Smart green cities: from modernization to resilience?

Contribution by Derek Antrobus to the URBACT annual conference,

Liege, December 1st, 2010

Abstract
It is possible to detect a shift in the way we think about environmental issues,
in particular climate change, from what academics call ecological
modernization to what can be termed resilient cities. This is both a
consequence and a cause of city-regions emerging as the pragmatic scale of
governance. This paper will use a case study of Greater Manchester in the
North West of England to show how thinking on the environment was centred
around ecological modernization with an emphasis on business opportunities
associated with a move to a low-carbon economy. It will argue that this
approach has been enhanced by a new focus on resilience. The case study
will use examples of the Ecocities Project, green infrastructure, and flood risk
to show how a concern for resilience has emerged. It will then revisit the issue
of energy to show how the new concerns have influenced the low-carbon
strategy.
Speaker biography
Derek Antrobus has been a Labour councillor for 30 years and is the Lead
Member for Planning for Salford City Council. He chairs the Greater
Manchester Planning and Housing Commission one the bodies established
under new city-region governance arrangements. He was recently appointed
by the Government to chair the North West Regional Flood Defence
Committee.
He chairs a partnership of six Greater Manchester councils which delivers
green infrastructure projects and is a trustee of the charity Community Forests
North West.

1. Introduction
As climate change takes hold, there is a new hope that cities
throughout the world will be able to avoid sleepwalking to disaster.
Civic leaders have been dreaming green dreams. Countless civic
administrations proclaim their desire to be the greenest city. They see
a world of homes roofed with photovoltaic cells, hillsides humming with
windmills and rivers gushing through hydroelectric turbines. Moreover,
they see green jobs. Innovative green technologies give cities a
competitive edge and the shift to a low carbon economy creates its
own demand for green services. Such is the dream. But that dream
could turn into a nightmare unless this modernization agenda is
accompanied by actions to make our cities resilient.
The need for resilience is evident in recent climatic events. Our
climate is already changing. Temperatures are 1 C higher than the
1970s, thousands died in Europe as a result of the 2003 heatwave, UK
flooding in 2007 cost the economy 3 billion, and extreme weather is
more frequent (Climate Change Committee, 2010). At long last, it looks
as though national governments and some urban governments will
tackle the issue. What is more, it is city-regions that are leading the
way. And this is not by chance. City regions are both a cause and a
consequence of the shift in thinking. As institutions develop within city
regions, new spaces emerge with their distinct problems: river
catchments, energy grids, forests, wastewater and similar issues
become more visible at the city regional level. For at the scale at the
individual authority, only a fragment of the issue is perceived as one
that can be managed. Furthermore, the rationale of city-region
governance is that some issues are better addressed at the scale of
the conurbation.
I want to show how this is so through a case study of Greater
Manchester where a series of projects reveal this shift in the way we
think about environmental problems and climate change in particular.
The commissioning of a mini-Stern report for Greater Manchester

marked a clear commitment to the modernization agenda. But this

coincided with a report on green infrastructure which opened up the
issue of resilience, a shift reinforced by work on flooding and then
embedded in the policy thinking of Greater Manchester by embracing
the Ecocities project. Evidence of the shift in thinking is explored by
reviewing the way energy policy has changed. Firstly, however, it will
be helpful to offer a brief account of Greater Manchester.

2. Greater Manchester: a new city region

The Manchester city region is a conurbation of some 2.5 million
people in the North-west of England. It is administered by 10 single-tier
local authorities Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale,
Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Wigan - each independently
responsible for most aspects of the governance of its area. This
situation has persisted since 1986 when the upper-tier Greater
Manchester County Council was abolished and its strategic functions
were devolved to the 10 district councils. Other functions were
devolved to four statutory boards (consisting mainly of nominees of the
10 councils) to run conurbation-wide services such as public transport,
waste disposal, police and the fire service.
In the quarter of a century that has elapsed, the authorities have
worked together through a voluntary organisation, the Association of
Greater Manchester Authorities. This has been responsible for
managing those joint services not devolved to a statutory board,
developing new organisations to market the conurbation and promote
economic development, and providing a single political voice for
Greater Manchester. They have also worked together to promote the
growth of the Metrolink tramway system and the growth of Manchester
Airport which they jointly own. This culture of collaboration led to
Greater Manchester becoming a pilot officially agreed in December
2009 and reaffirmed by the new Government in November 2010 for a
new form of city-region governance. The 10 leaders of the local
authorities will form an Executive Board which will have legal authority

