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OPEN
Urbanization in and for the Anthropocene
T. Elmqvist1 ✉, E. Andersson 1,2, T. McPhearson 1,3,4, X. Bai 5, L. Bettencourt 6, E. Brondizio7, J. Colding8,9, G. Daily
N. Grimm 11, D. Haase12, D. Ospina1,8, S. Parnell 13, S. Polasky14, K. C. Seto15 and S. Van Der Leeuw16
10
, C. Folke1,8,
Key insights on needs in urban regional governance - Global urbanization (the increasing concentration in urban settlements of the
increasing world population), is a driver and accelerator of shifts in diversity, new cross-scale interactions, decoupling from
ecological processes, increasing risk and exposure to shocks. Responding to the challenges of urbanization demands fresh
commitments to a city–regional perspective in ways that are explictly embedded in the Anthopocene bio- techno- and noospheres,
to extend existing understanding of the city–nature nexus and regional scale. Three key dimensions of cities that constrain or
enable constructive, cross scale responses to disturbances and extreme events include 1) shifting diversity, 2) shifting connectivity
and modularity, and 3) shifting complexity. These three dimensions are characteristic of current urban processes and offer potential
intervention points for local to global action.
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npj Urban Sustainability (2021)1:6 ; https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00018-w
URBANIZATION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
We live in turbulent times—the Anthropocene—where rapid
changes are occurring in biophysical conditions driven by
accelerating growth in human activity. New risks emerge from
interactions at the interface of multiple systems including climatic,
ecological, political, social, institutional, infrastructural, financial,
and technological systems1–4. In a globalized world characterized
by shifting patterns of inequality, new cross-scale interactions, and
decoupling from ecological processes5–8, altered disturbance
regimes increasingly lead to shocks that were previously
contained within a geographic area or a sector, but now are
becoming globally contagious9,10. Global urbanization (the
increasing concentration in urban settlements of the increasing
world population), is a driver and accelerator of many of these
processes11.
The effects of multiple interacting changes that can be traced to
the expansion of cities, generates new and extreme global
vulnerabilities12,13, making global urban change a frontier of
science for sustainability14,15. For example, cities are responsible
for ~70% of global CO2 emissions from final energy use, but are
disproportionately and increasingly exposed to the impacts of
climate change, since 90% of urban areas—and the majority of
the world’s population—are situated on coastlines16. A recent
study shows that 339 million people live on deltas throughout the
world. Of these 31 million people are living in the 100-year storm
surge floodplains, 92% of whom live in developing or leastdeveloped economies17. Further, in coming decades, climatechange driven migration is expected to increase dramatically.
When migrants settle in larger cities they add to existing
challenges, particularly in developing countries often unable to
provide basic infrastructure or social protection in response to
accelerated growth18–20. While some cities are already shrinking,
1
the overall challenge is one of expansion, with the global urban
footprint up by up to 1.3 million square kilometers between 2015
and 2050 (an increase of 171 percent over the 2015 figure)21.
Given the overarching dominance of urban growth, we here
consider ways in which interlinked social, ecological and
technological system diversity and interlinkages support or hinder
urban development and influence potential for cities to be
positive drivers of local and global sustainability transformation.
We argue that to position cities at the core of planetary change,
better understanding of the city–regional scale is key.
Although urbanization has existed for millennia, in its present
form it functions as an accelerating aspect of the Anthropocene.
What is important is not just that cities and their hinterlands are
interdependent but that the form of their interdependencies are
increasingly complex and significant globally—as the COVID-19
pandemic has recently demonstrated22. Urban areas are dependent on extracting external, teleconnected resources that
empower cities as economic, political, and cultural hubs, that in
turn drive global flows of material, energy, and information23,24. A
recent study shows that human energy expenditure since 1950
(~22 zetajoules (ZJ)), particularly related to fossil fuels, exceeds
that across the entire prior 11,700 years of the Holocene (~14.6
ZJ)25. Urban resource demand is influenced by continuous
changes in urban stocks such as population size, infrastructural
and housing density, consumption patterns and lifestyles, and
urban policy and management decisions26. Disconnection of cities
from their hinterlands tends to lead to the undervaluation of
remote nature—and associated deforestation and other habitat
destruction, agricultural intensification, climate change, and the
wildlife trade—are driving biodiversity loss27,28.
