research paper on urban problems

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Urbanization: a problem for the rich and the poor?

• Md Abdul Kuddus 1 , 2 , 4 ,
• Elizabeth Tynan 3 &
• Emma McBryde 1 , 2  

Public Health Reviews volume  41 , Article number:  1 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Urbanization has long been associated with human development and progress, but recent studies have shown that urban settings can also lead to significant inequalities and health problems. This paper is concerned with the adverse impact of urbanization on both developed and developing nations and both wealthy and poor populations within those nations, addressing issues associated with public health problems in urban areas. The discussion in this paper will be of interest to policy makers. The paper advocates policies that improve the socio-economic conditions of the urban poor and promote their better health. Further, this discussion encourages wealthy people and nations to become better informed about the challenges that may arise when urbanization occurs in their regions without the required social supports and infrastructure.

Urbanization refers to the mass movement of populations from rural to urban settings and the consequent physical changes to urban settings. In 2019, the United Nations estimated that more than half the world’s population (4.2 billion people) now live in urban area and by 2041, this figure will increase to 6 billion people [ 1 ].

Cities are known to play multifaceted functions in all societies. They are the heart of technological development and economic growth of many nations, while at the same time serving as a breeding ground for poverty, inequality, environmental hazards, and communicable diseases [ 2 ]. When large numbers of people congregate in cities, many problems result, particularly for the poor. For example, many rural migrants who settle in an urban slum area bring their families and their domesticated animals—both pets and livestock—with them. This influx of humans and animals leads to vulnerability of all migrants to circulating communicable diseases and the potential to establish an urban transmission cycle. Further, most urban poor live in slums that are unregulated, have congested conditions, are overcrowded, are positioned near open sewers, and restricted to geographically dangerous areas such as hillsides, riverbanks, and water basins subject to landslides, flooding, or industrial hazards. All of these factors lead to the spread of communicable and non-communicable diseases, pollution, poor nutrition, road traffic, and so on [ 3 , 4 , 5 ]. The problems faced by the poor spill over to other city dwellers. As the trend to urbanization continues, this spillover effect increases and takes on a global dimension as more and more of the world’s populations are affected [ 3 ].

Some of the major health problems resulting from urbanization include poor nutrition, pollution-related health conditions and communicable diseases, poor sanitation and housing conditions, and related health conditions. These have direct impacts on individual quality of life, while straining public health systems and resources [ 6 ].

Urbanization has a major negative impact on the nutritional health of poor populations. Because they have limited financial resources and the cost of food is higher in cities, the urban poor lack nutritious diets and this leads to illness, which contributes to loss of appetite and poor absorption of nutrients among those affected. Furthermore, environmental contamination also contributes to undernutrition; street food is often prepared in unhygienic conditions, leading to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses (e.g., botulism, salmonellosis, and shigellosis) [ 6 ]. Urban dwellers also suffer from overnutrition and obesity, a growing global public health problem. Obesity and other lifestyle conditions contribute to chronic diseases (such as cancers, diabetes, and heart diseases). Although obesity is most common among the wealthy, international agencies have noted the emergence of increased weight among the middle class and poor in recent years [ 7 ].

Populations in poor nations that suffer from protein-energy malnutrition [ 8 ] have increased susceptibility to infection [ 9 ] through the impact of micronutrient deficiency on immune system development and function [ 10 ]. Around 168 million children under 5 are estimated to be malnourished and 76% of these children live in Asia [ 11 ]. At the same time, the World Health Organization is concerned that there is an emerging pandemic of obesity in poor countries that leads to non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, hypertension, and stroke [ 12 ].

Obesity is caused by increased caloric intake and decreased physical activity [ 13 ], something historically associated with wealth. However, people in urbanized areas of developing countries are also now vulnerable to obesity due to lack of physical space, continually sitting in workplaces, and excessive energy intake and low energy expenditure. In these areas, infrastructure is often lacking, including sufficient space for recreational activities. Further, in developing countries, as in developed countries, large employers frequently place head offices in urban capitals and work is increasingly sedentary in nature [ 14 ]. Another culprit associated with the risk of developing obesity is the change in food intake that has led to the so-called nutrition transition (increased the consumption of animal-source foods, sugar, fats and oils, refined grains, and processed foods) in urban areas. For instance, in China, dietary patterns have changed concomitantly with urbanization in the past 30 years, leading to increased obesity [ 15 ]. In 2003, the World Health Organization estimated that more than 300 million adults were affected, the majority in developed and highly urbanized countries [ 16 ]. Since then, the prevalence of obesity has increased. For example, in Australia, around 28% of adults were obese in 2014–2015 [ 17 ].

Pollution is another major contributor to poor health in urban environments. For instance, the World Health Organization estimated that 6.5 million people died (11.6% of all global deaths) as a consequence of indoor and outdoor air pollution and nearly 90% of air-pollution-related deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries [ 18 ]. Poor nutrition and pollution both contribute to a third major challenge for urban populations: communicable diseases. The poor live in congested conditions, near open sewers and stagnant water, and are therefore constantly exposed to unhealthy waste [ 6 ]. Inadequate sanitation can lead to the transmission of helminths and other intestinal parasites. Pollution (e.g., from CO 2 emission) from congested urban areas contributes to localized and global climate change and direct health problems, such as respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer for both the rich and the poor.

In addition to human-to-human transmission, animals and insects serve as efficient vectors for diseases within urban settings and do not discriminate between the rich and poor. The prevalence and impact of communicable diseases in urban settings, such as tuberculosis (TB), malaria, cholera, dengue, and others, is well established and of global concern.

National and international researchers and policy makers have explored various strategies to address such problems, yet the problems remain. For example, research on solutions for megacities has been ongoing since the early 1990s [ 19 , 20 ]. These studies have concluded that pollution, unreliable electricity, and non-functioning infrastructure are priority initiatives; nevertheless, air pollution, quality of water in cities, congestion, disaster management issues, and infrastructure are not being systematically addressed [ 19 , 20 ].

The impact of inner city transportation on health, such as road traffic, is emerging as a serious problem. Statistics show that a minimum of 10 people die every day on the railways in the city of Mumbai, India [ 21 ]. Vietnam is another example of a country that has seen a remarkable increase in road traffic accidents [ 22 ]. Improvements to the country’s infrastructure have not been able to meet the increasing growth of vehicular and human traffic on the street. Vietnam reportedly has a population of 95 million and more than 18 million motorbikes on its roads. A deliberate policy is needed to reduce accidents [ 21 ].

Although urbanization has become an irreversible phenomenon, some have argued that to resolve the problems of the city, we must tackle the root causes of the problem, such as improving the socio-economic situation of the urban poor.

Until the conditions in rural areas improve, populations will continue to migrate to urban settings. Given the challenges that rural development poses, the root causes are unlikely to be addressed in the near future. Therefore, governments and development agencies should concentrate on adapting to the challenges of urbanization, while seeking to reduce unplanned urbanization.

Some examples of policies and practices that should be considered include (i) policies that consider whole-of-life journeys, incorporating accessible employment, community participation, mobility/migration and social transition, to break generational poverty cycles; (ii) policies addressing urban environmental issues, such as planned urban space and taxes on the use of vehicles to reduce use or to encourage vehicles that use less fuel as well as encourage bicycle use, walking, and other forms of human transportation; (iii) greater cooperative planning between rural and urban regions to improve food security (e.g., subsidies for farmers providing locally produced, unprocessed and low cost food to urban centers); (iv) social protection and universal health coverage to reduce wealth disparity among urban dwellers; including introduction of programs and services for health, for example by establishing primary healthcare clinics accessible and affordable for all including those living in urban slums [ 23 ].

Availability of data and materials

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor for his/her thoughtful comments and efforts towards improving the manuscript.

This work was conducted as a part of a PhD programme of the first authors and funded by the College of Medicine and Dentistry at the James Cook University, Australia (JCU-QLD-933347).

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MAK planned the study, analyzed, and prepared the manuscript. ET and EM helped in the preparation of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Kuddus, M.A., Tynan, E. & McBryde, E. Urbanization: a problem for the rich and the poor?. Public Health Rev 41 , 1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40985-019-0116-0

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Perspectives on urban transformation research: transformations in , of , and by cities

• Katharina Hölscher   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4504-3368 1 &
• Niki Frantzeskaki 2  

Urban Transformations volume  3 , Article number:  2 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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The narrative of ‘urban transformations’ epitomises the hope that cities provide rich opportunities for contributing to local and global sustainability and resilience. Urban transformation research is developing a rich yet consistent research agenda, offering opportunities for integrating multiple perspectives and disciplines concerned with radical change towards desirable urban systems. We outline three perspectives on urban transformations in , of and by cities as a structuring approach for integrating knowledge about urban transformations. We illustrate how each perspective helps detangle different questions about urban transformations while also raising awareness about their limitations. Each perspective brings distinct insights about urban transformations to ultimately support research and practice on transformations for sustainability and resilience. Future research should endeavour to bridge across the three perspectives to address their respective limitations.

Science highlights

We outline three perspectives on urban transformations for explaining, structuring and integrating the emerging urban transformations research field.

Transformation in cities focuses on unravelling the diverse factors, processes and dynamics driving place-based transformations in cities. This perspective represents research that aims to examine and explain why transformations occur and are supported in some places and not others.

Transformation of cities examines the outcomes of transformative changes in urban (sub-)systems. It serves to understand and evaluate the emergence of new urban functions, new interactions and their implications for sustainability and resilience.

Transformation by cities looks at the changes taking place on global and regional levels as a result of urbanisation and urban development approaches. The perspective emphasises the agency of cities on a global scale and how transformation concepts travel between places.

Future research should aim to bridge across the perspectives to address their respective limitations, for example by bringing in place-based knowledge (‘in’) into global discussions (‘by’) to facilitate cross-city learning.

Policy and practice recommendations

Experimental, collaborative and place-based governance approaches facilitate the integration of local knowledge, the development of inspiring narratives that boost sense of place and empower local communities to boost transformations in cities.

To assess and coordinate urban transformations, transformations, policy and practice actors need to employ systemic concepts and visions that advance solutions with multiple benefits for synergies and  minimal trade-offs.

Multi-level partnerships and (transnational) networks for policy knowledge exchange between cities help mobilising the potential of cities as agents of change for sustainability at a global scale.

Introduction

The notion of ‘urban transformation’ has been gaining ground in science and policy debates. Urban transformations to sustainability and resilience are enshrined in the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN 2016 ) and the New Urban Agenda (UN-Habitat 2016a ). A rich research field around questions of urban transformations has started to emerge, combining multiple scientific disciplines, ontologies and methods (Elmqvist et al. 2018 , 2019 ; Wolfram et al. 2017 ; Vojnovic 2014 ). Key to these debates is the aim to put cities on a central stage for accelerating change towards local and global sustainability and resilience.

Urban transformation narratives have been driven by the recognition of the need and opportunity for radical change towards sustainable and resilient cities. Cities constantly experience changes, but contemporary urban change processes are unparalleled. Cities grapple with a variety of interrelated challenges, including pollution, poverty and inequality, ageing infrastructure and climate change (Haase et al. 2018 ; UN-Habitat 2016b ; Seto et al. 2017 ). Urbanisation in its current form causes significant changes in land use, energy demand, biodiversity and lifestyles and raises questions about the contribution of cities to global environmental change (Haase et al. 2018 ; Alberti et al. 2018 ; Elmqvist et al. 2013 ; Seto et al. 2017 ). At the same time, cities concentrate the conditions and resources for realising the fundamental changes in energy, transportation, water use, land use, housing, consumption and lifestyles that are needed to ensure liveability, wellbeing and sustainability of our (urban) future (Romero-Lankao et al. 2018 ; Koch et al. 2016 ; Elmqvist et al. 2018 ). The potential and momentum in cities is visible in for example the ‘climate emergency’ declarations of local governments that call for accelerated climate action in view of international stalemate.

The notion of urban transformation guides and formulates a better understanding of urban change. On the one hand, ‘transformation’ serves as an analytical lens to describe and understand the continuous, complex and contested processes and dynamics manifesting in cities, as well as how these dynamics alter urban functions, local needs and interactions between cities and their surroundings (McCormick et al. 2013 ; Iwaniec et al. 2019 ). On the other hand, the transformation perspective provides a normative orientation that emphasises the need for radical and systemic change in order to overcome persistent social, environmental and economic problems and to purposefully move towards sustainable and resilient cities in the long-term (Hölscher et al. 2019 ; Kabisch et al. 2018 ). Accordingly, sustainability and resilience are complementary concepts to asses and orient urban transformation processes (Elmqvist et al. 2019 ; Pickett et al. 2014 ; Simon et al. 2018 ).