to take binding decisions. They will be advised by a number of

Commissions, one of which, the Planning and Housing Commission, I
chair.
Our Commission has been charged with developing a spatial
framework for Greater Manchester which will help to deliver the vision
adopted for the city-region by the ten local authorities in the Greater
Manchester Strategy. This committed the region the largest and most
economically important outside London to improving productivity and
tackling inequality in the conurbation. It committed itself to do so in a
way that was sustainable. This originally emphasised the need to move
to a low carbon economy but, following recommendations from the
Planning and Housing Commission, the strategy crucially added the
phrase: Adapting to a changing climate and boosting our resilience is
also integral to our future success (Association of Greater Manchester
Authorities, 2009, p31). Our recommendation was prompted by the
perception that the delivery of the strategy depended on securing
spaces for the future. It was apparent that some locations were
unsustainable because of flood risk and we had been given examples
of developments that had been delayed because of the lack of an
adequate power supply. For spatial planning, it was necessary to
understand the impact of flows into the city: both in terms of the
potential threat of a flow and the risks associated with the lack of flows.
As Hodson and Marvin (2009:205) observe: ...the ability to continue to
grow is intertwined with a citys ability to guarantee the ecological
resources necessary to

support economic growth. Thus the

Commission began to see in spatial planning issues that had

previously been considered as beyond the local authority, issues that
might be addressed by regional agencies or private business.
It was also the case that a rationale behind the institutions
established in Greater Manchester was the need to address certain
issues at the city region scale. Ad hoc committees had been
established to develop common policies across Greater Manchester on
waste disposal and on minerals extraction. The scale of these issues
meant that the conurbation was the appropriate level to address them.

Even so, the experience of the waste plan (which has progressed more
than the recently initiated minerals plan) illustrates that no scale is
perfect. The objective of the plan was to ensure that the waste
produced in the city-region could be disposed of in the city region in the
most sustainable manner. But existing contracts mean that much waste
will be dealt with at recycling plans outside of Greater Manchester.
This is an important point to draw attention to when considering
the role of city-region governance in addressing green issues. The
institutional logic for the governance arrangements is the recognition
that the city-region is a functional economic area where labour,
residential and commercial/industrial markets are overlain. This
economic imperative behind governance gives rise to certain
environmental issues which are appropriately dealt with at city-region
level such as waste planning. But other issues begin to be addressed
because the institutions exist. This is something that will be evident
from the case-study examples.

3. The Mini-Stern
One of the most significant developments in climate change
thinking in Greater Manchester was the production of the so-called
Mini-Stern report. This was produced in the wake of Nicholas Sterns
influential 2006 report for the British Government which pointed to the
severe economic costs involved in not tackling climate change and
pointed to the crucial need for adaptation strategies which it
considered were under-emphasised in most countries (Stern,
2006:xxi). The Manchester report was commissioned from consultants
Deloitte MCS Ltd on behalf of the economic development agency for
Greater Manchester, Manchester Enterprises (now Commission for the
New Economy under the city-region governance arrangements). The
terms of reference of the report stated that its remit was to assess the
implications of climate change legislation, policy and regulation for
Greater Manchester.

Climate change was framed almost exclusively in terms of

mitigation and the need to develop a low carbon economy. The report
was selective in its identification of the legislation citing the European
Trading Scheme for carbon emissions but not the Flood Directive which
had come into force a year earlier. The role of spatial planning was
defined in terms of delivering an infrastructure which would reduce the
need to travel and thus reduce transport-related emissions. References
to adaptation appeared to generally mean businesses and institutions
adapting to a low-carbon economy. This emphasis on mitigation seems
to support the view that the thinking behind the report was influenced
by the values of ecological modernization. This was reinforced by the
reports emphasis on economic drivers.
The Manchester Mini-Stern estimated that the city-region could
lose a potential 21 billion to its economy