Uniform approaches to making technology and urban infrastructure ever more efficient are often reducing the redundancy
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. 2Unit for Environmental Sciences, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. 3Urban Systems
Lab, The New School, New York, NY, USA. 4Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, NY, USA. 5Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University,
Canberra, Australia. 6Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation & Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. 7Department of Anthropology,
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA. 8The Beijer Institute, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden. 9Department of Building Engineering, Energy
Systems and Sustainability Science, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden. 10Natural Capital Project, Department of Biology and Woods Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, CA,
USA. 11School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. 12Department of Geography, Humboldt University, Berlin, and Helmholtz Centre for Environmental
Research - UFZ, Leipzig, Germany. 13School of Geography, University of Bristol, UK and African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. 14Department
of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA. 15Yale School of the Environment, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. 16School of Human Evolution and
Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. ✉email: thomas.elmqvist@su.se
Published in partnership with RMIT University
T. Elmqvist et al.
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needed for resilience in the face of global change and extreme
events15,29. Innovating and transitioning societies along more
sustainable development pathways that can reverse changes
brought about by the intial onset of the Anthropocene is set in the
context of a reality in which strategic decision making in and for
cities is challenged by obdurate governance systems30. These
have yet to embrace polycentric31, multi-scale32, and other
governance innovations already articulated. In our current urban
Social-Ecologial-Technological Systems (SETS)33, governance is
characterized by decentralization and compartmentalization,
intensively managed ecosystems34 and activities increasingly
mediated through technologies and through support from
socioeconomic infrastructures.
Cities have long been known to depend on their natural
hinterlands35,36, but an increase in global connectivity and
redundancy of supply systems have masked this dependence,
particularly consequences of local resource exploitation, through
long and complicated global supply chains. Now more than ever,
flexible multi scale urban management that links the points of
consumption to the extraction, production, and distribution of
goods, is essential. It is well established that actions at the local
scale can add up to positive or negative impacts at regional or
global scales, potentially affecting distant areas through investment and political incentives as well as urban worldviews and
lifestyles at an increasingly rapid pace7,13,24,37. In this context,
envisioning and implementing ways to extend urban governance
and sustainability initiatives beyond the local is a critical
challenge38. In parallel with cities taking on more global
responsibilities, global decision-making and linked institutions
need to allow for local, polycentric, bottom-up embedded
solutions and governance approaches to fit the cultural, fiscal,
economic, and geographic contexts in which they are to function
in order to mitigate “environmental reductionism” in society39.
We ask a critical question: What constrains or enables
constructive, cross scale responses to disturbances and extreme
events, and over the long term, transformations towards more
sustainable and resilient cities? To address this complex question
we focus on three key dimensions of cities as embedded in the
Anthopocene bio-, techno- and noosphere to examine fundamental drivers and opportunities for sustainability and resilience
solutions: 1) shifting diversity, 2) shifting connectivity and
modularity, and 3) shifting complexity. We describe these three
urbanization dimensions as especially characteristic of current
processes. Additionally these dimensions offer potential intervention points for local to global action (Fig. 1a–c)
1. Shifting diversity—We see a recurring pattern of shifting
diversity (Fig. 1a) with increased diversity at local scales and
increased homogeneity at global scales. One example is the
global food system8: although local and regional crop
diversity have increased, the same kinds of bulk crops are
grown on all continents40. This replication of local and
regional diversity is further amplified by intensive longdistance trade, resulting in an increasingly diverse but
standardized set of food commodities being available
locally8. Estimates suggest that 20% of global cropland is
being allocated to the production of commodities that are
consumed in another country41, with significant impacts on
deforestation levels42, masking the erosion of overall
diversity. Similarly, migration in the form of urban–rural or
international population movements by relatively privileged
migrants spread environmentally impactful consumption
habits around the world43.