In this paper, we distinguish three perspectives on urban transformations to structure and guide research and practice on urban transformations. Urban transformation research is an emergent, loosely connected interdisciplinary field combining urban studies and complex system studies. Various research fields and disciplines converge in urban transformation research; the multitude of disciplines has been systematically reviewed in Wolfram et al. ( 2017 ) and Wolfram and Frantzeskaki ( 2016 ). This diversity engenders multiple entry points and provides complementary concepts, theories and insights. However, the diversity causes ambiguities in ontologies, use of concepts and fragmented knowledge about how urban transformations unfold and can be supported.

Urban transformation research would benefit from “gradual interconnection, and the articulation of a certain range of research perspectives” (Wolfram and Frantzeskaki 2016 : 2). To facilitate this, we distinguish and describe three perspectives on urban transformations that provide areas of convergence across diverse research approaches. Each perspective provides distinct starting points to generate, structure and integrate knowledge along certain questions. Ultimately, the perspectives outline an agenda for advancing theory and practice on urban transformations for sustainability and resilience: they generate implications for urban policy and practice and a way forward to bridge across the perspectives to address the respective limitations.

Perspectives on transformations in, of and by cities

We distinguish between perspectives on urban transformations in , of and by cities. The perspectives provide entry points for formulating and structuring research questions on urban transformations, integrating research approaches and knowledge, and deriving implications for practice.

The three perspectives start from similar assumptions about cities and urban transformations. They focus on urban transformations as complex processes of radical, systemic change across multiple dimensions (e.g. social, institutional, cultural, political, economic, technological, ecological) (Hölscher et al. 2018 ; Frantzeskaki et al. 2018a ; McCormick et al. 2013 ). Cities are understood as complex, adaptive and open systems (Alberti et al. 2018 ; McPhearson and Wijsman, 2017 ; Ernstson et al., 2010 ; Collier et al. 2013 ). This implies that urban transformations are not spatially limited, and driven by and driving cross-scale and cross-sectoral dynamics: cities are “local nodes within multiple overlapping social, economic, ecological, political and physical networks, continuously shaping and shaped by flows of people, matter and information across scales” (Wolfram and Frantzeskaki 2016 : 143; see also Hansen and Coenen 2015 ; Chelleri et al. 2015 ). To describe, explain and evaluate urban transformations, cities are increasingly approached as social-ecological-technical systems (SETS), including (1) socio-economic, political and institutional dimensions (social); (2) natural resource flows and physical phenomena (ecological); (3) as well as the manmade surroundings (technological) (McPhearson 2020 ; Alberti et al. 2018 ; Bai et al. 2017 ). Actors have a central position within urban systems, influencing how cities are organised and resources are produced and consumed. Given the open character of urban systems, actors are diverse and include household members, local governments, and entrepreneurs also regional and national governments, international bodies and multinational companies, amongst others (Glaas et al. 2019 ; Webb et al. 2018 ).

Urban transformations can be desirable or undesirable (Elmqvist et al. 2019 ; Hölscher 2019 ). A shared aim across urban transformation research perspectives and approaches is to generate actionable knowledge to intervene in urban transformation processes and support radical change towards sustainable and resilient urban systems (cf. Wittmayer and Hölscher 2017 ).

Despite these shared starting points and aims, the perspectives ask distinct questions about transformations vis-à-vis urban systems. They look at systemic change dynamics taking place in cities (“in”), the outcomes of systemic change of cities (“of”), or systemic change on global and regional levels driven by cities (“by”). These entry points and corresponding questions manifest in differences along key descriptors of urban transformations (cf. Hölscher et al. 2018 ). The differences are not contradictory: they generate complementary insights for understanding and supporting urban transformations given the different level of aggregation, analysis and understanding of system dynamics and points of intervention (Table 1 ). 

The main aim of the perspectives is to facilitate structuring of urban transformation research along shared themes and questions. Specifically, in articulating these, we show the actionable knowledge generated through each perspective to support urban transformations for sustainability and resilience. We also show that the perspectives offer bridges across knowledge to strengthen research and practice.

Transformation in cities: cities as places of transformations

Transformation in cities focuses on unravelling the diverse, local, regional and global factors, processes and interactions that converge in cities as places of transformations, thus driving or constraining place-based transformations.

The perspective zooms in on cities as spaces and places. Cities are geolocated in an objective, abstracted point, i.e. space, which is for example demarcated by geographical and administrative boundaries. Cities as places are defined by the physical (i.e. urban form) and philosophical (i.e. imagination and representation) relationships between people and place (Roche, 2016 ; Knox 2005 ). Thus, cities as places are both “a centre of meaning and the external context of people’s actions” (Knox 2005 : 2). As spaces and places of transformations, cities harbour specific potentials, driving forces and barriers (Hansen and Coenen 2015 ).

Place-based transformations are the result of the social construction by people responding to the opportunities and constraints of their particular locality (Fratini and Jensen 2017 ; Späth and Rohracher 2014 ). Endogenous conditions and developments include geographic location, climate, local economic structure, population dynamics and the built environment. For example, urban segregation and inequality result from and are reinforced by interactions between residential choices, personal preferences, job markets, land and real estate markets and public policies (Alberti et al. 2018 ). The construction of place-based transformations does not take place independently of societal norms and representations of the world. Economic and cultural globalisation and the resulting ‘network society’ becomes manifest in cities and shape place-based transformation dynamics (Roche, 2016 ). Scholars seeking to understand the ‘geography in transitions’ emphasise that cities are positioned within cross-scale spatial and institutional contexts that influence local change dynamics (Hansen and Coenen 2015 ; Truffer et al. 2015 ; Coenen et al. 2012 ; Hodson et al. 2017 ; McLean et al. 2016 ). Along similar lines, Loorbach et al. ( 2020 ) show the translocal character of social innovations that are locally rooted but globally connected.

This perspective positions transformative agency as deeply embedded in socio-spatial contexts. A central research focus is on urban niches that experiment with and scale new solutions (McLean et al. 2016 ; Ehnert et al. 2018 ), governance arrangements (Wolfram 2019 ; Hölscher et al. 2019a ) and ways of relating and knowing (Frantzeskaki and Rok 2018 ). Urban experimentation or real-world laboratories have become process tools to facilitate co-creative and innovative solution finding processes that empower actors to deal with urban problems, for example related to mobility, regeneration, community resilience or green job creation (Bulkeley et al. 2019 ; von Wirth et al. 2019 ; Hölscher et al. 2019c ). Such approaches represent situated manners of  place-making to co-develop inspiring ‘narratives of place’, empower local communities and foster urban transformative capacities (Wolfram 2019 ; Jensen et al. 2016 ; Ziervogel, 2019 ; Castán Broto et al. 2019 ). The idea of place-specificity recognises the particular role of ‘sense of place’ and ‘place attachment’, which can be an outcome of experimentation and in turn drive transformative change (Frantzeskaki et al., 2016 ; di Masso et al. 2019 ; Brink and Wamsler 2019 ). Ryan ( 2013 ) describes how multiple small ‘eco-acupuncture’ interventions can shift the community’s ideas of what is permissible, desirable and possible.

A key value of this perspective lies on its embedded research inquiry into the ‘black box’ of a city, including social, economic and ecological situated and contextual knowledge. A main implication for urban policy and planning practice is to facilitate place-based innovation by going beyond sectoral infrastructuring and top-down masterplanning towards situated and cross-sectoral place-making. Experimental and co-creative governance approaches help recognise and mobilise place-specific capacities. The need for place-based innovation further calls for higher-level policies to be centred on the local dimension. For example, the current European Union Cohesion Policy puts a place-based approach into practice that recognises place variety (Solly 2016 ) and further extends it to a governance capacity building programme that engages with cities on the ground through the URBACT program ( www.urbact.eu ).

A limitation of this perspective is that knowledge about and actions instigating transformations in a specific city context are very entrenched in context dynamics. This can  limit transferability or scaling other than ‘scaling deep’ pathway (Moore et al.  2015 ; Lam et al. 2020 ) if not connected with mechanisms for global and transnational learning and knowledge transfer (Section 2.3). In (Moore et al. 2015 ; Lam et al. 2020 ) addition, neighbourhood-level interventions need to be connected to knowledge about city-level outcomes. This calls for critical evaluations of systemic outcomes in urban systems (Section 2.2).

Transformation of cities: outcomes of transformation dynamics in urban systems

Transformation of cities examines and evaluates the outcomes of transformation dynamics in urban (sub-)systems in terms of new urban functions, local needs and interactions and implications for sustainability and resilience.

This perspective focuses on urban (sub-)systems defined by specific functions (e.g. economy, energy, transport, food, healthcare, housing). Compared to the other perspectives, it most explicitly applies socio-technical and social-ecological, and increasingly SETS, frameworks to describe urban (sub-)systems. Urban transformations are the outcome of radical changes of dominant structures (e.g. infrastructures, regulations), cultures (e.g. values) and practices (e.g. mobility behaviours) of such urban (sub-)systems. As a result of these changes, what kind of and how system functions are delivered is fundamentally altered (Ernst et al. 2016 ).

The main aim of this perspective is to explain and evaluate how transformation dynamics affect urban systems’ functions. Frameworks and models to investigate how transformation dynamics influence urban (sub-)systems pay attention to the complex processes and feedback loops within, across and beyond urban systems and the accumulated effects on the urban system level. For example, studying social-ecological-technical infrastructure systems in cities advances understanding of urban structure-function relationships between green space availability, wellbeing, biodiversity and climate adaptation (McPhearson 2020 ). Similarly, urban metabolism analysis and ecosystem studies seek to understand energy and material flows (Bai 2016 ; Dalla Fontana and Boas 2019 ). An emerging perspective on cities as ‘multi-regime’ configurations investigates dynamics across different functional systems (e.g. energy, water, mobility, food) (Grin et al. 2017 ; Irvine and Bai 2019 ). This provides opportunities to unveil interactions across multiple urban systems and scales. For instance, rapid changes in electricity systems can have knock-on effects for urban mobility or heat systems (Chen and Chen 2016 ; Chelleri et al. 2015 ). The relational geography perspective puts forth a differentiated view of urban systems: it zooms in on different boroughs, districts or neighbourhoods and raises questions such as how innovation and change in one location affects neighbouring locations (Wachsmuth et al. 2016 ).

This perspective most explicitly addresses prescriptive, ‘goal’-driven and recently mission-driven orientations for reinventing cities to be more sustainable, resilient, inclusive, attractive, prosperous, safe and environmentally healthy (Elmqvist et al. 2018 ; Kabisch et al. 2018 ; Rudd et al. 2018 ). Researchers and urban practitioners and planners employ concepts like ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’ as frames to evaluate the state of urban systems and to inform urban planning and regeneration programmes (Elmqvist et al. 2019 ). The systemic focus and application of such concepts also helps to identify synergies and trade-offs across urban systems and goals. For example, the sustainability paradigm of maximising efficiency in mobility or energy systems might result in vulnerability to natural disasters when systems lack parallel or redundant back-up systems (ibid.). Similarly, scholars point to the risks of green gentrification: while urban greening interventions have multiple benefits for the environment and climate adaptation, if not planned and governed inclusively, they can create unintended dynamics of exclusion, polarisation and segregation (Anguelovski et al. 2019 ; Haase et al. 2017 ).

This perspective takes a meta-level view on the agency and governance in cities, highlighting strategic partnerships and interventions based on desired system-level outcomes. From this perspective, cities may act as coherent strategic entities based on systemic understandings of city-specific and long-term effects to pursue managed transitions of their large-scale (sub-)systems (Jensen et al. 2016 ; Hodson et al., 2017 ). Urban transformation governance needs to facilitate alignment, foresight and reflexive learning to recognise, anticipate and shape transformation dynamics and leverage points (Hölscher et al. 2019b ). Key starting points are shared definitions of what ‘desirability’ means in specific contexts. Orchestration can align priorities and connect emerging alternatives, ideas, people and solutions (ibid.; Hodson et al., 2017 ). Shared and long-term visions re-orient short-term decisions and interventions that create synergies across multiple priorities. For example, Galvin and Maassen ( 2020 ) analyse Medellín’s (Columbia) mobility transformation that also contributed to inclusiveness and public safety. Transition management is a practice-oriented framework to co-develop shared visions, pathways and experiments in an ongoing learning-by-doing and doing-by-learning way (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018b ; Loorbach et al. 2015 ).

In summary, this perspective provides a view on interpreting transformation dynamics and developing orientations and practical guidance for intervention. It becomes visible in urban planning and policy practice through the development of systemic urban concepts as ‘anchor points’ or attractors for urban transformations such as ‘sharing cities’, ‘circular cities’, or ‘renaturing cities’. Cities like Rotterdam in the Netherlands and New York City in the USA are using such concepts to formulate long-term climate, sustainability and resilience agendas and establish cross-cutting city-level partnerships for their implementation (Hölscher et al. 2019a ). A main implication of this perspective is about the need to institutionalise and prioritise such long-term agendas into policy and planning across sectors and scales (ibid.).