in costs and lost

opportunities if it failed to address climate change. The gains could

arise from positioning the city region at the forefront of the global
environmental industry, transforming the energy mix to low carbon to
reduce economic costs of production and distribution, using public
procurement to promote business with smart, green products, and
reducing uncertainty for investors by anticipating the regulatory impact
of carbon reduction strategies (Deloitte MCS Ltd, 2008:45-52). This is
in keeping with ecological modernizations belief that encouraging
innovation in

new technology can bring both environmental and

economic benefits. The problem with ecological modernization as a

way of thinking about the environment is not that it doesnt work, as
some critics, argue, but it is that it leads to a narrow policy focus. The
emphasis on entrepreneurialism and market forces to reduce carbon
emissions can exclude other environmental factors which need to be
addressed to make cities sustainable. An attempt to widen the focus of
climate change strategy was developed by a community of
practitioners around green infrastructure.

4. Green Infrastructure
Green infrastructure involves all those aspects which are not
built (or grey). It includes grassed areas, trees, landscaping and water
bodies. There is a sense in which green infrastructure has been
perceived as either aesthetic in function or ethereal, satisfying the
needs of eccentric enthusiasts for the preservation of obscure habitats.
Anxious to dispel these notions which led to green infrastructure
being seen as luxury and thus dropping in the pecking order for public
funding the North West Development Agency and Natural England
(the national agency responsible for biodiversity) commissioned
consultants to prepare a report, The Economic Value of Green
Infrastructure (NWDA and Natural England, 2008). It argued that green
infrastructure benefited the economy of the North West of England by
2.6 billion per annum and supported 109,000 jobs. It identified 11
economic benefits from greenery: more motivated workers, increased
property values, reduced sickness absence, rural tourism, agricultural
employment, reduced pollution leading to reduced health costs,
encourage healthy lifestyles, create jobs in community-owned green
spaces, conservation employment, flood risk reduction and reducing
the heat-island effect. The report was launched at Manchester Town
Hall with the endorsement of the then Secretary of State for
Communities and Local Government. At the same event the Greater
Manchester response to the report was issued.
The policy initiative Towards a Green Infrastructure Framework
for Greater

Manchester came in a report (TEP, 2008) to the

Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA). It set out the

justification for investing in green infrastructure and opened with the
assertion that GI is critical to sustain growth. It went on to refer to the
NWDA/Natural England report commissioned specifically to put the
case for Green Infrastructures economic benefits (NWDA and Natural
England, 2008). The report argued: This includes direct benefits such

as job creation in environmental and visitor economies. Indirect yet

quantifiable benefits such as land value uplift and high quality place
branding are relevant. It reinforced this with the assertion that GI
delivers the city-regions intended brand as a green, vibrant and
ambitious city adding that [s]uch a brand is critical if GM is to sustain
its competitiveness against other European city regions. There is a
clear element here of thinking associated with ecological modernization
and the branding of place. The reliance on the NWDA/Natural England
report is a self-conscious effort to justify environmental investment in
terms of a set of values framed by ecological modernization.
The references to ideas associated with resilient cities are
frequent. It saw green infrastructure as central to climate change both
mitigation and adaptation. It also set out the objectives of green
infrastructure and these are principally around resilience: flood risk
management and biodiversity. One section of the report examines why
a conurbation-wide approach is needed and points to catchment-wide
flood issues and river valley greenways both recognising the
spatiality of environmental issues. The idea of resilient cities is
embedded in the thinking of this document. The interesting point here
is that it deliberately set out to persuade policy-makers that green
infrastructure ought to be part and parcel of the economic ambitions of
the Greater Manchester Strategy. It helped to change the way
environmental issues were thought about by widening their scope
beyond the notion of the low carbon economy.

5. Ecocities Project
That Greater Manchester had embraced a way of thinking about
the environment which encompassed resilience was symbolised in the
launch of the Ecocities project. The project is a partnership between
the University of Manchester and the development company
Bruntwood. Its aim is to provide a blueprint for the first climate change
adapatation strategy for Greater Manchester (Ecocities, 2010). That it
is a partnership between a university and the private sector is perhaps