At the same time, cities are increasingly shifting away
from analog ways of interacting, gathering data, and even
decision-making towards digital alternatives with reduced
redundancy and increasingly (fragile) reliance on a narrow
range of energy and communication networks. While
npj Urban Sustainability (2021) 6
increasingly prolific and diverse, digitalization will generate
both opportunities but also may create barriers to data
access, and can even decrease diversity, such as when
transportation, information, communication, and other
critical urban infrastructure systems rely on a single systems,
internet connectivity, to function. Such overreliance on
single systems with impacts on myriad infrastructure
systems will generate new reliability and security risks with
as yet unknown potential consequences for urban resident
life, not least when digital systems are threatened by climate
or other extreme events and may stop functioning
altogether44,45.
2. Shifting connectivity and modularity—We illustrate (Fig. 1b)
how human activities, not least in urban regions, increase
the spatial dimensions of connectivity and change modularity15. Although the drivers of these changes are not new
(e.g., trade, transport, technology and consumption), the
speed and scale at which they occur are unprecedented8. As
urbanization proceeds (left to right in Fig. 1b), modularity is
reduced and connectivity is increased, which has been
argued to, after a breaking point, greatly reduce resilience of
the system46. With low modularity in a highly connected
system, responses become more synchronized. For example
Tu et al.47, suggest that the resilience of the global food
system has declined over the past decades due to increased
interconnectedness and reduced modularity. They argue
that, due to the structural characteristics of the food trade
network, additional trade links will further erode the
resilience of the global food system. In an economically,
digitally, socially, and ecologically connected global network
that is also connecting at faster and faster rates, several new
and compounded risks emerge associated with an ever
more hyper-cohesive world (e.g., climate change induced
shocks occurring simultaneously with new global pandemics). A shift back to some intermediate form of
connectivity and modularity would be needed to restore
resilience to the system47. Such modularity that we focus on
here can, for example, be promoted by institutions that
allow for bottom-up, self-organized, and locally evolved
management solutions that to a higher degree draw on civil
society actors48. On the other hand, the experience of
COVID-19 pandemic also shows that networks within and
across cities can help enhance the functional resilience of
the city in the face of major disasters49. For example, there
have been large flows of aid through sister city networks
across borders, for example from other cities to Chinese
cities, but also later reciprocated strongly once these cities
started to recover. This points to the need for a greater
coordination and collaboration across cities, which can help
turn the vulnerability of high connectivity into sources of
resilience49.
3. Shifting complexity—We illustrate (Fig. 1c) the increasing
physical and cognitive distance between (re)sources and
consumers as well as actions and outcomes. In addition to
diversity and the overall anatomy of local to global linkages,
this point concerns the complexity of the linkages
themselves. As cities grow, they expand in complexity50,
both internally and in how they are embedded in regional
to global systems. Globalization, advancing technological
development, commodification, and sectoral compartmentalization are adding a growing number of intermediate
steps51 between people and the resources they use, such as
natural resources, information, and technology. This evergreater cognitive distance makes it increasingly challenging
for people to know the impacts of their consumptive
decisions and also to design effective institutions to govern
economic exchange and human interaction (e.g., the
value–action gap52,53).
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T. Elmqvist et al.
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Fig. 1 Characteristics of urbanization in the Anthropocene over time. a Shifting diversity—colors and shapes of symbols illustrating how
diversity of e.g. food and sources of information and knowledge has increased over time at the city level, while becoming more and more
homogenized at the global level. b Shifting connectivity and modularity—in the Anthropocene spatial dimensions of modularity tends to
decrease and connectivity increase over time. c Shifting complexity—in the Anthropocene development also tends to increase complexity
and number of layers of actors/agents/information etc. between source and end user. For discussion see text.