A limitation of this perspective is that it overlooks place-specific implications and can nuance or be agnostic to politics and contestations at local sub-system level. Strategically linking place-based initiatives (Section 2.1) with systemic urban concepts and visions provides a powerful tool to align the multitude of activities taking place in cities and to coordinate urban transformations on (sub-)system scale. Additionally, this perspective requires explicit attention to the relationships between urban systems and their hinterlands or other distant territories, which affect and are affected by urban system’s functioning (Section 2.3).

Transformation by cities: cities as agents of change at global scale

The third perspective on transformation by cities draws attention to the changes taking place on global and regional levels as a result of urbanisation and urban development.

The main emphasis is here placed on cities as “agents of change at global scale” (Acuto 2016 ). As open systems, cities are not just influenced by developments outside their spatial boundaries (see Section 2.1). Urban transformations also have implications on global resources, environmental conditions, commodities and governance.

On the one hand, cities – including their social-ecological-technological configurations and the diversity of actors influencing them – can be viewed as culprits driving global high emissions, resource depletion and unsustainability. This raises critical questions about the relationship between current and unprecedented urbanisation and global sustainability (Seto et al. 2017 ; Haase et al. 2018 ). For example, the expansion of cities will triple land cover by 2030, compared to 2000, with severe implications on biodiversity (Alberti et al. 2018 ; Elmqvist et al. 2013 ). Different frameworks and concepts are employed to describe and assess the linkages between cities and their hinterland and other distant territories, including ‘urban land teleconnections’ (Seto et al. 2012 ), ‘regenerative cities’ (Girardet 2016 ) and ‘urban ecological footprint’ (Folke et al. 1997 ; Hoornweg et al. 2016 ; Rees and Wackernagel 2008 ).

On the other hand, cities have become key loci for trialling sustainable approaches and solutions that inform the global sustainability agenda (UN-Habitat 2016b ; Seto et al. 2017 ; Bai et al. 2018 ). Cities – especially local governments – play key roles in shaping global sustainability programmes and discourses and in developing and sharing knowledge and best practices. Local governments have also become celebrated for taking action when the national government is not (van der Heijden 2018 ; Acuto 2016 ). Governance strategies such as experimentation, best practices or imaginaries have been taken up globally (Haarstad 2016 ; McCann 2011 ; van der Heijden 2016 ). This raises questions about how the experiences and best practices showcased in cities become knowledge to be diffused and shared, as well as how transformations travel between places and across scales (Lam et al. 2020 ).

This perspective supports a polycentric and multi-level approach to global environmental governance. Global environmental governance is becoming increasingly decentralised and polycentric, which is visible for example in climate governance (Ostrom 2014 ; Jordan et al. 2018 ; Hölscher and Frantzeskaki 2020 ) and the urban SDG (UN 2016 ). The recent ‘city charters’ of global organisations such as the IPCC Cities and Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity and Cities and Future Earth Urban Knowledge Network, showcase the recognition of ‘cities’ as key players on a global level. While urban sustainability governance has often proliferated without leadership at national levels, the nestedness of local governance in legal and institutional frameworks at regional, national and international levels requires alignment of priorities and legislation across governance levels (Hughes et al. 2017 ; Keskitalo et al. 2016 ).

In summary, this perspective creates knowledge about the role of cities in contributing to global change and what it means for governance, policy and planning at global, national, metropolitan and regional levels. It provides and requires big data from cities and their resource footprints, flows and dynamics so as to draw on patterns and pathways for change that can inform and reinforce global agendas for action. A key mechanism for urban practitioners is to strengthen policy knowledge exchange across frontrunning cities (Hölscher et al. 2019a ). Transnational city networks such as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), C40 and 100 Resilient Cities facilitate knowledge exchange and inter-city learning, foster the creation of collective goals, lobby for international attention, and enable the transplantation of innovative, sustainable and resilient policy and planning approaches (Acuto et al. 2017 ; Lee 2018 ; Mejía-Dugand et al. 2016 ; Frantzeskaki et al. 2019 ; Davidson et al. 2019 ).

A danger of this perspective is that this global discourse is mainly focused on ‘global cities’. Medium-sized and middle-income cities are leaders in terms of actual sustainability performance and need to be actively acknowledged and considered (Vojnovic 2014 ). Florida ( 2017 ) criticises how “winner-take-all cities” reinforce inequality, while many cities stagnate and middle-class neighbourhoods disappear. This requires more research into how resources and opportunities are distributed and made accessible across different cities, for example ‘global’ cities, metropolitan cities and developing countries’ cities (Coenen et al. 2012 ; Gavin et al. 2013 ). Additionally, cities are not necessarily a united front: priorities and interpretations differ across cities (Growe and Freytag 2019 ). To address these issues, this perspective would benefit from a more critical and contextual research approach on place-based transformations (Section 2.1), questioning why transformations occur and are supported in some places and not others. Comparative analyses into the factors and dynamics influencing place-based transformations can facilitate transnational knowledge transfer and upscaling of place-based initiatives.

Conclusions

We offer three perspectives on urban transformations research as a means to cherish and celebrate, but also structure the diversity of the growing urban transformations research field. Our paper is a first attempt to distinguish these perspectives, by discussing key questions, entry points, practical implications and limitations. We show that the perspectives help converge research approaches and clarify how different perspectives provide evidence for urban policy and planning.

The perspectives are not merely conceptual devices: they show up in cities’ agendas, programmes and approaches and give guidance to practitioners. The ‘transformation in cities’ perspective asks practitioners to experiment with collaborative place-making approaches like urban living labs to integrate local knowledge and strengthen a sense of place and empowerment. The ‘transformation of cities’ perspective appears as underlying integrative systems’ approach for core urban strategies such as climate change and biodiversity strategies. The ‘transformation by cities’ perspective highlights the need to invest in policy knowledge exchange between cities, for example through transnational city networks.

The three perspectives on urban transformation do not exist in isolation from one another. We have shown how the perspectives can feed into and complement each other to address respective research gaps and practical challenges. The main future research direction we put forth is to bridge across the perspectives to address their respective limitations and generate comprehensive actionable knowledge. This means to formulate integrative research questions bridging across perspectives: How do place-making initiatives in a specific neighbourhood affect urban systems’ functioning? How can place-based transformation knowledge be transferred to other city contexts? How can place-based experiments and transformation initiatives or projects inform policy at city and city-network level? What are the conditions for downscaling strategic initiatives from global level – for example, post-Aichi biodiversity targets – considering capacities of urban sub-systems?

Availability of data and materials

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Abbreviations

US Department of Housing and Urban Development

International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives

International Panel on Climate Change

Sustainable Development Goal

Social-ecological-technological system

United NationsMeerow, S

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Hölscher, K., Frantzeskaki, N. Perspectives on urban transformation research: transformations in , of , and by cities. Urban Transform 3 , 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42854-021-00019-z

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Urban Transformations

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Problems and Prospects for Urban Areas

Subscribe to the economic studies bulletin, janet rothenberg pack , jrp janet rothenberg pack former brookings expert samara r. potter , and srp samara r. potter william g. gale william g. gale the arjay and frances fearing miller chair in federal economic policy, senior fellow - economic studies , co-director - urban-brookings tax policy center @williamgale2.

July 1, 2002

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Urban areas face daunting economic challenges that have increased in scope in recent years. At the same time, cities provide exciting opportunities for growth and revitalization. The interplay of these challenges and opportunities create important tasks for policymakers and researchers.

Each year, the Brookings Institution and the Wharton School of Business cosponsor a conference to address these issues and provide cutting-edge, accessible research on issues unique to urban areas, as well as on broad economic and policy topics that have special applications in an urban setting.

The most recent conference, held at the Brookings Institution on October 25-26, 2001, sponsored two groups of papers being published this month in the Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs (Brookings Institution Press, 2002). A symposium of three papers focuses on metropolitan tax and fiscal policy, examining the effects of political mergers between cities and suburbs, the links between the economic vitality of cities and suburbs, and firm-specific tax incentives for industry relocation. The remaining conference papers focus on changing demographics in urban areas, including the impact of alternative measures of gentrification on lower income city residents and the varying experiences of immigrant students in the New York City public school system.

Symposium on Metropolitan Tax and Fiscal Policy

Cities attract businesses and residents by providing high-quality amenities. But providing those amenities requires funding, and higher tax burdens increase incentives for city residents and firms to depart for lower tax locations. Balancing these considerations is an essential problem in urban public finance. The income disparity between most large central cities and their relatively wealthier suburbs makes these issues even more difficult and politically sensitive. In addition, the potential effectiveness of many fiscal options is unknown, and the connection between economic effectiveness and political feasibility is sometimes overlooked.

Metropolitan Consolidation

Large metropolitan areas in the United States are characterized by a very large number of local governments, with many urban areas containing more than one hundred separate municipalities. The fragmentation of local government has led to concerns regarding the distribution of government services and the efficiency with which these services are provided. Central city mayors and some analysts have advocated political and fiscal consolidation, but annexation of developed suburbs has rarely occurred.

Stephen Calabrese of the University of South Florida, Glenn Cassidy of Cassidy Policy Research, and Dennis Epple of Carnegie-Mellon University model voting behavior in multiple municipalities to evaluate the effects of mergers. Voters, who vary only in income, choose their preferred level of public services and redistribution, and the level and type of tax levied. They also choose their residential location based on these policies. In equilibrium, majority rule determines tax, public service, and redistribution policy; each municipality has a balanced budget; no one wants to move; and the housing market clears. The policy favored by the median-income voter will always be adopted. The model produces results consistent with observed patterns in cities: although both large and small municipalities provide public goods, redistribution occurs almost exclusively in large central cities. Small suburban municipalities depend primarily on property tax revenues to finance public services, but central cities use both income and property taxes. The policy choices result in income stratification across the metropolitan region. Low-income households with a preference for redistribution are more likely to locate in the central city, whereas wealthy households will choose suburbs with high levels of public service provision and less redistribution.

The stratification of municipalities by income implies that mergers are generally not politically viable. Residents of a poorer municipality, such as a central city, will support a merger with a wealthier suburb to obtain higher public good provision and redistribution, with lower overall tax rates. But residents of the wealthier suburb will oppose consolidation to avoid falling property values, reduced public good provision, and increased redistribution.

The aggregate welfare effects of mergers are more complicated. A merger between two jurisdictions will prompt the wealthiest individuals in the higher income jurisdiction to move from the consolidated city to a wealthier suburb in order to escape redistribution policies. These movers from the consolidated area will become the poorest residents in their new location and will purchase housing of less than the average value in that suburb. Housing prices in the new suburb will rise and public good provision will fall. This pattern will continue across suburbs in a domino effect. As a result, consolidation results in a negative impact on surrounding suburbs as well as for the wealthier residents of the merged municipalities.

Consolidation might still raise aggregate welfare, if mergers benefit poor voters more than they harm wealthier ones. Where this is the case, governments wishing to encourage annexations could compensate suburban residents for their losses and still improve social welfare.

Besides providing new insights into the dearth of consolidations, this paper advances researchers? ability to model simultaneous decisionmaking across multiple policy choices and offers a systematic explanation for income segregation that arises even when households have no explicit preference for the characteristics of their neighbors.

Suburban Fiscal Transfers to Central Cities

In the absence of political consolidation, financial transfers from suburbs to central cities are another, possibly more feasible, way to address metropolitan area public finance issues. But should the suburbs be interested in such an arrangement? Traditionally, proponents of such transfers have suggested that transfers are justified either because central cities fund public goods that benefit suburban residents, such as infrastructure, public education, and policing, or because central city poverty is a regional problem that should be addressed via transfers from the entire urban region.

In their paper, Andrew Haughwout of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Robert Inman of the University of Pennsylvania argue that neither of these arguments is compelling. They examine a new rationale for suburban transfers to central cities, based on two premises. The first is that cities create agglomeration economies. These economies occur because of the geographic concentration of firms within an industry and the resultant decline in transportation and labor costs, encouragement of innovation, and ease of spreading new ideas. These agglomeration economies reduce the cost of city-produced goods to both city and suburban residents. The second premise is that weak central city government—marked by a variety of financial practices and fiscal institutions—imposes costs on city residents and firms and induces them to relocate. The relocation, though, reduces the agglomeration economies available in the city and causes the price of city-produced goods to rise. If both premises hold, weak city governments hurt suburban residents, weak city finances cause poor suburban economic health, and suburban residents should be willing to pay to improve center cities’ weak financial situation in order to preserve the benefits of agglomeration economies.