indicative of the way local authorities have not privileged adaptation a

finding of the Climate Change Committee (2010). But that the councils
in Greater Manchester are collaborating with the partnership is
evidence of a willingness to take on board the ideas emanating from
the partnership.
Indeed, the partnership was officially launched in the summer of
2009 at an event hosted by Manchester City Council at which the
council leader, Sir Richard Leese, spoke. The Planning and Housing
Commission invited the Project to present its findings and agreed that
officers working on the Greater Manchester Spatial Strategy would
seek to integrate some of the issues raised by researchers. This
includes identifying where additional tree cover is needed to mitigate
against the heat island effect, identifying surface water flooding etc.
As well as embedding the thinking of the climate change
scientists from Manchester University into our spatial strategy, the
Project has been influential at a number of levels. It has sought to
transform public and official opinion by a series of public lectures and
policy exchanges where key policy-makers engage directly with
climate change academics. Ecocities has carried out a series of
discrete research projects ranging from an investigation into the
preparedness of emergency services to assessing the capacity of
street trees to minimise run-off. And students from the Universitys
planning schools have carried out research for individual Greater
Manchester authorities as part of their Masters programme. Building
resilience into the city regions fabric is now part of the mainstream
plans and policies instead of being marginal and misunderstood. The
area where this is most advanced is probably in flood risk management
an area that is instructive in understanding the role of city-regions in
resilience.

6. Strategic Flood Risk

Until recently, the chief responsibility for flood risk was the
Environment Agency which is organised on a regional basis. The North

West Environment Agency is still responsible for flooding from rivers

and the sea but the 2010 Flood and Water Management Act gave local
councils responsibility for managing other types of flooding and
coordinating the response to flood risk in their areas. Greater
Manchester is assuming some of these statutory functions as part of a
pragmatic accommodation. The city region straddles two river
catchments the Douglas and the Mersey. Within Greater Manchester
there are a number of sub-catchments for each of which the
Environment Agency has produced a Catchment Flood Management
Plan. The logic of flood risk management might be to create
partnerships that align with catchment boundaries and would thus be
bigger than Greater Manchester. Or to focus on sub-catchments which
might involve each council being involved in a range of partnerships
with neighbouring authorities. But work is being coordinated at the city
region level.
Under the new legislation, each of the ten councils is a Lead
Local Flood Authority having statutory responsibility to address
flooding. The decision to address some of the issues at a city region
basis has been pragmatic. First of all, one of the first responsibilities is
to produce flood risk maps for the area. Since the ten local authorities
had jointly commissioned a Strategic Flood Risk Assessment to inform
their own spatial plans, it was logical to reduce costs and draw on this
assessment for the production of the new documents. Secondly, in
order to carry out the responsibilities, there was a necessity to
cooperate with the Environment Agency and the regional water
company United Utilities. Neither of these had the resource to engage
with every individual authority in the region and so expressed a wish to
liaise

with

groupings

of

authorities.

The

existing

institutional

arrangements in Greater Manchester made it an obvious choice for

engagement and, indeed, both the Environment Agency and United
Utilities have a voice on the Planning and Housing Commission.
Thirdly, strategic spatial planning and major incident planning takes
place at a Greater Manchester level and so existing institutional
responsibilities had a best fit with the new arrangements.

It is impractical impossible, even - for political boundaries to

align with natural boundaries even if such an entity could be
identified (catchments do not match habitats, for example: ecological
systems are more complex than a bounded space). So the spatial
scale selected does not pretend to be a bioregion. It is institutionally
convenient and democratically accountable. But the issues do have to
managed at more than one scale. So, although strategic assessments
and mapping may take place at a city-region level, specific actions and
programmes may take place at sub-catchment or local authority level.
Furthermore, water flows to and from Greater Manchester need to be
understood and managed and this involved working with partners at
the

North

West

regional

level.

So

Greater

Manchester

has

representatives on the NW Regional Flood Defence Committee as well

as having regional players represented on city-region Commissions.

7. Low Carbon Economy

Finally, I want to return to the issue of the low carbon economy.
When this was first adopted as a policy it was primarily about climate
change mitigation: reducing the release of greenhouse gases. This was
seen as intrinsically good, it achieved a social objective of reducing fuel
poverty and it offered the opportunity of employment as Greater
Manchester became a home to cutting-edge companies which
developed energy-efficient products.
The most recent publications from the Association of Greater
Manchester Authorities have referred to decentralised energy as an
objective. This means that there is a new emphasis on being less
dependent on external flows of energy. Consultants Urbed have carried
out a study which identifies potential energy sources in Greater
Manchester combined heat and power, wind farms, hydroelectric
sources and demonstrates how these can be linked to local
development.

