Green and Thriving Neighbourhoods

GREEN AND THRIVING NEIGHBOURHOODS

Explore how to develop green and thriving neighbourhoods in your city with an integrated vision, a set of design strategies, and a step-by-step delivery roadmap.

By emphasizing the importance of local context, design, and integration, this course will inspire you to think differently about neighbourhoods and provide the necessary tools to take action.

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As urban life becomes the default human experience, it is crucial that national and local governments develop resilient and carbon-neutral cities where everybody thrives. To tackle this challenge, inclusive and coordinated policies, strategies and actions are required. Through a more holistic, systems-based approach, cities can achieve multiple environmental benefits and reduce infrastructure costs.

However, integrated planning at city scale can feel like an impossible task, both from a resource and operational point of view. The neighbourhood scale is an ideal entry point for cities to start implementing people-centered, holistic urban design strategies.

Targeted at urban decision-makers and planners, this course describes how to design a “green” neighbourhood layout that positively influences the microclimate and minimizes energy use, while promoting nature-based solutions, circular economy, local sourcing, and smart systems. The course also encourages early community engagement to help urban practitioners better understand people’s needs, motivations, and concerns and ensure that the neighbourhood becomes a place where everybody thrives.

Learning Objectives

This course aims to provide cities with integrated strategies to transform neighbourhoods across multiple sectors (such as land use, street design, housing, transport, economic development, water, waste, sanitation, public safety, education, and energy) and align multiple actors to have an enduring impact for all communities.

Localized, Integrated Model

Create an integrated model for neighbourhood regeneration and new developments, contextualised to your community.

Low-Carbon Design

Implement low-carbon and people-centred design at neighbourhood level for delivering sustainability, liveability, and better well-being and environmental outcomes.

Policy & Tools

Acquire greater knowledge on actionable policy, process instruments, and financing tools to oversee the sustainable and integrated design of green and thriving neighbourhoods.

Global Understanding

Integrate sustainability dimensions with quality urban design by better understanding the key methods that aim to achieve these strategies, and through a diversity of options and experiences from around the world.

Course at a glance

Targeted at urban decision-makers and planners, this course describes how to design a “green” neighbourhood layout that positively influences the microclimate and minimizes energy use while promoting nature-based solutions, circular economy, local sourcing, and smart systems. The course also encourages early community engagement to help urban practitioners better understand people’s needs and motivations and ensure that the neighbourhood becomes a place where everybody thrives.

Duration

8 hours

Lead Institution

UN Environment Programme

Languages

English (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian Bahasa and Mandarin Chinese available soon)

Certificate

Personalized certificate provided upon course completion

Course Outline

Section 1: Place-based Strategies

Neighbourhoods are not merely a collection of statistics or buildings; rather, they depend on the interaction between people, the environment, and architecture. Placemaking is bound to the creation of public spaces and streets as places for people, defined by the interplay of the built environment and voids. The section presents the transformative change potential of place-based actions, explaining how design decisions regarding public space, location, movement, connections, and biodiversity shape green and thriving neighbourhoods.

Section 2: System-based Strategies

Parallel actions on urban planning, sustainable design, infrastructure and cross-sector efficiency are required for a transition towards low-carbon and socially just cities. This section provides guidance on the organization of systems to make a neighbourhood resource–efficient, minimizing emissions and counteracting any residual emissions in a robust and transparent way.

Section 3: Socio-economic Strategies

Good neighbourhood design, either place-based or system-based, can positively influence the health of people in the community, provide economic opportunities for all, and ensure the safety of women and vulnerable communities. This section provides guidance on how holistic design can address cross-cutting issues such as community health, gender equity, and socio-economic vulnerabilities.

Section 4: A Roadmap for Implementation

Successfully developing a green and thriving neighbourhood requires a strategic and holistic approach; investing in standalone technical solutions is not enough. This section outlines a development roadmap for implementing placemaking, systems integration and socio-economic strategies in five core stages.

