Healthier, lower-carbon places for a growing world.
Healthier, lower-carbon places for a growing world. This section brings together GCS reporting and analysis across the places, institutions and systems where action is taking shape.
8 published insights in this solution area.
Explore how Melbourne Skyfarm demonstrates rooftop and vertical farming as nature-based solutions for food security, urban cooling, and stormwater management.
Explore how Singapore’s climate-sensitive urban design integrates wind corridors, green infrastructure, and digital modelling to mitigate rising urban heat risks.
Explore how the Tokyo Digital Twin Project integrates real-time data and 3D modelling to support data-driven urban planning, infrastructure management, and city resilience.
Discover how the London Community Energy Fund mobilises public grants and local capital to accelerate small-scale renewables and urban decarbonisation.
Urban forests reduce heat, manage stormwater, and strengthen climate resilience. Discover how Melbourne’s Urban Forest Strategy uses canopy expansion, biodiversity thresholds, and vegetation health targets to align with international benchmarks.
Explore how green transport solutions and Abu Dhabi’s 2040 smart mobility targets are transforming cities—from Level 4 autonomous permits to Masdar City.
Cities consume vast material flows, lock resources into long-lived assets, and shift environmental burdens far beyond municipal borders. Circular Cities shows how leaders can turn that complexity into accountable action. Written for planners, policymakers, infrastructure professionals, researchers, and informed readers, the book connects urban metabolism, value retention, procurement, building stocks, mobility, food systems, digital tools, finance, and governance. Readers learn to define boundaries, build credible baselines, prioritize interventions, and test whether initiatives deliver measurable environmental and social value. Rather than treating recycling as the endpoint, Robert C. Brears presents circularity as coordinated choices across design, maintenance, reuse, recovery, institutions, and investment. The analysis addresses rebound effects, data quality, cross-boundary resource flows, distributional impacts, and the practical constraints that can separate promising pilots from durable change. The result is a rigorous framework for moving from isolated projects to governed portfolios with clear responsibilities, evidence-based priorities, and verifiable outcomes.
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