Pathways to Urban Equality through the Sustainable Development Goals: Modes of Extreme Poverty, Resilience, and Prosperity

ABSTRACT

There has been a tendency for debates around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to focus on particular Goals or Targets. What tends to get lost, however, is the bigger picture. In this paper we ask: to what extent and under what conditions do the SDGs offer a pathway to equality? Specifically, we focus on the potentials of the SDGs as a pathway to urban equality in the decade of delivery. We focus on the ways that three key interrelated development agendas, eradicating extreme poverty, promoting prosperity, and building resilience, are mobilised through the SDGs. Together these agendas reveal tensions and opportunities in the relationship between the SDGs and urban equality. In discussion, we reflect on the potentials of an urban equality lens to read the SDGs, and the conditions under which they might contribute to the realisation of fairer and more equal cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Extreme poverty
• Prosperity
• Resilience
• Sustainable development goals
• Urban equality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. KNOW is a four-year project funded through the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund, involving several academic and non-academic partners across multiple cities in Africa, South America and Asia, led by The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London: https://www.urban-know.com.

2. The SDG framework contains two types of Target: ‘Outcome Targets’ are numbered e.g. Target 1.1, while ‘Means of Implementation Targets are designated with a letter, such as 1b; the term ‘poverty’ appears in both forms of targets.

3. Progress on the SDGs is monitored using a database of available global, regional and country data and metadata for the SDG indicators, which is maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division and is available at https://unstats.un.org/sdgs.

4. Butcher, Acuto and Trundle (2021) provide analysis of the intersections between ‘equality’ and ‘urban’ across the 17 SDGs and a framework for mobilising urban equality across the 2030 Agenda.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/P011225/1]

Notes on contributors

Allan Lavell

Allen Lavell Originally specialised in urban and regional development, Allan migrated to the disaster risk and climate change adaptation field from 1989 onwards, always examining these themes from a development angle of cause and effect. Currently based at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO) in Costa Rica, Allan has lived and worked continuously in Latin America for the past 48 years. In his role at FLACSO, Allan coordinates a programme for the social study of disaster risk and climate change adaptation. He holds a PhD in Economic Geography from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Colin McFarlane

Colin McFarlane is an urban geographer whose work focuses on the experience and politics of informal neighbourhoods. This has involved research into the relations between informality, infrastructure, and knowledge in urban India and elsewhere. A key part of this has been a focus on the experience and politics of sanitation in informal settlements in Mumbai, which was part of an Economic and Social Research Council ethnographic project on the everyday cultures and contested politics of sanitation and water in two informal settlements. His current work examines the politicisation of informal neighbourhoods from a comparative perspective, including African and South Asian cities.

Henrietta L. Moore

Henrietta L. Moore is the Founder and Director of the Institute for Global Prosperity and the Chair in Culture, Philosophy and Design at University College London. Her work focuses on designing and developing alternative definitions and measures of prosperity in diverse geographical locations, including the UK, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Lebanon. Henrietta’s research argues that sustainable global prosperity is founded in diverse forms of human flourishing, within planetary limits. Research interests in globalisation, mass migration, gender, social transformation, livelihood strategies, new technologies and agroecology have shaped her career and her engagement with policy making.

Saffron Woodcraft

Saffron Woodcraft is an anthropologist with a long-term interest in exploring how participatory research with communities can bring lived- experience into urban policy to tackle social, economic, and spatial inequalities. Recently, her work has explored how local understandings of sustainable and shared prosperity can be co-produced with citizen scientists and embedded in policy, governance, and spatial practices. Saffron is Principal Research Fellow at UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity where she leads transdisciplinary research programmes in the UK and Tanzania to develop new prosperity metrics to change the way decision-makers think and act for sustainable prosperity.

Christopher Yap

Allen Lavell Originally specialised in urban and regional development, Allan migrated to the disaster risk and climate change adaptation field from 1989 onwards, always examining these themes from a development angle of cause and effect. Currently based at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO) in Costa Rica, Allan has lived and worked continuously in Latin America for the past 48 years. In his role at FLACSO, Allan coordinates a programme for the social study of disaster risk and climate change adaptation. He holds a PhD in Economic Geography from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Christopher Yap is an urban geographer with experience conducting Participatory Action Research in cities in the global North and South. His research interests include community self-organisation, urban food systems, and urban decision-making processes. Christopher is particularly interested in the ways in which relations between urban actors both shape and are shaped by urban spatial development at the neighbourhood and city levels. He holds a PhD from Coventry University and an MSc in Development Administration and Planning from the Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London.