Authors

Serge Salat is an architect, urban planner, economist, and the founder of the Urban Morphology and Complex Systems Institute in Paris. He is a global expert in urban morphology and city design, spatial planning, urban energy, smart cities, urban finance and complex systems management. He advises the IPCC, GEF, UNEP, UN-Habitat, World Bank, the Chinese government and many cities, including the municipalities of Shanghai and Chongqing. Serge Salat holds three PhDs in Architecture, Economy, and History of Civilizations. He is a recipient of the prestigious GFHS Outstanding Individual Award for his work on urban sustainability.

Elsa Lefevre is Programme Manager at UNEP Cities Unit, where she works to support sustainable urban development. She focuses on the development of UNEP’s work in integrated and sustainable neighbourhood design and coordinates the advocacy component of UrbanShift. Elsa previously worked at the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, where she was leading the capacity-building program to reduce short-lived climate pollutants. Margaux Ginestet is a development economist working at UNEP's Cities Unit, where she supports the dissemination of integrated solutions for sustainable urban development. Her work is focused on the development of holistic strategies, including on sustainable neighbourhood design and the circular economy, in collaboration with practitioners and experts.

Margaux Ginestet is a development economist working at the UN Environment Programme's Cities Unit, where she supports the UrbanShift programme and the development and dissemination of holistic approaches to sustainable urban development. Her work is focused on sustainable and integrated neighbourhood design and the circular economy, in collaboration with practitioners and experts at the local and global level.

Anastasia Ignatova is an architect and urban planner from the UN-Habitat Urban Lab. She has a vast experience in spatial analysis, evidence-based planning and targeted urban design. In each urban design project, Anastasia uses a participatory approach with a wide range of actors to target problematic issues at the broader city-wide level to address them through synthesized knowledge in planning and design guidelines that can be used in similar contexts.

Herman Pienaar is the Head of the UN-Habitat Urban Lab. He has extensive local government experience and in-depth knowledge of urban planning, capital investment planning, and municipal finance. As head of the UN-Habitat Urban Lab, he directs various global initiatives assisting cities and governments with innovative approaches to drive transformation processes and achieve sustainable development outcomes.

Hélène Chartier is the Director of Urban Planning and Design at C40 Cities. She supports cities to accelerate sustainable and resilient urban planning policies and design practices. She leads the C40 Land Use Planning Network, the Green & Thriving Neighbourhoods programme that support cities to turn the 15-minute City concept into reality, and Reinventing Cities, a series of competitions delivering decarbonised and resilient urban regeneration projects in cities around the world. Hélène previously served as an advisor to the Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo. She also worked for the Paris Urbanism Agency and the global consulting firm Arup. Hélène holds a master’s degree in science and engineering from the École Centrale with a specialisation in building and civil engineering.

Chris Pountney is a climate and sustainability expert who co-authored the Green and Thriving Neighbourhoods Guidebook. He is the Arup Skills Leader for Decarbonisation and Sustainability in UKIMEA and is a member of the SBTi Expert Advisory Group on Buildings.

Emanuele Sciuva, Urban Morphology & Complex Systems Institute
Anton Larsen, MASS Design Group
Lindsay Rasmussen, RMI
Sneha Sachar, ClimateWorks Foundation
Anu Ramaswami, Princeton University
Kirti Das, Princeton University

Featured Resources

SEVEN TRANSFORMATIONS FOR MORE EQUITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE CITIES

A sustainable future depends on whether cities can become more prosperous, more equal, and low-carbon at the same time. This synthesis report produced by WRI offering a roadmap for how to unleash transformative change in cities.

GROWING IN CIRCLES

By looking at cities from a systems perspective, this UNEP report identifies pathways to resource efficiency and waste management for cities transitioning from a linear to a circular economy, outlining inspiring examples to initiate change in the way urban areas are planned and managed.

BANKING ON A JUST AND GREEN RECOVERY

Cities are finding innovative ways to finance and implement projects with a focus on inclusion, equity, and a green and just recovery. This C40 report provides case studies from nine cities around the world, sharing actionable lessons for city officials and other stakeholders about how to access finance.