Inclusive and Sustainable Urbanization: Using a Macropsychology Perspective to Strengthen the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

Current planning and management of cities are not adequate to cope with the increasing flow of foreign and domestic migrants to urban areas. SDG 11, as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, focuses on the need for sustained economic, social, and environmental development of urban areas. Implementation of development policies in urban areas is a longer term process and requires sustained public support. Public institutions across boundaries and hierarchical levels need to find ways to act in a coordinated and coherent manner, in support of the needed transformations to realize SDG 11. Acropsychology and its insights into complex policy-making process and development of institutions at the macro-level are very much needed to solve pressing developmental challenges to ensure urban sustainability in a holistic, effective, and efficient manner. Decision-makers need to stretch their mental models or schemas to “crossover” (Hand et al., Stepping up, by stepping out: Sustaining humanitarian work psychology. In I. McWha-Hermann, D. C. Maynard, & M. O’Neill Berry (Eds.), Humanitarian work psychology and the global development agenda: Case studies and Interventins (pp. 171–175). East Sussex, UK: Routledge, 2016) by forming multi-layered perspectives including meta-, macro-, meso-, and micro-realities of urban development. Measurements through appropriate indicators and robust feedback loops are necessary to avoid misdirection of resources and concomitant conflicts where the psychology of motivation and influencing up and down different levels of analysis need to be called into play. This chapter presents key challenges of urban development, identifies current shortcomings of the related SDG 11 indicators, and proposes solutions to align urban development with the core pillars of the 2030 Agenda by incorporating population science and macropsychology in their formulation.