Six paradigm shifts could redefine how Global South cities plan for sustainability

Cities across the Global South are entering a decade in which conventional urban planning may no longer be able to keep pace with the forces reshaping them. A new specialty grand challenge article published in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities argues that rapid urbanization, intensifying climate change, widening socio-spatial inequalities, and infrastructure and resource constraints are interacting within increasingly complex urban systems, and that incremental improvements to inherited planning approaches will not be sufficient to respond. The article, authored by Abdulaziz I. Almulhim of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, sets out six interrelated paradigm shifts intended to reframe how sustainable urban planning is understood and practiced over the next ten years.

The starting point of the argument is a mismatch between the assumptions embedded in conventional planning instruments and the conditions under which many Global South cities are actually evolving. Planning tools have often been built around expectations of relatively predictable urban growth, effective formal institutions, clearly defined administrative responsibilities, reliable data, and development manageable through formal regulatory systems. In many rapidly urbanizing contexts, however, urban change unfolds through a more complex combination of formal and informal processes, uneven institutional capacity, infrastructure deficits, resource constraints, and increasingly uncertain climatic and socioeconomic conditions. The author emphasizes that conventional planning has not become irrelevant; rather, its underlying assumptions are increasingly insufficient for the realities of these cities.

Evidence of this mismatch is visible at the implementation level. The article cites an assessment of progress in implementing the New Urban Agenda reporting that, despite wider adoption of national urban and housing policies, implementation has not kept pace with the growing scale and complexity of urban challenges. Persistent gaps between national policy frameworks and municipal planning instruments, limited local capacity, fragmented institutional mandates, weak monitoring systems, and inadequate financing continue to constrain implementation. The same assessment identifies fragmented institutional mandates and weak coordination across levels of government as persistent barriers to translating urban policy into spatially coordinated investment. Comparable constraints are described in rapidly urbanizing Saudi cities, where population growth, environmental pressures, and mismatches between national priorities and local urban conditions have challenged planning practice.

The first proposed shift moves from sectoral planning to systems thinking. Urban sustainability challenges rarely conform to the administrative and sectoral boundaries through which cities are planned: decisions about land use influence mobility, infrastructure demand, housing, ecological conditions, and exposure to environmental risks, while water, energy, and transport systems depend on one another. A housing decision, for example, may alter travel demand, energy consumption, emissions, environmental exposure, and ultimately patterns of inequality. Concepts such as urban metabolism, infrastructure interdependencies, and water-energy-land relationships can help reveal how interventions in one domain generate consequences elsewhere. Yet the article cautions that systems thinking should not become synonymous with increasingly complex modeling, because incomplete data, fragmented institutional responsibilities, and limited technical capacity may constrain data-intensive approaches in many Global South cities, and models alone cannot resolve competing interests or unequal power.

The second shift moves from static plans to adaptive and resilient planning. Long-term planning has traditionally depended on anticipating future population, land-use, infrastructure, and development needs with reasonable confidence, but climate extremes, migration, resource scarcity, demographic change, economic shocks, and geopolitical disruptions can alter development trajectories in ways fixed plans cannot fully anticipate. Evidence from Dhaka demonstrates how uncertainties associated with both climate change and urbanization can push existing strategies beyond their effective limits, reinforcing the need to move from predictive planning toward continuous monitoring and adaptation. Scenario planning, adaptive pathways, risk-informed decision-making, and periodic reassessment can enable cities to prepare for multiple plausible futures rather than relying on a single expected trajectory. Experience from Quito, Surat, and Durban further indicates that sustained political leadership, institutional coordination, stakeholder involvement, learning, and capacity building are important for embedding adaptation within urban governance rather than treating it as a one-off planning exercise.

The third shift moves from formal planning to inclusive urbanism, and the scale of the underlying challenge is substantial: more than 1.1 billion people worldwide were living in slums or informal settlements in 2022, an increase of over 120 million since 2016. Informal settlements, informal economies, peri-urban development, and community networks are integral components of how urbanization occurs, not peripheral exceptions. Research across African cities shows that formal planning often struggles to accommodate informal, temporary, and citizen-led urban processes, and the article argues that planning should recognize residents and community organizations as producers of urban knowledge and active participants in shaping development. Evidence from Nairobi illustrates how co-production of infrastructure and public services can create spaces for more inclusive governance, while evidence from informal settlements in Accra shows that having a voice in participatory processes does not necessarily translate into substantive influence over decisions. The author also notes that informality should not be equated exclusively with poverty, as it may be produced through entrepreneurship, wealth, and power.