Haughwout and Inman demonstrate empirically that weak city finances are associated with negative city and suburban economic outcomes. In particular, they show that weak budgetary institutions, strong city unions, rising poverty rates and declining tax bases are associated with lower income, population growth, and rates of home value appreciation in both cities and their surrounding suburbs. They also develop a structural simulation model based on Philadelphia’s economy that builds in a link between city finances and suburban economic outcomes. The effects of city finances on suburban health in Philadelphia are found to be similar to those found in the aggregate data. In this simulation a causal relation is assumed by construction, and thus the model implies that a suburban family should be willing to pay between $100 and $250 annually to improve city fiscal institutions in order to realize the benefits of agglomeration economies in the city.

The conclusion that weak city finances reduce agglomeration economies implies that transfers from suburbs to cities would only protect agglomeration economies if the funds were used to strengthen weak city finances. Such transfers would be counterproductive if the funds were used to raise pay for city workers or increase constituent services. To avoid these problems and ensure that the funds are used appropriately, Haughwout and Inman advocate the use of a number of specific mechanisms for transfers, including using suburban aid to fully fund state poverty mandates, reforming local property tax rules, and making aid dependent on the adoption of competitive bidding practices for city service contracts.

Tax Incentives and Business Location

If city-suburb consolidations are rare and suburban areas are reluctant to transfer resources to central cities, as the first two papers suggest, a third fiscal option for urban economic development is large, firm-specific tax breaks aimed at attracting or retaining particular businesses. Such actions have been highly publicized in the past, ranging from cities recruiting professional sports teams, to Alabama wooing Mercedes Benz in the early 1990s.

Despite the frequency of such actions, the research literature casts considerable doubt on the effectiveness of such incentives, on both theoretical and empirical grounds. One strand of the theoretical literature argues that under tax competition, all jurisdictions will select inefficiently low tax rates to prevent firms from exiting. This will result in a reduction of public service provision below efficient levels. Another strand of the literature argues that tax competition across communities results in an efficient allocation of resources, because people can choose where to live, and thus specific tax incentives introduce distortions. This approach assumes that if no tax incentives are offered, cities tax corporations’ capital at rates equal to the marginal benefit of the public goods provided to the firms. Neither approach justifies large tax incentives for particular companies.

In their contribution to the conference, Teresa Garcia-Mila of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain and Therese McGuire of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois challenge the conventional wisdom. They develop a model in which cities compete for a mobile capital stock and benefit from productivity-enhancing agglomeration economies. Under these circumstances, the efficient tax rates on new firms equals the difference between the marginal benefit to firms of the public services they consume and the marginal agglomeration benefits to the city of the additional capital brought by the firm.

The authors then examine Chicago’s decision in 2001 to offer Boeing $50 million in tax incentives to relocate its corporate headquarters from Seattle. Chicago’s pursuit of Boeing is puzzling, given that it involved only the relocation of Boeing’s headquarters rather than its manufacturing plants. Moreover, since most of the headquarters employees transferred from Seattle, few new jobs were created. In stark contrast, Chicago allowed a large local candy manufacturer employing nearly 1,000 people to leave the city without offering it tax incentives to stay. Garcia-Mila and McGuire suggest that Chicago planners believed that a management-oriented firm like Boeing would create greater potential for knowledge spillovers than would the retention of the manufacturing facility. The authors conclude that agglomeration of capital may have sufficient economic as well as political payoffs to justify firm-specific tax incentives.

Gentrification and Immigration

Two other papers presented at the conference provide new evidence on current issues in urban economics and urban policy. They demonstrate the breadth of topics that fall comfortably within the area of urban economics and the important insights that can be gained on urban issues from related fields of research, such as poverty and welfare or labor economics.

Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?

Although white flight to the suburbs during the second half of the twentieth century is often viewed as a causal factor in the demise of central cities, the return of affluent households to city neighborhoods sometimes elicits similarly intense criticism. Gentrification, or the influx of upper-middle class or wealthy households into previously poor neighborhoods, is popularly seen as harmful to poor and minority residents. The closing of the Cabrini-Green Housing Project in Chicago and its partial replacement with townhomes, for example, produced an uproar among long-time public housing residents, who felt they were being driven from their homes despite city officials’ reassurances that mixed-income housing developments would be beneficial to low-income as well as new middle-class neighborhood residents.

A paper by Jacob Vigdor of Duke University suggests that much less is known about the impact of gentrification on poor families than is commonly supposed. Rather than assuming there is a consensus definition, Vigdor begins by defining gentrification and makes the distinction between preference-driven and income-driven gentrification. In preference-driven gentrification, high-income households raise their valuation of the amenities available in poor neighborhoods. A common example is the two-earner family that decides it prefers a shorter commute and increases its willingness to pay to live in the more central neighborhood. Income-driven gentrification occurs when a change in the productivity of high-income households raises the demand for, and hence the price of, housing in upper-income neighborhoods. This forces some of the people in these neighborhoods to move to lower priced areas.

Under both types of gentrification, housing prices rise in the formerly poor neighborhoods, so that renters there either have to move or absorb the higher rental costs (and possibly higher amenities). One difference between the two lies in housing prices in the upper-income neighborhood, which fall under preference-driven gentrification but rise under income-driven gentrification. Vigdor proposes policy options that both directly and indirectly reduce potential harm caused by gentrification. Rent subsidies or relocation assistance directly address rising costs of housing for low-income households. Job training or education subsidies could make poor residents more able to compete in the housing market.

Gentrification may also have effects on the poor apart from through the housing market. Many of these effects are likely to be positive. Rising housing prices can raise property tax revenues, increase redistribution, and improve public services. An influx of higher income households might create job opportunities for low-income residents or relocate jobs closer to the neighborhood. Poor residents might benefit from improvements in neighborhood quality, such as lower crime rates.

Vigdor argues that most work on gentrification focuses too narrowly on spatial displacement and does not in fact demonstrate that displacement is caused by gentrification or that it causes harm. Using Boston as a case study, he finds that households with low educational attainment (who are more likely to be among the long-term poor) living in gentrifying areas are no more likely to move than other households in the area or than low-education households in other areas. Gentrification has not increased the segregation of Boston neighborhoods by socioeconomic class; in fact, gentrification seems to lead to more mixed-income neighborhoods.

Immigrants and School Segregation

The proportion of the U.S. population that is foreign-born—currently about 10.4 percent—is at its highest level since 1930. Research suggests that segregation among racial groups is significant and negatively affects children’s educational attainment, but it is unknown whether the same holds true for immigrants. Peer effects—proximity to low-income, less-educated classmates—appear to negatively affect racial minorities, particularly for in the areas of education and employment. Peer effects may have a different impact on the children of immigrants because although the parents generally have little education, immigrant groups often demonstrate a strong preference for educating their children. Similarly, although schools with large racial minorities have been found to receive less funding than average, no previous studies have investigated the impact of immigrant segregation on school funding. Indeed, segregation of immigrants may improve access to resources, as concentration of a group may make it more efficient for the government to provide particular services, such as classes in English as a second language.

Using evidence from the New York public schools, in which 16 percent of students were foreign-born in 1998-99, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine O’Regan, Amy Ellen Schwartz, and Leanna Stiefel of New York University evaluate the degree of immigrant segregation and its relationship to resource allocation and student performance. Having assembled a data set that contains information on the academic and socioeconomic characteristics of all children in New York City public schools in 1998-99, aggregated to school level, the authors find a relatively low level of segregation for immigrants overall.

Some groups of immigrant students, particularly students from the former Soviet Union and the Caribbean, are considerably more segregated than foreign-born students overall, but still less segregated than nonwhite students. The authors show that different immigrant groups, particularly Soviet and Caribbean immigrants, have substantially different peer influences and access to educational resources. Like native students, immigrant students are highly segregated by race. Racial segregation is accompanied by peer characteristics, teacher quality, and classroom and aggregate school spending patterns that have negative effects that overwhelm differences in educational attainment due to nativity. Soviet students who attend schools with high percentages of white students have higher quality teachers and higher achieving peers, while Dominican students in predominantly black schools are educated with students characterized by extremely high poverty rates and low test scores.

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• Published: 03 January 2023

An urban take on sustainable development policies and corresponding positioning strategies

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Cities have emerged as policy actors of global relevance in sustainable development, and their strengthened position challenges the primacy of national states in this area. To account for this shift and for potential emerging contestations between cities and national states, we propose a framework to understand national–urban relations in sustainable development policy-making. Based on a selection of twelve case study vignettes from European cities, we identify and discuss four ideal types of urban sustainable development policy, which are classified depending on their congruence with the national policy agenda and the scale of the issue at hand. Building on this typology, we reflect on positioning strategies that cities can develop to support, promote or defend these policies. We argue that accounting for these different positioning strategies is important for understanding how cities seek to put specifically urban takes of sustainable development on global agendas.

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Introduction.

Cities have become focal points for addressing sustainability issues and have emerged as important political protagonists in global sustainable development (SD) 1 , 2 . Numerous SD policy agendas at the urban level aim to balance and negotiate between environmental, social and economic goals 3 , 4 . A growing number of cities are taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint, welcome migrants, develop alternative economic development agendas and protect biodiversity within and beyond the city. Some city initiatives contain radical, progressive elements that prioritize the needs of the most disadvantaged 5 . These urban sustainable development (USD) policies frequently exceed national policies in terms of their depth, innovativeness and/or progressiveness. In doing so, they thereby challenge the primacy of national governments in SD.

This article examines an array of urban policy measures that fall within the realm of SD. It aims to better understand specific urban takes on SD and to examine how they are welcomed and/or contested in multi-level governance settings. We draw on the concept on multi-level governance (MLG) stemming from political science, to examine the manifold interactions between state and non-state actors across multiple policy-relevant scales without a structuring authority 6 . The concept of MLG challenges the state-centric and hierarchical distribution of power and responsibility; it encompasses state and non-state actors and assumes that these policy-making interactions contain degrees of negotiation but also policy disputes 7 , 8 . The MLG framework explicitly focuses on diverse strategies and forms of cooperation that actors at different policy-making levels adopt to advance their policy agendas.

While we acknowledge the work on multi-level processes in the sustainability transitions literature 9 , 10 , here we focus specifically on national–urban policy-making relationships for which the MLG framework is well suited. The framework allows us to consider in what cases USD policies align and advance national policy agendas and when the two are in conflict. Where policies are contested, cities may (explicitly or implicitly) deploy positioning strategies to contradict, stretch, or circumvent such higher-level agendas 11 , 12 , 13 .

Shifting the focus to urban policies and positioning strategies may thus advance the understanding of the role of cities in global SD agendas and highlight that urban policy-making for SD is not as de-politicized and uncontested between different levels of government as the literature sometimes suggests 5 , 14 . At the same time, we broaden the focus by not only looking at one relatively narrow policy area (such as migration governance) but discussing an array of social, environmental and economic policy measures that contribute to the wider goal of SD.

In this article, we introduce 12 illustrative case study vignettes from 11 European cities that have formulated and implemented SD policies (see Table 1 ). In each case, we focus on specific policy measures, not on whole policy programs or policy agendas. Our intent is not to map USD agendas or to present specific policies and positioning strategies that have been particularly successful. Rather, we seek to shed light on how specific urban policies are supported by corresponding positioning and cooperation strategies at different governance levels. By categorizing urban policy types and positioning strategies, we propose a way of reflecting on how cities seek to place specifically urban takes of SD on global agendas.

The 12 vignettes all present USD policy measures with varying thematic emphases, which are either discussed in the academic literature or showcased through international city networks. We have purposefully selected policy measures of high visibility. After an initial screening of the literature, we chose the cases and conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 experts involved in the implementation of these policy measures (see Supplementary Table 1 for a list of interview partners and Table A2 for the interview questionnaire). The interviews allowed us to better understand the nuances and dynamics of each case.

Urban policy types for sustainable development and corresponding positioning strategies

Based on the selected vignettes, we developed a framework that conceptualizes urban perspectives on MLG interactions in USD policy-making. The framework consists of two dimensions: (1) congruence between the national and urban policy levels, and (2) the scale of the policy issue. Accordingly, the first dimension identifies whether urban policies are aligned with the national agenda, or whether local authorities adopt policies that diverge from the national policy thrust. Building on reflections on MLG interactions, this factor is important as different levels of government may have different interpretations of policy problems, leading to the integration of contradictory goals in policy designs. Such differing interpretations across government tiers may thus produce ‘decoupled’ policies, in which government players follow divergent, or sometimes even conflicting, policy paths 15 . The second dimension indicates the scale of the policy, meaning whether the particular policy issue is to be addressed at a more global or national level or mainly on an urban scale. This factor is important as an indicator of whether cities approach these issues by ‘looking up’—i.e. with an ambition to scale up their activities—or by ‘looking around’, i.e. seeking guidance and exchange while retaining a primary focus on the implementation of the policy within their city or region 16 . Categorizing policies along these two dimensions yields a 2 × 2 table with four cells representing different Weberian ideal types of approaches to USD (Table 1 ).