Ecosystem service use is increasingly becoming commodified
and commercialized, while information networks are increasingly
global (and thus often far from what people can experience
directly), and health services and transportation are increasingly
provided by interacting, specialized actors and structures. For
example, small household appliances often have long supply
chains associated with their production, and there is little
transparency regarding the sustainability of any production
process along the chain. It can be challenging, almost impossible,
Published in partnership with RMIT University
to make positive choices for sustainable consumption with so
many information steps within each step to understand or have
information on to inform consumption practices. The subsystems
interact as well, creating dizzying complexity for anyone trying to
make sense of how to live sustainably, at individual or community
decision-making levels. With increasing urban SETS complexity33,54 comes an increased complexity of governance. Cities
require multiple city agencies to deal with waste, park management, public health, crime, transportation, infrastructure, and
npj Urban Sustainability (2021) 6
T. Elmqvist et al.
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more. As the number of departments or agencies multiply,
including ascendent sustainability and resilience departments,
coordinating responses to build resilience and transform complex
urban SETS along sustainability pathways faces institutional
challenges of trade-offs between decisions still made in governance siloes11.
URBANIZATION FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE
Building on the tradition of seeing the city and nature as
interconnected, we argue for a response to the processes of
urbanization that highlights the potential of both cities and their
rural support areas as positive forces for sustainable development
and governance.
Global sustainability will hinge on reshaping the nature of
urbanization to bring it in balance with fundamental planetary
limits and boundaries. We need a transformation of urbanization
processes for a desired or “good” Anthropocene11,38,55–57.
1. Rescaling diversity—Diversity needs to match scales with
emerging disturbance regimes to provide improved flexibility to respond to slow and fast local and global changes.
Much of the diversity in and across urban areas is more or
less intentionally designed and managed. Generating and
acting on clear targets of desired diversity at different scales
would be a first step towards building more options into
how cities tackle regional sustainability challenges as well as
prepare for and respond to emerging and even novel
disturbance regimes and extreme events. Attention to and
investment in diversity could include such strategies as 1)
accelerating present trends of local and regional sourcing of
more diverse foods, 2) intentionally designing hybrid green,
blue, and gray infrastructure particularly with emphasis on
diversity and flexibility, which may reduce vulnerability to
disturbances58–60, 3) providing accessibility to regional and
local multifunctional open space when mobility is reduced,
for example during a pandemic61. In social contexts,
diversity can be promoted by approaches such as comanagement of urban commons48, and mobilizing different
types of knowledge, which in turn can allow for multiple
alternative opportunities for learning about and using the
system. Plurality of institutional arrangements for managing
different functions through processes of co-creation in
parallel to streamlined planning processes may enable
experimentation and simultaneous evaluation of multiple
solutions to address challenges across urban regions15.
2. The anatomy of urbanization—managing connectivity and
modularity—As discussed earlier, cross-scale linkages allow
people to benefit from and draw on diversity external to
their everyday environment. Linkages also allow disturbances to spread. Both reactive and proactive responses to
change balance and actively work with connectivity and
modularity for different aspects of the system (e.g.,
information vs. trade in goods or food) and in different
situations and transformation towards more desirable and
resilient ends. While a rich array of regional level studies of
urbanization exist24, much of our knowledge about cities in
the Anthropocene is either at a very high aggregate level, a
global “urban”, or at the individual city level. These two
perspectives need to be complemented by an intermediate
level that explicitly addresses interlinkages and exchange.
Cities are embedded in clusters of reciprocally interacting
urban–rural multi-dimensional complexes characterized by
different patterns, processes, and connections. Unpacking
these complex relationships, accelerated by the exponential
pace of urban change over the last few decades, can help us
identify openings and opportunities for innovations in
management of connectivity and modularity. Changes in
npj Urban Sustainability (2021) 6
technology and shifting norms and values alter urbanization
trajectories but at the same time could present opportunities to shift those trajectories toward local, regional, and
global sustainability.