The fourth shift moves from growth-centered planning toward wellbeing and equity. Recent global evidence shows that economic growth alone is a poor proxy for multidimensional sustainable development, because gains in socioeconomic activity can coexist with worsening environmental conditions and substantial spatial inequalities. Health is highlighted as particularly important, since planning and built-environment decisions shape population health through environmental exposures, physical activity, mobility, access to green space, housing, and social conditions. Yet an analysis of 55 city climate adaptation plans found that although health impacts were widely recognized, comprehensive health adaptation was largely absent, with mental and social health particularly neglected. The article also warns that sustainability interventions are not inherently equitable: research on green gentrification demonstrates that environmental improvements can contribute to socio-spatial inequalities, and evidence from Medellín shows green infrastructure interventions dispossessing low-income communities of land, location, and social capital.

The fifth shift moves from engineering-dominated solutions to ecological urbanism. Engineered infrastructure remains indispensable for managing flooding, water, heat, and waste, but the article argues for a broader conception of urban infrastructure in which technical and ecological systems are planned together. Nature-based solutions, blue-green infrastructure, biodiversity-sensitive planning, and circular resource systems can expand the infrastructure portfolio by providing multiple ecological and social functions alongside conventional systems. Studies of Global South cities show nature-based solutions being applied through green and blue infrastructure to address climate resilience, biodiversity support, ecosystem restoration, and public-space provision, with water management and climate resilience identified as prominent functions. The effectiveness of these approaches, however, depends on the social, ecological, economic, and infrastructural contexts in which they are implemented, and implementation remains shaped by financial sustainability, institutional capacity, awareness, and access to information. The challenge, the author stresses, is not to choose between gray and green infrastructure but to combine them within hybrid systems suited to local conditions.

The sixth shift moves from planning as control to planning as learning. Monitoring and evaluation mechanisms can support adaptive capacity by enabling planning strategies to be revised in response to new information, while digital technologies can expand how urban conditions are observed, interpreted, and tested. Urban observatories, GIS, citizen-generated data, real-time monitoring, scenario modeling, artificial intelligence, and digital twins can support monitoring and experimentation, but their maturity varies considerably: a recent study of smart technologies and urban resilience finds relatively stronger empirical support for GIS and IoT applications in risk mapping, early warning, and infrastructure management, whereas AI and digital twins remain more commonly at pilot or conceptual stages. Adoption in the Global South remains conditioned by digital infrastructure, institutional and governance capacity, financial constraints, and unequal access to technology. Digital divides can systematically influence who contributes to crowdsourced data, and AI-based planning raises concerns about data quality, model transparency, and risks of algorithmic exclusion, reinforcing the need to combine digital and non-digital forms of engagement.

From these six shifts, the article derives seven research priorities for the coming decade: making integrated urban systems models usable where data and capacity are constrained; enabling adaptive institutions to make and revise long-term decisions under deep uncertainty; incorporating informal urban systems and local knowledge without generating displacement or livelihood losses; developing context-sensitive methods and indicators that reveal inequalities in health and wellbeing rather than obscuring them in aggregate measures; identifying conditions under which nature-based and hybrid infrastructure can provide durable, equitable, and financially viable resilience; strengthening AI and digital planning while protecting privacy and reducing algorithmic bias; and closing the gap between policy ambition and implementation so that promising experiments become institutionalized and scalable. The author argues that Global South cities should increasingly be treated as sites of conceptual innovation and theory building rather than primarily as testing grounds for models developed elsewhere, and that progress should be judged not by the sophistication of new plans or technologies but by whether they contribute to healthier, more equitable, and ecologically resilient urban futures.

Subject of Research: A grand challenge article proposes six paradigm shifts to transform sustainable urban planning in Global South cities over the next decade.

Article Title: Rethinking sustainable urban planning in the Global South: six paradigm shifts for the next decade

Article References: Almulhim, A. I. (2026). Rethinking sustainable urban planning in the Global South: six paradigm shifts for the next decade. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 8, Article 2014131. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2026.2014131

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsc.2026.2014131

Keywords: sustainable urban planning, Global South, urbanization, climate change, informal settlements, nature-based solutions, urban equity, adaptive planning, systems thinking, digital twins, urban health, New Urban Agenda