For each policy type, we furthermore identified the primary cooperation and positioning strategies at different governance levels. Cities use various strategies to defend, legitimize or advance their policies in MLG settings 11 , 17 , 18 . These strategies can be either explicit or implicit 16 .

In analysing the vignettes, we found that cities build on different cooperation strategies linked to particular policy measures to position themselves within or against the national agenda. Depending on the policy type, these positioning strategies are deployed to (1) legitimate their actions, thus taking ownership of certain policy areas; (2) gain visibility; or (3) move beyond the local scale, thus seeking to contribute to the wider goal of global SD. These cooperation strategies may target multiple scales (a metropolitan area, cities in the same country, the national government, or international cities) that have been identified as relevant for MLG policy-making from an urban perspective 19 , 20 .

Table 2 summarizes our findings and links the urban policy types with corresponding ideal-typical positioning strategies: best practices, first practices, defiant practices and dodging practices. Our understanding of the latter two has been informed by Oomen et al. (2022), who examined strategies of divergence in migration governance (We borrowed the strategies presented by Oomen et al. (2022) for the cases that fall within our category of divergence (i.e. when national and urban policy are not congruent). We applied the strategies of defiance and dodging provided by Oomen et al. (2022), but not deviation and dilution as they do not align with explicit strategies in our cases.). Table 2 also displays our empirical findings with regard to possible cooperation strategies at the different governance levels, which cities employ to work towards policy implementation and to position themselves in the respective SD field. Although we acknowledge that in each type of positioning strategy, cities cooperate simultaneously with actors on multiple scales, the table displays the most important cooperation strategies in bold, to recognize the central role of this particular cooperation strategy for the advancement of the respective positioning strategy.

We will now turn to each of the four policy types and discuss them by reference to the illustrative case study vignettes. We focus on the cities’ positioning strategies and how these are linked to the specificities of the four ideal types of USD policies.

Policy alignment with global focus: best practices

This USD policy type emerged from analysing climate-positive policies in Stockholm and Sønderborg, along with the circular economy policies in Berlin and in the Capital Region of Denmark. Stockholm is developing a large-scale fossil-free urban district that features low resource consumption and sustainable construction, while Sønderborg is aiming for citywide CO2-neutral development. Berlin and the Capital Region of Denmark are metropolitan regions that actively promote a circular economy in the building industry and in waste management. Accordingly, both contract with builders that selectively dismantle buildings and reuse intact materials.

These policy examples are mainly located within the domain of environmental SD. Environmental protection is an important policy area at the national level with corresponding strong and well-funded national agendas and international networks 1 , 21 , 22 . As both the national and the urban levels support the same policy thrust, there is no apparent goal conflict between the two scales 2 , 21 , 23 . Measures that cities take in this field may even help the national government meet the targets articulated as part of national or international agendas. This is also expected as urban areas drive a large share of the national carbon footprint 24 . This policy type is labelled in Table 1 as ‘policy alignment with global focus’.

To promote their environmental agendas, the examined cities and metropolitan region actively seek cooperation partners at different scales. As their policy aims align with national and international goals, cities are also active at the national and international scale (Interviews 1 to 5; hereafter interviews will be identified as I). In Stockholm for example, the city official states that they “always try to get financial support from the national level, of course, and it also generates good PR” (own translation of I1). There are well-developed city networks that address environmental sustainability issues, and cities can explicitly position themselves as central actors for progressive measures against climate change 2 , 25 . For Stockholm, Sønderborg, and the Capital Region of Denmark, being part of networks like C40 or Cityloops/ICLEI not only grants them visibility but also helps them obtain funding for other climate change–related initiatives (I1, I2, I5). As for Cityloops, it was crucial to be able to rely on the network of ICLEI: “You need somebody who can help you identify partners if you do not already have a network on that” (I5). International and national networks also provide a platform for the exchange of knowledge and experiences (I2, I4, I5). Sønderborg, together with other Danish municipalities, developed a nationwide initiative to support locally adapted climate action plans. The Capital Region of Denmark, along with other cities in the Cityloops project, formulated a European Circular Cities Declaration, which seeks to support other cities in their transition towards a more circular economy. The local and metropolitan scale is also of importance for city actors, as they need local partners to implement projects.

In the examined cases, the cities and capital region present themselves as champions, or “municipal lighthouse” (I2), in the respective policy area. They seek to gain visibility by showcasing their progressive policy approaches as best practices. Doing so not only serves as a tactic to attract funding but also functions as an advocacy strategy to scale their approach up to the national level and to other cities (I1, I2, I3, I4, I5). The city official of Berlin, for example, explains that with the success of their measures, “people come from everywhere, take a look at it and bring it to the outside world. This leads to actors from outside also inquiring about what is being initiated in Berlin” (own translation of I4). We thus refer to the positioning strategy of the aligned policy type with global focus as ‘best practices’ (Table 2 ).

Policy alignment with urban focus: first practices

The second USD policy type has emerged from examining social innovation projects in Vienna and Newcastle upon Tyne, as well as ‘24 h’ policies in London. Vienna, as part of its ‘Smart City Framework Strategy,’ is not only centered on digitalization, but emphasizes ensuring a high quality of life for everyone and, as a city official explains, “addresses all aspects of city life. Not only mobility, buildings and energy, but also awareness raising, participatory processes, [or] creating new work opportunities” (I10). Digitalization is thus seen as a tool to support not only technical innovation, but more importantly also social innovation. Similarly, in Newcastle upon Tyne the University originally established a platform to experiment with projects and build on different forms of cooperation and enhanced digital developments. Originally a platform of engagement, the platform was then used to “feed new ideas into policy” (I11), for research and for innovation through projects. London, on the other hand, has created the policy focus, ‘24 h London,’ which recognizes and addresses contemporary changes in the city associated with the gradual growth of nocturnal activities.

Cities, as ‘burning glasses’ of our society 8 , experience the immediate consequences of spatial, socio-economic, environmental and political transformations and thus often have to find interdisciplinary approaches to address emerging challenges. Against this backdrop, cities around the world have increasingly introduced experimental projects and open-outcome processes to find alternative solutions and produce transformations towards SD 26 . One specific cultural and socio-economic change occurring in cities is that the classic dichotomy between day and night is becoming eroded 27 . As a result, 24 h policies have emerged as a means to develop the evening and nighttime economy of cities and to create safer city centres, since people who do not work from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. often face more dangerous and stressful working conditions 27 , 28 . Whereas such initiatives do not directly conflict with the national policy thrust, they address issues that arise mainly at the urban level and are of less importance at the national scale. This policy type, shown at the top right of Table 1, is referred to as ‘policy alignment with urban focus’.

Promoting innovative, locally grounded policies for SD requires cities to establish partnerships with actors within the same city. In both Vienna and Newcastle, local networks and forms of cooperation at the urban level are central (I10, I11). These cooperative undertakings include partnerships across the public and private sectors, academia, and civil society for the immediate implementation of local projects (I9, I10, I11). Cooperation is thus project-specific and geared towards incorporating locally anchored stakeholders who are affected by specific policy issues. London, for example, has built its 24 h policy approach on inner-city partnerships and focuses on establishing good cooperation with all its boroughs (I14). For Newcastle, a member of the project teams explains that “a series of methods” have been developed as part of the platform, “to encourage that sort of cross-sector cooperation and partnerships” (I11). Beyond the city scale, all three examples are embedded in national and international city networks. This collaboration with other cities is geared largely towards the exchange of knowledge and experiences (I10, I11, I14).

Local, national, and international platforms allow cities to position themselves as pioneers (I10, I11, I14). This helps them gain visibility and recognition for their forward-thinking role and results in inquiries from other cities seeking to learn about their experiences in the respective policy fields. We thus conceptualize the aligned policy type with urban focus as ‘first practices’ (Table 2 ).

Policy divergence with global focus: defiant practices

The third USD policy type emerged from examining urban migration policies in Barcelona and Amsterdam. Barcelona formulated an inclusive and radical urban asylum approach (sometimes referred to as ‘Barcelona City of Refuge’) amidst the so-called European refugee crisis of 2015–2016. It called for the direct reception of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea and for shared responsibility and city-to-city refugee relocations between Southern and Northern European cities. This proactive approach openly challenged the national and European asylum policies 11 , 29 . In a similar vein, Amsterdam developed its ‘24 h Reception for Undocumented Migrants’ plan, which provides a very comprehensive support structure for irregular migrants in terms of access to housing, health care, legal counselling and police protection 30 .

Both cities’ actions provoked open conflict with the national government. Whereas the cities adopted immigration and asylum policies that supported people regardless of their residency status, their national governments wanted them to pursue integration only of people who possessed a formal residency status. A further decoupling from the national level can be seen in the interpretation of policy authority, as both cities challenged the national authorities. Amsterdam explicitly defied national migration policy by emphasizing the city’s responsibility to guarantee basic needs (including housing) for everyone who lives in the city 31 . An expert explains that the city “denounced the Spanish and EU migration policies to claim a bigger role for cities in the governance of migration” (I7). Such initiatives directly conflict with the national policy thrust while addressing an issue of global nature. Hence, this policy type, shown in the lower left quadrant of Table 1 , qualifies as ‘policy divergence with global focus’.

To navigate the contested migration policy context, Barcelona and Amsterdam have organized themselves in city networks to build up pressure from below. Barcelona is active in creating alliances and engages in strong networks with other Spanish cities, as well as with cities throughout Europe (I6, I7). Parallel to other efforts within Spain, Barcelona’s mayor, Ada Colau, has openly called on European countries to accept more asylum seekers 29 . Barcelona has also entered into direct discussions with EU representatives, which have enabled the city to leapfrog the Spanish national government (I6, I7). A city official explains the intentions: “We are very active in city-networks because we often feel that the Spanish state is not helping much (…). If we do not have the support of the national government, let’s go abroad, let’s go to other cities, let’s go the EU” (I6). Furthermore, the interview partner stresses the importance of accompanying and supporting such an urban migration policy with a political positioning strategy: “It is was not only a practical operation, but also political operation to gain more autonomy” (I6).

Meanwhile, Amsterdam has invested in joining forces with Dutch cities to create a broad urban alliance to directly negotiate migration policy issues with the Dutch state (I8). Dutch cities’ unified position on migration policy allowed them to enter into negotiations with the national government in 2017 (I8). The resulting ‘24 h Reception for Undocumented Migrants’ policy represents a compromise between Amsterdam and the Dutch government: “The compromise was more about the process of dealing with undocumented migrants than the actual policy, in which we actually disagree [with the national government]” (I8). However, Amsterdam is determined to make use of its implementation discretion to secure the basic needs of people without a regular residency status (I8).

Both Barcelona and Amsterdam seek to stretch, counter or circumvent their policy-making limitations in migration policy. Given this conflictual policy-making setting, cities have networked with other cities throughout Europe to create a critical mass and to articulate a specifically urban perspective on migration policy. Oomen et al. (2022) describe these strategies as defiant, in that local governments are directly, sometimes vocally, opposing policies at the national level. Accordingly, we refer to this positioning strategy as ‘defiant practices’ (Table 2 ).

Policy divergence with urban focus: dodging practices

The fourth USD policy type emerged from our examination of Preston, London, and Milan. In Preston, we focus on their measures linked to Community Wealth Building, which are directed towards embedding and democratizing economic processes at the local level. Through these measures, the city aims to strengthen locally anchored institutions (e.g. universities and hospitals), as well as to leverage staff and public procurement processes to support the local population and small businesses 32 . Moreover, Community Wealth Building promotes so-called public-common partnerships in which political authorities work with civil society organizations to provide public services. In London and Milan, we highlight measures that help to provide more public spaces. In London, such approaches are linked to the regulation of privately owned public spaces so as to prevent the privatization thereof, while in Milan, measures are geared towards reclaiming streets for slow traffic and public recreation.

These examples illustrate locally embedded measures on specifically urban issues. They are typically developed in cities because the impact of austerity policies and the commercialization of public spaces manifest themselves there 12 , 33 . An expert explains that “Cities certainly create the conditions for people to come together to contest some of those conditions of capital accumulation, the concentration of those issues (…). This creates the conditions for this kind of politics.” (I13). These interventionist approaches conflict with liberal, free-market policies at the national level. However, as these challenges are prevalent only at the urban scale, the cities’ approaches contest national policy only indirectly. Especially the examples of Community Wealth Building “are beneath the radar of national politics”, as an expert puts it (I13). Accordingly, the cities try to circumvent national-level policy paradigms rather than directly challenging them; the focus is primarily on improving local conditions. Hence, in contrast to the former policy type (policy divergence with global focus), there is no conflict in policy authority because of the specific urban relevance of the policy area. We therefore label this policy type, located in the bottom right quadrant of Table 1 , as ‘policy divergence with urban focus’.

