate change poses to financial markets, but it is ignored by investors due to the market’s tendency towards myopia. Undoubtedly, society faces multiple interdependent challenges that exceed the horizon of a single generation, a constituency of individual institutions, or the certainty of model-based predictions.
Urbanization, as one of the defining megatrends of our time, is shaping almost all aspects of our lives. The way societies organize themselves in space shapes the quality of people’s lives, becomes a spatial fix for global capital investments materialised in the built-up environment, and creates the demand for resources needed for running the entire urban metabolism. The negative symptoms of rapid urbanization are well known, such as poor quality of public infrastructure, urban sprawl, traffic congestion, lack of affordable housing, segregated communities, or crime and public safety.
Yet, cities and regions should not only be perceived as part of the problem but as places where solutions to today's key challenges can be found. For instance, recent experience with the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that cities provide critical infrastructure and safety in times of crisis. Therefore, the urgency to transform our cities and regions into more sustainable and resilient places requires accelerating the sustainability transition. This transition must go beyond the repetitive elite club of best-practices cities and should deliver the fruits of urban futures into everyday life now.
At CTD, we seek to break the horizon and take the criteria of time, scale and uncertainty in today’s decision-making processes on urban and regional development seriously. We see the sustainability transition as a window of opportunity for policy-makers and municipal governors to enforce forward-looking regulations and policies. To ground the sustainability transition in cities and regions, we need to go beyond the horizon of a single generation, a constituency of a spatially bounded institution, and operate with inclusive economic imaginaries in times of uncertainty. At CTD, we break down these challenges through our work in six frontiers: Territorial cohesion; Governance innovation; Entrepreneurship; Infrastructure development and land policy; Sustainable urban and regional forms; and Sustainable finance.