This shift from an explicitly ecological modernization approach to

one which emphasises resilience is symbolic of the transformation in
thinking which has occurred in Greater Manchester.

8. Prospects
Clearly these are ambitious projects for the city region and in an
era of constrained public finances there must be a question mark
against the will and capacity of the 10 authorities to deliver. A
significant advantage for the conurbation is the culture of collaboration
which has developed over the lifetime of the Association of Greater
Manchester Authorities. As well as the major projects mentioned
above, the authorities have worked together to provide a statutory
waste plans and achieved a political and geographical consensus
despite potentially explosive issues. The decision to pilot the
Government initiative to explore new forms of city regional governance
has led to the creation (from April 2011) of the Greater Manchester
Combined Authority. This will strengthen decision-making by making a
majority vote of seven of the 10 council leaders in Greater Manchester
binding on the rest. The new Authority will be charged with delivering
the Greater Manchester Strategy which puts sustainability including
climate change mitigation and adaptation - at its heart.
There is reason to be optimistic that the strategy rather than
fighting over the spatial distribution of resources will guide decisions.
After all, the strategy is based on the perception that boundaries
between councils should be ignored for certain issues. Existing
voluntary collaboration has involved the funnelling of millions of pounds
in external grants mainly for regeneration by the Association and
distributed on the basis of impact and need rather than any sense of
equal

proportions

for

each

council.

That

has

been

done

unproblematically and without outcry.

Whether sufficient funding will be made available is more
uncertain. There are positive signs. The 10 leaders agreed to topslice
their already-squeezed transport investment budgets to help to fund

extensions to the tramway. In other areas, innovation may be the key.

To deliver the energy strategy, the city region is examining the use of
the EU Evergreen Fund to pay for some proposals and use the savings
delivered to replenish the Fund. Reliance on external grant will
continue to be important. The proposed Local Enterprise Partnership
the private sector led investment agency set up by the new
Government has green infrastructure as one of its objectives. But
the constituent councils will also draw upon embedded capacity: the
concept used in Greater Manchester to describe how existing staff and
financial resources are re-ordered to meet common challenges. Flood
protection is a good example where existing expertise and some
additional national funding have been pooled to make the city-region
an acknowledged leader in addressing the issue.

9. Conclusions
I hope that it is clear that there has been a shift in Greater
Manchester in the way climate change issues are perceived from
what is known as ecological modernization to what I have labelled
resilient cities. This shift has occurred, in part, because of the
existence of the city regions institutions. As in the case of flooding, the
existing institutional arrangements were a better fit for managing risk
than creating new bodies or leaving it to individual local authorities. In
some cases, such as energy planning, issues which would have been
left to energy companies now became very visible to a city-regional
level of governance concerned with strategic issues. So the existence
of city region arrangements has encouraged thinking about resilience.
It is not my purpose to call into question ecological
modernization as a theory. It seems logical that innovation and wealth
can be used to reduce the ecological footprint of particular cities. The
notion of resilient cities does not, therefore, put itself in opposition to
ecological modernization. Rather it is a refinement. It seeks to extend
the focus of its practice. Like ecological modernization, resilience

underpins economic performance. Like ecological modernization,

resilience generates skills and wealth.
A key difference is that it is long term. It is easy to persuade
developers to be green where the aesthetics of the landscape adds to
land values. It is easy to persuade finance directors to invest in energy
saving which reduces costs in the medium term. But the savings from
investment in resilience are much less clear cut. They can be long
term, affecting cities 40 to 70 years hence. The benefits are not always
returned to investors for example, flood protection is rarely costbeneficial to individual economic agents: it requires public schemes.
Most of all, there is the issue of social inequality. It is generally the
poorest in society and those without a voice who will suffer most from
climate change.
For no other reason, the move to resilience is welcomed.

REFERENCES
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Manchester
Strategy,
available
at
http://www.agma.gov.uk/cms_media/files/gm_strategy2.pdf
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2010
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climate change legislation on Manchester City Region and the North West,
Manchester, Manchester Enterprises
Ecocities
(2010)
Ecocities
Website
available
at
http://www.ecocitiesproject.org.uk/ecocities/page.aspxlocal
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N.,
(2006)
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Economics
of
Climate
Change,
available
at
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