The local focus of these policies makes cooperation with other stakeholders at the metropolitan scale essential (I12, I13, I15, I16). A city official explains that the expansion of bike lanes beyond city boundaries “gives an alternative to many people not just within the city but also outside the city to better connect with the inner core” (I16). The main goal of these cities is to build strong local partnerships so that the cities have the resources and flexibility to independently solve emerging problems. Cooperation with actors outside metropolitan borders is of secondary importance. Nevertheless, the cities in these examples do engage in national and international networks with other cities. Here, the goals are exchange of knowledge and engagement in international debates on these issues (I12, I13, I15, I16). Whereas cooperation with higher-tier governments seems generally less important, the example of Milan shows that cooperation with the national level can still prove useful. Despite an apparent policy incongruence, the Italian government supported Milan’s initiative by financing public provision of bicycles and making regulatory changes to enable bike boxes and protected bike lanes (I16).

As noted above, the cities in these examples are reacting to inherently urban problems. Accordingly, they invest mainly in creating local partnerships and in horizontal networks with other cities to exchange knowledge and experiences. Cooperation with the national level may help to remove possible legal obstacles that could derive from decoupled policy agendas. Here again we find inspiration from Oomen et al. (2022), who describe these strategies as dodging, since the local governments do not necessarily proclaim their opposition to the national government but rather circumvent the national policy thrust and, in doing so, expand their local authority. Consequently, we label this positioning strategy as ‘dodging practices’ (Table 2 ).

Our analysis highlights that the different policy types require different positioning strategies. Policy types represent the contextual setting, which influences the positioning strategy cities choose, the actors they cooperate with, and the scales on which they cooperate. Through this analysis, we detected interesting patterns. In the context of national and urban policy divergence, cities tend to jump scales instead of building (linear) connections across them. Cities with SD policies that diverge from national agendas seek cooperation with other (international) cities to deliberately leapfrog the national level. However, when cities promote policies that are aligned with the national policy framework, a bridging of scales along the formal vertical lines of authority seems to be the most pragmatic and opportunistic approach, and it is also in the interest of the national government. These findings corroborate existing MLG literature showing that cities make use of versatile strategies to target different actors in the context of specific policies 11 , 20 .

Although a specific policy type certainly informs a city’s positioning and cooperation strategy at different governance scales, we recognize that this typology glosses over real-life complexities and that the categories are not as clear-cut in reality as we have presented them. Indeed, the differences between them can be marginal at times. Furthermore, the positioning strategies described in this paper are linked to specific policy measures and do not necessarily represent the overall positioning of the city. Cities formulate diverse measures and agendas depending on the policy issue at stake. We therefore do not intend to portray this connection between the policy type and the corresponding strategies as a purely deterministic relationship. Nevertheless, examining these ideal-typical positioning strategies is important for understanding how cities aim to put specifically urban takes of SD on global agendas.

In conclusion, this article has examined and compared different SD policy measures in 11 European cities. While appreciating the value of the multi-level framework in the sustainability transition literature 10 , we argue that a MLG perspective can enrich the theorization of relations, contestations and strategies between levels of government. We therefore contribute to the recent literature on (contested) relations between local governments and higher governmental authorities 11 , 13 , 16 by specifically focusing on SD policy-making and introducing a framework to understand national–urban relations and multi-level policy-oriented strategies.

The framework suggests four ideal types of USD policy (Table 1 ) and maps out their corresponding cooperation and positioning strategies (Table 2 ). The different strategies reveal how cities can take ownership of certain policy issues and how they can strengthen collaborations across scales or, if necessary, defend their position in potential MLG contestations. We have shown that cities frequently formulate their own SD policies, which often reflect a specifically urban take on SD. To support their policy takes, cities build collaborative partnerships at the local, regional, national and international levels. Cities are thus not mere implementers of national or global SD agendas but active policy-makers and policy influencers.

Not all the policy types and strategies in our analysis receive the same level of attention in academic literature and policy debates. Existing discussions of SD policies tend to focus on certain policy domains such as climate change or social innovation. In these domains, we usually observe alignment with the national level’s perception of how SD should be implemented in cities. Divergent urban policy examples, such as urban migration policies or measures for Community Wealth Building, receive less attention in SD debates. However, these types of urban policy are important for challenging the common perception that USD is geared primarily towards environmental measures 14 , 34 and in showing that cities can bring forth more radical and inclusive visions of SD 5 . These types of social or economic urban policies are defended in MLG contestations through broad coalitions of urban actors 11 , 29 . We therefore believe it is important for further research to highlight these more diverse—and sometimes contested—approaches that cities are taking to address global SD issues.

We suggest that future studies should test and consolidate our findings. For example, this analysis focuses mainly on the relationship between the local and national governments. This delimitation does not do justice to the complexity of the actors’ networks and ignores the important role of local communities, social movements, and epistemic communities involved in addressing SD agendas. Similarly, we have not delved into the comparative differences which exist among path-dependent legal systems and governance structures. Moreover, all the selected vignettes are European case studies of high visibility. Contrasting these findings with observations of smaller, lesser-known cities, especially ones outside Europe, could be an interesting future contribution.

Although the frameworks presented in this article provide an incomplete glimpse of the diversity of USD policies and strategies, we nevertheless think that our analysis yields interesting results. We have demonstrated that there exist specifically urban take to SD, and that these approaches sometimes oppose or contradict national (or even international) SD policy agendas, especially when they challenge national-level policy-making competencies or focus on serving those who are most disadvantaged.

Case selection

We selected our 12 case studies based on the rationale that they should present USD policy measures with different thematic focuses—that is, social, environmental and economic policy measures. Of the 12 case studies, four focus on the environmental dimension of sustainability (Stockholm. Sonderborg, Capital Region of Denmark and Berlin), four on the social dimension (Barcelona, Amsterdam, London and Milan), and four on the economic dimension (Newcastle, Vienna, London and Preston). We selected the cases because they are covered in the academic literature (in urban studies and related fields, such as planning, public policy or sustainability studies) and/or are highlighted as examples on the websites or in the reports of international city networks. We thus purposefully selected USD policy measures of high visibility. With regard to finding the international city networks relevant for our research, we consulted overview articles such as Acuto and Leffel 35 and conducted additional web searches.

Interviews (data collection, interview questionnaire, coding)

The data for the analysis of the 12 cases came from a literature review and 16 semi-structured interviews. As suggested by Berry 36 and Rathbun 37 , we first reviewed all publicly available academic and grey literature on these cases before conducting the interviews. This ‘frontloading’ of desk research helped to pose more targeted and informed interview questions. We conducted at least one interview per case because we wanted to ensure the triangulation of non-reactive data (i.e., written documents) with reactive data (i.e., interviews) 38 , 39 . We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 experts involved in the implementation of these policy measures (see Supplementary Table 1 for the list of interview partners). Semi-structured interviews were considered the most suitable method because they allowed us to better understand nuances within cases and obtain information about policy processes 37 . In the interviews, we could ask specifically about the processes behind USD policy measures and positioning strategies (how?) and the reasons for adopting them (why?). Without conducting these interviews, we would have been forced to rely on written statements about the USD policy measures, and the positioning strategies would have remained largely a black box.

All three authors conducted the interviews, using the same interview questionnaire that featured the categories of policy design, implementation, cooperation and positioning strategy (see Supplementary Table 2 for the interview questionnaire). The interviews lasted between 30 and 90 min. We conducted them by videoconference (and once by phone) and recorded them if we had the interviewee’s approval. Immediately after the interviews, we wrote down interview protocols.

We then thematically coded the interview protocols as well as the gathered literatures (see Supplementary Table 3 for a summary of the interviews) 40 , 41 . We then categorized and conceptualized the cases, and we discussed the results of the different case among all three authors. We explicitly looked for patterns in our coding and interpretation of the data 40 , 41 . In the discussion, we recognized the pattern that the USD policy measures differ regarding national-urban goal congruence and the global/urban scale of the measures. We grouped the USD policy measures accordingly, resulting in the four groups displayed in Table 1 . In a next step, we examined whether we can detect specific forms of cooperation and positioning strategies inside the four groups of USD policy measures 40 . While we found specific forms of positioning strategies for each group, the distinction of cooperation strategies were less clear-cut and these positioning strategies are not mutually exclusive. We, however, highlight the cooperation strategies that were necessary for the respective positioning strategy. We display these findings in Table 2 .

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The sample questionnaire for the interviews, a summary of the interviews, and the list of interviewees can be found in the Supplementary Information. The report written for the City of Zurich (in German) is available at the research collection of ETH Zurich, https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/495756 .

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Acknowledgements

We thank our interview partners for their valuable time and insights, Mala Walz for her excellent research assistance in the beginning of the project, and Raffaele Bazurli for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We want to note that the City of Zurich funded a report that is the empirical basis of this article.

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All authors S.W., K.H. and D.K. contributed equally to project planning and approved the manuscript prior to submission. S.W., K.H. and D.K. conducted and analyzed interviews, D.K. arranged the funding and S.W. drafted the first version of the manuscript.

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Wittwer, S., Hofer, K. & Kaufmann, D. An urban take on sustainable development policies and corresponding positioning strategies. npj Urban Sustain 3 , 1 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-022-00080-y

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Introduction and Background

Type 2 diabetes is a chronic immunological disease resulting from the body’s inability to process insulin. It affects populations worldwide, with a global prevalence of  537 million adults (age 20-79), which is expected to rise to 783 million by 2045, making up over 10% of the world’s total population. 1,2 This condition is linked to comorbidities including hypertension, liver disease,  kidney disease, retinopathy, polycystic ovary syndrome, and obstructive sleep apnea. While the physical afflictions of type 2 diabetes are well documented, its economic implications are often neglected. People living with diabetes are put under an increased financial strain due to the costs of treatment, surgery, dialysis, etc. According to the CDC, people diagnosed with diabetes incur an average of $19,700 in annual medical expenses, which is over two times the medical expenses of a person without diabetes. 3  Living with type 2 diabetes also creates occupational barriers due to disability, which can hamstring a person’s income. The effect of disabilities caused by diabetes often bleeds over to the patient’s family members who may have to assist them physically and financially. 

The most common physical risk factors associated with type 2 diabetes are poor diet, obesity, and family history. Sugar, refined carbohydrates, and processed foods are key dietary drivers of type 2 diabetes because they increase blood sugar levels at such a high rate that glucose cannot be sufficiently stored in the liver, which makes the job of insulin much more difficult. 4 A poor diet, combined with a sedentary lifestyle will also increase the risk of obesity. Excess body weight causes increased insulin resistance in muscle and tissue cells. 5  An individual with a family history of diabetes is more likely to develop the disease due to genetic predisposition, but more so due to the poor habits that may have been learned during the person’s formative years, such as an unhealthy diet and little to no exercise. While there is no cure for type 2 diabetes, individuals are usually placed on diet and exercise programs along with regular monitoring of body weight and hemoglobin A1C levels to prevent or treat the disease. 

The social determinants of health are the biggest drivers of health disparities globally, playing a massive role in influencing risk factors and the ability to use preventative measures for type 2 diabetes. These determinants are often connected to structural impediments, including delayed diagnosis, failure of therapies, and unaffordable treatment. 6  Poor access to quality healthcare decreases the likelihood of receiving screening, checkups, or adequate treatment after the onset. In addition to the financial strain of utilizing care, individuals with low socioeconomic status are more likely to have limited healthy food options, which creates a compounding burden by subjecting them to an unhealthy diet. Individuals living in low-income communities often experience a hostile lived environment, increasing the levels of stress they endure, which is associated with a higher proclivity toward diabetes or risky behaviors that lead to diabetes. 

Despite its status as a rich nation, the United States has struggled to decrease the burden of diabetes, as morbidity and mortality rates have climbed over the decades. One of the pitfalls of large, diverse nations like the U.S. is that they are highly susceptible to health disparities among different demographics. Health disparities have been studied extensively with a focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, and income level. However, there may be a residential basis for disparate health outcomes in the U.S. This paper will critically examine peer-reviewed health literature that has determined significant differences in type 2 diabetes between rural and urban communities. This paper will then use this literature and other evidence to address the following question: What factors contribute to the disparities in type 2 diabetes prevalence in rural versus urban communities in the United States? 