One example that could help steer urbanization pathways
toward such positive trajectories is the initiation of new
incentives for more sustainable landscape management that
fosters new types of urban–rural connections, and also
fosters city–city linkages focused on sustainability at larger
scales. The flows and exchange that have been one of the
characteristics of globalization are often seen as static, or
difficult to change. However, the current COVID-19 pandemic has shown that these flows and exchanges can
undergo fundamental change quite rapidly. For example,
mobility has been curtailed by the COVID-19 lock-downs
and overall restrictions on traveling, giving cities an
incentive to rethink their approach towards urban space
and suggest alternative options, as has occurred in cities
across the world62. In many cities, systems for mobility are
complemented by an emphasis on accessibility and modular
design of the urban landscape to increase provision of
essential services at a neighborhood scale. Managing
globalization towards temporarily variable and more easily
adjustable levels of modularity and connectivity across scale
and within different subsystems (Fig. 1b) could provide an
important new target for expanded urban resilience
building.
3. Managing increasingly complex connections to the biosphere—Diversity, not least in the sense of increased
specialization and longer functional chains with more
interactions can also make functions more vulnerable,
especially if it makes the linkages more opaque. On the
other hand, functional diversity also allows for greater
response diversity to deal with malign and unwanted
change and disturbance that in turn nurtures resilience63.
New crises will need complex responses where different
actors/units can add complementary contributions, but this
requires communication among actors, social trust, and
ability to coordinate complexity.
If fundamental transformations are what we need to move
towards sustainability11 we need to understand what the different
pathways would mean. For example, the COVID-19 crisis has
provided multiple examples of indirect, far-reaching effects of
seemingly targeted decisions. In response to these open-ended
outcomes, many cities have been collaborating with a wide range
of actors, including the national and regional governments, and
urban stakeholders and citizens. These collaborations have
enabled design and implementation of immediate, short-term
and long-term responses to the multiple dimensions of the
pandemic, and international city networks have played a key role
in peer learning, exchanging knowledge, experience, medical
equipment and protective gears, and in taking leadership in policy
making49,62. Even though the pandemic has had extremely severe
economic, social, and health effects across the globe, there are
also positive outcomes, e.g., in its Adaptation Plan 2020, Milan is
using the crisis to question fundamental characteristics and
expectations of the city and its scale, creating new visions for
increased wellbeing62.
The future process of urbanization in the post-COVID-19
Anthropocene where globalization processes may be more wisely
managed and consequences of different decisions are easier to
anticipate and plan for, would likely be strikingly different and
take on a new face. Although urbanization may look different
post-COVID-19, jobs, infrastructure, and opportunities will still for
the foreseeable future exist and mainly expand in urban areas—of
all sizes, including suburbs and peri-urban areas. We expect a
multipolar world to develop though, where thriving local and
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T. Elmqvist et al.
5
regional social, cultural, and ecological diversity and governance
towards sustainability become more central, and a new
urban–rural regional integration is possible. Global agendas such
as the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban
Agenda, provide a common roadmap and vision to engage local
stakeholders, including the private sector and civil society in cocreating and building new urban visions and purposes. The three
urbanization dimensions, as proposed in this paper, offer a
framework for a potentially more successful realization of diverse
positive urban visions and for guiding action towards a more
regenerative urbanization in and for the Anthropocene.
Received: 24 November 2020; Accepted: 13 January 2021;
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
This paper is a result of a workshop “Urbanization in the Anthropocene” held in
Stockholm in January 2019. Funding for the workshop was provided by the Beijer
Foundation. Gretchen Daily and Carl Folke are supported by the Marianne and
Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. TM is supported by the US National Science
Foundation through grants (#1444755, 1927167, 1934933, and 2029918).
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to T.E.
Reprints and permission information is available at http://www.nature.com/
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AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
T.E., E.A. and T.M. led the writing and all other authors contributed with discussions
during the workshop 2019 and commented on the manuscript.
FUNDING
Open Access funding provided by Stockholm University.
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COMPETING INTERESTS
The authors declare no competing interests.
npj Urban Sustainability (2021) 6
© The Author(s) 2021
Published in partnership with RMIT University