Abstract
Urban areas play a key role in reaching global sustainability as they produce a high amount of waste and emissions, consume a lot of resources, and perform as the prime mover of the global economy. Unsustainable urbanization will generate multidimensional impacts on the earth’s socio-ecological system that is nearly impossible to be managed. As a preemptive action, urban sustainability has been considered as one of the most important targets in the Sustainable Development Goals. Within this context, the green city has emerged as a widely adopted concept around the globe. In the Global North, the concept of a green city has been incrementally developed as efforts to mainstream green infrastructure and nature-based solutions approaches in supporting ecosystem services. Quite the contrary, in the Global South cities, due to their rapid and vast urbanization process, the green city has been fragmentally adopted. Previous studies have proposed three factors, i.e., urbanization, biophysics, and governance, underlying the different approaches of green city development between cities in the Global North and South. Still, more studies are needed to explicate these factors and how these will in turn shape a particular green city trajectory in Global South cities. This study aims to respond to these questions based on green city experimentation in Indonesia. An exploratory study was done based on a literature review and participant observation. The results exhibit that the green city program in Indonesia largely focused on the development of green open spaces which has ultimately failed to improve the urban environment and sustainability. Incorporating local socio-ecological aspects coupled with integrated multi-level and multi-actors’ governance is recommended to increase the green city performances.
Highlights
Urban areas have become a key geographical area to address sustainability issues due to their massive ecological implications, i.e., waste and emission production and ecological footprint, that have affected in-situ environment and the global environment (Acuto et al, 2018; Zinkernagel et al, 2018)
This paper address two questions in particular: How has the green city concept been adopted in Indonesia by means of the P2KH program? And, based on this assessment and considering the context specifics of Indonesia, how should the green city concept be further developed? A thorough assessment was done to gauge the effectiveness of the program as well as to gain some valuable lessons learned from the program in achieving urban sustainability goals
Various urban models and jargon have spread like wildfire: policy makers are racing to adopt a variety of global labels into the urban agenda in their respective countries and cities
Summary
Urban areas have become a key geographical area to address sustainability issues due to their massive ecological implications, i.e., waste and emission production and ecological footprint, that have affected in-situ environment and the global environment (Acuto et al, 2018; Zinkernagel et al, 2018). Amid the rising prominence of urban sustainability agendas, the green city has come to the fore as one of the most widely adopted concepts across the globe, both in the Global North and South. At the outset of green city’s experimentation, more emphasis was given to minimizing environmental impact by increasing efficient use of energy, water, and land as well as reducing waste and emissions (EIU, 2012; Liendfield and Steinberg, 2012; Venkatesh, 2013). Green infrastructure (GI) and nature-based solutions (NBS) have become two major approaches to operationalize ES in cities as both approaches focus on the integration between nature and artificial-human systems (Nesshöver et al, 2017; Pauleit et al, 2017)
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