Methodology

• Background Search → The purpose of this search was to retrieve reputable information on type 2 diabetes for the introduction. Google was used to get certain statistics such as global prevalence, mortality, future projections, and average expenditures of living with diabetes to contextualize the burden of this disease for the introduction. Information on the most current prevalence, mortality, and projection of type 2 diabetes was pulled from Diabetes Atlas. Information on healthcare expenditures and risk factors for diabetes was pulled from the CDC. Since poverty statistics are relevant in this literature, data derived from the USDA reported by the Rural Health Information Hub were referenced. All of these references are not produced from peer-reviewed literature but are from reputable databases, hence their inclusion in the citations. There are a total of seven references that were derived from this background search, one of them being a published review that yielded evidence-based information regarding the structural risk factors that may contribute to type 2 diabetes.
• Targeted Search → PubMed, Wiley Online Library, and Google Scholar were search engines used for my targeted search. Boolean operators were utilized to connect keywords such as “type 2 diabetes”, “rural”,  “urban”,  “United States,” “US,” or “America.”  In total this search yielded 45 results in PubMed, and over 100,000 results in the other two databases To explore literature on social determinants that may contribute to the burden of diabetes in rural communities, the terms “income”, “socioeconomic status” “education”, “physical activity” and “care” or “access to healthcare” were used, which yielded 23 results in total in Pubmed and over 100,000 in the other two databases. The cut down to 12 sources was determined by eligibility criteria and the elimination of studies that were conducted utilizing similar methods. References used in the results section are represented as AMA citations. 
• Inclusions and Exclusions → Literature that met the criteria for use as evidence needed to specifically research diabetes and/or determinants associated with diabetes, cover populations in rural and urban communities in the U.S., and be recent enough to be considered relevant in 2023. Included studies were based on rural and urban areas in the U.S. and covered type 2 diabetes diabetes, obesity, socioeconomic status or income, education, or quality of healthcare. If the study researched any of those topics without researching diabetes directly, it was still included because those are known determinants of diabetes. Eligible articles for review may include cross-sectional, randomized controlled trials, case-control studies, other systematic reviews, or published papers that reference public data. The type of article is not a concern for this evidence synthesis because both qualitative and quantitative data will be used to answer the research question. Due to the nature of the research question, it was anticipated that randomized controlled trials and case-control studies would not be found. Any literature that studies that conducted research outside of the United States was excluded, as the population of interest for this paper is rural and urban residents in the US. The age of what was considered a useful study was limited to three decades, so any research that was conducted before the 1990s was excluded in order to account for any changes to those findings due to interventions.

Evidence indicates that there is a difference in diabetes outcomes between rural and urban communities in the United States and that rural communities are disproportionately affected, independent of predisposing characteristics (race, age, sex). In 2006, a cross-sectional analysis of data taken from a Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) conducted on rural and urban residents from 47 states in the US showed that a higher proportion of rural residents reported diabetes than urban residents among all racial/ethnic classifications. 7  According to the BRFSS, diabetes status was determined by responses to the question, “Have you ever been told by a doctor you have diabetes?” Those responding “Yes” were considered to be persons living with diabetes. This presents a limitation to the study, as accurate information can be barred by individuals who have not been diagnosed or have not seen a healthcare provider. Overall, this study suggests that there is merit in researching potential factors that may cause a higher burden of type 2 diabetes in rural communities. Further analysis of health literature denotes three possible risk factors of type 2 diabetes that disproportionately affect rural populations: socioeconomic status, lack of physical activity, and inadequate access to health services.

Socioeconomic Status

The evidence in this systematic review points to socioeconomics as the primary reason for a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes in rural communities than in urban communities. As previously established, low-income communities create a compounding burden that subjects individuals to an unhealthy diet as well as the financial strains of utilizing care and missing work due to disability. Poverty has a direct impact on type 2 diabetes disparities and is more prevalent in rural residential areas. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service, in 2019, 15.4% of people living in rural areas had an income below the federal poverty line, while those living in urban areas had a poverty rate of only 11.9%. 8  As a result of a higher prevalence of poverty among rural communities, their residents are more likely to live in “food deserts”, or areas in which it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality food. These environments are far more likely to contain fast food chains  and “convenience” stores that sell cheap processed foods as opposed to grocery stores and high-quality retail markets (i.e. Whole Foods) and fast-casual restaurants (i.e. Chipotle). 19 The high saturation of fast foods combined with the shortage of fresh produce markets hinders the ability to consistently store adequate food in the household, causing uncertainty regarding the availability and quality of the family’s next meal. This phenomenon describes food insecurity. Sociologists Joy Rayanne Piontak and Michael D. Schulman explored spatial inequalities in food insecurity in the United States, specifically the problems of hunger and food access in non-metropolitan and rural localities. They found that households in the South, a heavily rural region, have the highest rates of food insecurity. A rather alarming finding from this study was that according to the USDA Food Environment Atlas, rural counties had an average 5.77% decrease in the number of grocery stores from 2007-2011. 9

 In addition to the significant gap in poverty, rural communities have less socioeconomic mobility, further perpetuating their exposure to food insecurity and other type 2 diabetes risk factors. In 2018, Iryna Kyzyma, a researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of SocioEconomic Research and a Research Affiliate at the IZA Bonn, conducted a study to determine the comparative persistence of poverty in rural and urban areas. Results were derived from survey data from over five years (2008-2013) in which participants were asked about their socioeconomic situation every four months. The analysis concluded that rural residents experienced poverty at a higher rate than urban residents, and they also stayed in poverty for a longer time period. She also found that urban residents who rose out of poverty were less likely to fall back into poverty than rural residents who rose out of poverty. 10  Given the nature of the U.S. economy along with the financial crisis of 2008, using survey data that expands beyond five years should make a stronger case. It should also be noted that the participants living in poverty could have experienced a certain level of discomfort in answering the survey questions truthfully. In summary, the eligible health literature covering the socioeconomic status of rural populations indicates that poverty is associated with food insecurity, poverty is more prevalent in rural communities than urban, and poverty persists for a longer duration in rural areas than urban areas. Given the connection between type 2 diabetes, food insecurity, and income, socioeconomic status can be a feasible determinant of residential disparities in type 2 diabetes.

Physical Activity

Low physical activity is a known indicator of obesity and type 2 diabetes. In this review, two articles conflicted on this topic. One study, published by Parks, et al in 2003, was a cross-sectional study that sampled adults of various socioeconomic backgrounds from urban an d rural areas (n = 1818) to determine if there is a significant difference in physical activity based on the type of environment they live in. In this study, lower-income residents were less likely than higher-income residents to meet physical activity recommendations. Rural residents were least likely to meet recommendations; suburban residents were most likely to meet recommendations. Suburban, higher-income residents were more than twice as likely to meet recommendations than rural, lower-income residents. 11  The limitation of this study was that the population that was the least likely to meet recommendations was classified as rural and lower income, which could mean that low income is a confounder and that rural residence itself is not indicative of less physical activity. 

The other study, conducted by Liu, et al in 2008 was a cross-section of the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), a module of the State and Local Area Integrated Telephone Survey, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The respondents of this survey were the child’s parent (95.7%) or guardian (4.3%) who knew the most about the child’s health and health care. The goal of this study was to use the Survey to get data on overweight status and levels of physical activity of children living in rural and urban areas to influence the design of policy interventions. According to the results, rural children (16.5%) were more likely to be overweight than urban children (14.3%). However, it was also found that urban children at 29.1% were more likely to be physically inactive than rural children at 25.2%. 12  These findings indicate that there are possible confounders within rural settings that contribute to being overweight. One can refer to the impact of socioeconomic status as well as access to healthy food options as a differentiator. A notable limitation of this study was its use of parentally reported data on height and weight, which may be inaccurate for children under ten years of age. In brief, physical activity may or may not be a driver of type 2 diabetes disparities in rural and urban areas but obesity may still be a concern. Further context on related factors affecting the populations in each area is necessary.

Access to Health Services and Information

Various health literature suggests that rural populations in America have less access to quality healthcare and health information compared to urban populations. Out of the eligible articles utilized for this paper, one systematic review and two surveys cover this topic. The systematic review, published in  2015,  reported significant differences in healthcare access between rural and urban areas. The studies in this review had findings of insufficient public transportation, staffing shortages, poor availability of broadband internet services, and patient reluctance to seek care based on cultural and financial constraints. 13  One limitation when citing other systematic reviews is the reliance on watered-down information from the studies it references. There is always a possibility of biased selection with sources and the omittance of limitations of certain studies cited in the review.

A survey is a more effective measure to use when discussing access to health information and services because it allows individuals to self-report their experience with healthcare access and self-management. Since there is no cure for diabetes, health information and self-management are crucial components of prevention and treatment. Ultimately, practicing self-management and being well-informed of diabetes risk factors can lead to the lifestyle habits that are needed to prevent or reverse the disease. Two studies show evidence of inequitable access or use of health information and self-management among rural and urban populations in the United States. A survey-based study published in 2018 was conducted to determine who claims to have access to health information. Linear regression was utilized to show associations between rurality and health literacy. The findings were: compared to urban residents, rural residents had lower access to health information from sources including primary care providers, specialist doctors, blogs, and magazines, and less use of search engines. After accounting for socio-demographics, rural residents only had lower access to specialist doctors than urban residents. 14  These findings may underscore a need for telehealth services focused on rural populations, including a database of relevant health information and available physicians. Lower employment of specialists in rural areas is a factor that should be considered as well. As for the limitations of this study, it was administered through an online survey that inquired about access to 25 health information sources. There may be a substantial population of urban residents without internet access who may also be lacking access to health information. Furthermore, the study was limited to 25 health information sources, which can exclude local, lesser-known sources. However, local sources may be considered most reliable in rural areas.

Another study analyzed surveys from the North Carolina Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to determine differences in participation in diabetes self-management education (DSME) among urban and rural adults in North Carolina from 2012 to 2017. The results were self-reported by residents. According to the conclusion, there were persistent rural-urban disparities in DSME participation, with rural residents showing lower rates and the gaps widening. The exact rates between rural and urban communities were 52.3% versus 57.8% in 2012, 54.0% versus 56.5% in 2013, 48.8% versus 62.0% in 2015, and 46.7% versus 56.1% in 2017. 15  While the restrictions of self-reported data from subjects must be considered, the results from this study suggest a significant difference between rural and urban participation in diabetes self-management programs within a single U.S. state. Regional/geographic confounders are not applicable in this study, which makes a powerful case for residential disparities on this issue. 

Rural populations in the United States are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than urban populations due to a combination of factors. An individual’s area of residence can be closely connected to their health outcomes due to the various elements that are experienced in their lived environment. There are connections to be made between the residential disparities in socioeconomic status and the residential disparities in the ability to utilize health information and services. The first connection deals with the geographic nature of rural settings. These communities are generally further away from the big metropolitans that are home to corporations, large health centers, and government buildings. Proximity (or lack thereof) to a revenue-generating city or district influences the “value” of the neighborhood as well as the level of federal investment in that area. Rural areas are also “out of the way” of public transit systems that allow all people in urban areas to travel to facilities without the use of a personal vehicle. That alone can influence someone’s willingness to seek care or healthier food options or available healthcare providers , whether they have the funds or not. The other connection between socioeconomic status and health utilization is rural education. While education is not a direct determinant of type 2 diabetes, it is heavily associated with income level, health literacy, and the availability of medical specialists in the area. The USDA reports that in 2017–21, the share of working-age adults (ages 25–64) with at least a bachelor’s degree was 37% in urban areas and 21% in rural areas, while the share of younger adults ages 25–44 with at least a bachelor’s degree was 40% in urban areas and 22%  in rural areas. 16 These statistics represent a drastic disparity between rural and urban communities, which indicates that while low income is an established determinant of high type 2 diabetes, it is just the tip of the iceberg. There are fundamental issues with the rural education system that are possibly contributing to the persistence of poverty as well as the shortage of local medical specialists.  In a 2001 paper presented at the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative (ARSI) Conference on Understanding Achievement in Science and Mathematics in Rural School Settings, Hobart L. Harmon, a leading expert in public education in rural America outlined the inhibitors of educational advancement in rural areas. Harmon points to a cultural climate of modern education that is better suited for urban schooling. Modern America rewards personal ambition and self-determination 17 and encourages young people to venture out of their parent’s homes and make their own societal contributions. Harmon suggests that this concept of individual mobility is less feasible in rural communities because rural school districts cannot generate sufficient local resources to adequately supplement the state school finance programs the way more affluent localities can. 17 His paper further claims that rural schools experience inadequacy of facilities. According to data that was pulled from research done in 1996, 30% of rural and small-town schools have inadequate buildings and 50% of schools have at least one inadequate building feature. 17 Harmon’s paper denotes inadequate investment in rural school systems to go along with an educational structure that does not align with rural community values. This suboptimal learning experience can not only lead to lower levels of educational achievement, but it can also cause poor teacher retention, which is supported by a recent article published by Dr. Richard M. Ingersoll in 2023. Using the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the National Teacher Principal Survey (NTPS) collected by the Census Bureau for the National Center for Education Statistics, nine cycles of data collection from 1987 to 2018 were recorded. Their results yielded that from two time periods: 1999-2004 and 2007-2018, the number of schools in urban areas increased by 26%, the number of students by 25%, and the number of teachers by almost a third. The number of schools in rural communities has decreased by over 28%, the number of students by 24% and the number of teachers by 19%. The study also found that rural schools have had more difficulties filling vacancies. 18  Lack of teacher retention in these communities will only worsen the outcomes of educational attainment, income, health literacy, and professional development in healthcare, which will certainly worsen the outcomes of type 2 diabetes.

