Urban Sustainability, the Challenge of Drawing Links

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As significant efforts have been made within the international society to establish an effective approach to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the highly diversified contexts of regions, or even cities, implied the eventual failure of a top-down solution. Urban governance must be, thus, the main arena where sustainable policies are implemented, and resilience and urban sustainability are two paradigms that can serve as levers of public action.

Nevertheless, before looking for a clear solution to converge urban governance and the SDGs, this article mainly aims to understand the complexity behind sustainable urban governance by following a simple hypothesis: sustainability’s first challenge is about drawing links. Only when one understands the fundamental connections among different governance levels and various sectoral policies, can one move forward with translating sustainability into governance practices and frameworks.

By: Alice YaoYao Dang, Janka Jurisits, Bianca Liu Herzog, Ha My Nguyen, Lois Paatan & Yingyin Wing Wu

Published on April, 2017

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