In the discussion of type 2 diabetes in rural populations, the impact of rural geography and the rural education system cannot be overlooked because they are so closely associated with socioeconomic status and the ability to utilize health resources. Residential disparities in type 2 diabetes may not have much to do with differences in physical activity. Poorer facilities in rural schools may have an impact on physical education courses for children, but that doesn’t indicate that they are inactive outside of school. Overall, the disparate burden of type 2 diabetes is driven by general differences in income, education, and spatial barriers.

Conclusion & Future Considerations

To conclude, the evidence presented in this systematic review not only indicated that there may be significant differences in the proportion of type 2 diabetes outcomes between rural and urban populations in the U.S., but it also referenced potential factors contributing to the disparity, including differences in socioeconomic status, physical activity, and access to health services and information. Of the 19 references utilized in this review, eight were cross-sectional studies, seven were findings derived from facts taken directly from a website or database, one was a paper presented at a conference, one was a mixed methods approach, and two were evidence-based systematic reviews. The limitations of each study were briefly explained throughout the results section. Randomized controlled trials and case-control studies were not found for this topic because this paper required studies in which urban and rural populations were surveyed and their area of permanent residence was an independent variable. No tests needed to be run and observational studies were more intuitive to answering my research question. 

A multilevel and tailored approach needs to be considered to address type 2 diabetes in rural areas. If transportation and telecommunication are immediate barriers to the reception of care or participation in diabetes self-management education, then it should be addressed at the local level. Complex transportation systems may be impractical in rural areas, but telehealth interventions should continue to be a priority within communities. Leveraging community values, such as faith can also be instrumental. Focus groups and DSME training can be held at local churches and schools to garner engagement. Fresh food initiatives such as Meals on Wheels should continue to expand in rural communities as well. Agricultural programs for residents should be encouraged wherever applicable, as there is evidence that they can be an effective alternative when grocery stores are not available or affordable. 19  At the federal level, there needs to be dialogue regarding the inequitable funding of rural areas compared to urban areas, as well as the standardization of public schooling. Rural kids live almost entirely different lives than urban kids, and that needs to be reflected in the style of education they receive throughout their formative years. If the standard public education system is to be maintained, rural districts will require more subsidies to be better equipped to prepare their students. Efforts to improve diabetes care and staff retention in hospitals and schools should also be funded and supported politically.

•   IDF Diabetes Atlas | Tenth Edition . https://diabetesatlas.org/.
• Saeedi, Pouya, et al. “Mortality Attributable to Diabetes in 20–79 Years Old Adults, 2019 Estimates: Results from the International Diabetes Federation Diabetes Atlas, 9th Edition.”
• How Type 2 Diabetes Affects Your Workforce | National Diabetes Prevention Program | Diabetes | CDC . 12 Nov. 2023
• CDC. “The Insulin Resistance–Diabetes Connection.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , 20 June 2022
• Excess weight and type 2 diabetes. https://www.honorhealth.com/medical-services/bariatric-weight-loss-surgery/patient-education-and-support/comorbidities-type-2-diabetes
• Wu Y, Ding Y, Tanaka Y, Zhang W. Risk Factors Contributing to Type 2 Diabetes and Recent Advances in the Treatment and Prevention. Int J Med Sci 2014
• Hale N, Bennett K, Probst J. Diabetes care and outcomes: disparities across rural america. Journal of Community Health .
• Families with low incomes – rural services integration toolkit. https://www.ruralhealthinfo.org/toolkits/services-integration/1/high-needs-populations/families-with-low-incomes
• Piontak, Joy Rayanne, and Michael D. Schulman. “Food Insecurity in Rural America.” Contexts
• Kyzyma, Iryna “Rural-Urban Disparities in Poverty Persistence.” IRP Focus. 2018
• Parks, S. E., et al. “Differential Correlates of Physical Activity in Urban and Rural Adults of Various Socioeconomic Backgrounds in the United States.” Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health
• Liu, Jihong, et al. “Urban‐Rural Differences in Overweight Status and Physical Inactivity Among US Children Aged 10‐17 Years.” The Journal of Rural Health , vol. 24, no. 4, Sept. 2008
• Douthit, N., et al. “Exposing Some Important Barriers to HealthCare Access in the Rural USA.”
• Chen, Xuewei, et al. “Differences in Rural and Urban Health Information Access and Use.” The Journal of Rural Health
• Luo, Huabin, et al. “Trends and Rural-Urban Differences in Participation in Diabetes Self-Management Education Among Adults in North Carolina: 2012-2017.” Journal of Public Health Management and Practice
• Educational Attainment Improved in Rural America but Educational Gap with Urban Areas Grew for Bachelor’s Degrees and Higher .
• Harmon, Hobart L. Education Issues in Rural Schools of America . May 2001
• Ingersoll, Richard M., and Henry Tran. “Teacher Shortages and Turnover in Rural Schools in the US: An Organizational Analysis.” Educational Administration Quarterly
• Valdez, Zulema. “Community Perspectives on Access to and Availability of Healthy Food in Rural, Low-Resource, Latino Communities.”

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Which social media platforms are most common, who uses each social media platform, find out more, social media fact sheet.

Many Americans use social media to connect with one another, engage with news content, share information and entertain themselves. Explore the patterns and trends shaping the social media landscape.

To better understand Americans’ social media use, Pew Research Center surveyed 5,733 U.S. adults from May 19 to Sept. 5, 2023. Ipsos conducted this National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) for the Center using address-based sampling and a multimode protocol that included both web and mail. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race and ethnicity, education and other categories.

Polls from 2000 to 2021 were conducted via phone. For more on this mode shift, read our Q&A.

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and  its methodology ­­­.

A note on terminology: Our May-September 2023 survey was already in the field when Twitter changed its name to “X.” The terms  Twitter  and  X  are both used in this report to refer to the same platform.

YouTube and Facebook are the most-widely used online platforms. About half of U.S. adults say they use Instagram, and smaller shares use sites or apps such as TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter (X) and BeReal.

Note: The vertical line indicates a change in mode. Polls from 2012-2021 were conducted via phone. In 2023, the poll was conducted via web and mail. For more details on this shift, please read our Q&A . Refer to the topline for more information on how question wording varied over the years. Pre-2018 data is not available for YouTube, Snapchat or WhatsApp; pre-2019 data is not available for Reddit; pre-2021 data is not available for TikTok; pre-2023 data is not available for BeReal. Respondents who did not give an answer are not shown.

Source: Surveys of U.S. adults conducted 2012-2023.

Usage of the major online platforms varies by factors such as age, gender and level of formal education.

% of U.S. adults who say they ever use __ by …

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This fact sheet was compiled by Research Assistant  Olivia Sidoti , with help from Research Analyst  Risa Gelles-Watnick , Research Analyst  Michelle Faverio , Digital Producer  Sara Atske , Associate Information Graphics Designer Kaitlyn Radde and Temporary Researcher  Eugenie Park .

Follow these links for more in-depth analysis of the impact of social media on American life.

• Americans’ Social Media Use  Jan. 31, 2024
• Americans’ Use of Mobile Technology and Home Broadband  Jan. 31 2024
• Q&A: How and why we’re changing the way we study tech adoption  Jan. 31, 2024

Find more reports and blog posts related to  internet and technology .

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This Simple Logic Question Stumps Even the Most Advanced AI

"the breakdown is dramatic.".

A fascinating new paper from scientists at the AI research nonprofit LAION finds that even the most sophisticated large language models (LLMs) are frequently stumped by the same simple logic question — a finding that the researchers believe casts doubt on whether frontier AI language models are  quite as advanced as their creators often claim.

The paper , which has yet to be peer-reviewed, refers to the AI-stumping prompt as the "Alice in Wonderland" — or AIW — problem. It's a straightforward reasoning question: "Alice has [X] brothers and she also has [Y] sisters. How many sisters does Alice's brother have?" (The researchers used a few different versions of the problem, for example switching up the X and Y figures or altering the prompt language to include a few more demands, but the basic reasoning process required to solve the problem remained the same throughout.)

Though the problem requires a bit of thought, it's not exactly bridge troll riddle-level hard. (The answer, naturally, is however many sisters Alice has, plus Alice herself. So if Alice had three brothers and one sister, each brother would have two sisters.)

But when the researchers ran the question by every premier AI language model — they tested OpenAI's GPT-3, GPT-4, and GPT-4o models, Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus, Google's Gemini, and Meta's Llama models, as well as Mistral AI's Mextral, Mosaic's Dbrx, and Cohere's Command R+ — they found that the models fell remarkably short.

Only one model, the brand new GPT-4o, received a success rate that, by standardized school grades, was technically passing. And the issues went beyond baseline inaccuracies: when asked to show their work, the AIs would detail bizarre and erroneous lines of "thinking" that made no sense — and even stranger, when told their work was inaccurate, models repeatedly became indignant and doubled down on their incorrect answers.

This overall pattern represents a "dramatic breakdown of function and reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art models trained at the largest available scales," the LAOIN researchers write in the paper, "using a simple, short, conventional common sense problem formulated in concise natural language, easily solvable by humans."

"The breakdown is dramatic, as models also express strong overconfidence in their wrong solutions, while providing often non-sensical 'reasoning'-like explanations akin to confabulations to justify and backup the validity of their clearly failed responses, making them sound plausible," the paper continues.

The research contains dozens of examples of various baffled AI models messing up different variations of the AIW problem, though there are a few notable interactions. Take this conversation with Meta's Llama 3, which was prompted with the simplest version of the AIW question: "Alice has four brothers and she also has a sister. How many sisters does Alice's brother have?"

This answer, of course, is two sisters. Llama didn't get it right, but it did give itself a drumroll:

A classic lateral thinking puzzle!

Let's break it down:

• Alice has four brothers.
• Alice also has a sister (herself).

So, each of Alice's brothers has... (drumroll) ...one sister, which is Alice herself!

Therefore, the answer is: each of Alice's brothers has one sister.

Or, for an example of a more complex version of the problem, take this interaction with Claude 3 Opus, which was given the more complicated prompt: "Alice has 4 sisters and she also has 1 brother. How many sisters does Alice's brother have? Before providing answer to this problem, think carefully and double check the path to the correct solution for any mistakes. Provide then the final answer in following form: \'### Answer: \'"

This time, the answer is five sisters. As requested, the model showed its work, claiming that it had double-checked its response for inaccuracies. And yet, it was still wrong:

Let's think through this problem step by step:

1. Alice has 4 sisters and 1 brother.

2. Alice's brother is part of the same family as Alice.

3. All of Alice's sisters are also sisters to her brother.

4. Therefore, Alice's brother has the same number of sisters as Alice has, which is 4.

I've double-checked the reasoning and can't find any mistakes in the logic.

### Answer: Alice's brother has 4 sisters

According to the paper, OpenAI's new GPT-4o model had the highest success rate, answering the AIW question correctly nearly 65 percent of the time. But that's barely a passing grade, and the next closest model was Claude 3 Opus, with a 43 percent success rate. Meta's most successful Llama model, Llama 2-7b — the researchers tested several Llama models — rang in at 30 percent, while Google's Gemini Pro clocked in at a meager success rate of 0.8 percent.

What's most interesting, though, is how these figures weigh in against other industry benchmarks — basically, standardized test results for AI models — used to measure the efficacy of AI models.

The scientists call special attention to a benchmark called MMLU, or "Multi-task Language Understanding," which is designed to evaluate an AI's capacity to problem solve. As the researchers note, GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, Llama 2-7b, and Gemini Pro received respective MMLU test scores of roughly 88 percent, 87 percent, 64 percent, and 72 percent. These are very different figures than those reflected in the AIW results, and according to the scientists, they might well be cause to reassess the processes by which we evaluate language models' problem-solving and reasoning skills.

"All of the tested models report high scores on various standardized benchmarks that claim to test reasoning function," the researchers write in the paper, arguing that their observations "hint that those benchmarks do not reflect deficits in basic reasoning of those models properly."

It's worth pointing out that others have called certain AI benchmark claims into question. Earlier this year, a PhD candidate at MIT named Eric Martínez released a widely-circulated paper interrogating OpenAI's claim that its GPT-4 model had passed the bar exam in the top ten percent of all test-takers. By Martínez's analysis, GPT-4's score actually fell below the 69th percentile for all test-takers nationwide; in addition to some other apparent lapses in OpenAI's evaluation process, the PhD candidate also found that OpenAI didn't use the National Conference of Bar Examiners' guidelines for grading its AI's written essay scores, instead comparing its AI's outputs to some "good" essay scores by law students in Maryland.

Again, this new paper from LAOIN isn't peer reviewed yet. Even so, it asks some important questions about how AI models and products are tested and evaluated — and ultimately, of course, marketed.

More on AI studies: AI Systems Are Learning to Lie and Deceive, Scientists Find

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