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

Cities across the Global South are entering a decisive decade for sustainable development.Rapid urbanization and intensifying climate change are placing growing pressure on urban sustainability, increasing environmental risks while challenging cities' social, economic, and infrastructural systems (Almulhim & Cobbinah, 2026;UN-Habitat, 2024). These pressures are unfolding alongside widening socio-spatial inequalities, infrastructure and resource constraints, and profound technological and economic change, with climate impacts often falling disproportionately on vulnerable and marginalized urban populations (UN-Habitat, 2024).Climate-induced migration adds another layer of complexity, as environmental stress can accelerate rural-to-urban mobility, placing additional pressure on infrastructure, services, and informal and peri-urban development in receiving cities (Almulhim et al., 2024). These pressures do not occur independently. They interact within increasingly complex urban systems, where decisions about land use, housing, mobility, infrastructure, ecosystems, and public services can generate consequences far beyond the sectors in which they originate. The significance of these interactions also extends beyond city boundaries, as urban growth increasingly shapes land cover, hydrological systems, climate, biogeochemical processes, and habitats at broader scales (Espey et al., 2024).Although the term Global South encompasses highly diverse urban contexts and should not imply a single development trajectory, the nature and intensity of urban challenges vary considerably across regions, from rapid urban expansion and informality to housing pressures, climate vulnerability, displacement, and resource scarcity (United Nations, 2026). Nevertheless, many cities across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East face a common challenge: the pace and complexity of urban change increasingly exceed the capacity of conventional planning institutions and instruments to respond effectively. This mismatch between inherited planning approaches and contemporary urban realities has long been recognized, particularly in relation to informality, inequality, rapid urbanization, and the assumptions underpinning planning theory and practice (Watson, 2009). A decade of expanded urban policy commitments has not resolved this challenge. The United Nations (2026), in its assessment of progress in implementing the New Urban Agenda, reports that implementation continues to lag behind the growing scale and complexity of urban challenges. A recent study further shows that sustainable development outcomes remain highly uneven across space and that socioeconomic progress can coexist with environmental deterioration, reinforcing the need for planning approaches that address trade-offs across multiple dimensions of urban sustainability (Guo et al., 2026).The challenge, however, is not a lack of ideas. Sustainable urban planning now draws on a rapidly expanding repertoire of approaches, including resilience planning, nature-based solutions, participatory governance, smart-city technologies, integrated infrastructure, and data-driven decision-making. Yet the translation of these approaches into sustained urban transformation remains uneven. Climate adaptation, for example, depends on institutional capacity, meaningful participation, and the ability to address the needs of poor and vulnerable communities (Chu et al., 2016). Similarly, recent research on nature-based solutions highlights governance, financial feasibility, social acceptance, and context-specific approaches as critical conditions for effective urban planning and implementation (Mirsafa et al., 2025). Informality further complicates this transition because formal and informal institutions, economic activities, and socio-ecological processes are deeply interdependent rather than functioning as separate urban systems (Eakin et al., 2025).The central question for the coming decade is therefore no longer simply what cities should do to become more sustainable, but how planning itself must change to enable sustainable urban transitions under conditions of complexity, uncertainty, informality, and inequality. This Grand Challenge argues that incremental improvements to conventional planning will not be sufficient.It identifies six interrelated paradigm shifts: from sectoral planning to systems thinking; from static plans to adaptive and resilient planning; from formal planning to inclusive urbanism; from growthcentered planning to well-being and equity; from engineering-dominated solutions to ecological urbanism; and, ultimately, from planning as control to planning as continuous learning.Conventional urban planning has played an essential role in organizing land use, guiding infrastructure investment, regulating development, and articulating long-term visions for cities.The challenge is therefore not that conventional planning has become irrelevant, but that many of its underlying assumptions are increasingly insufficient for the conditions under which cities in the Global South are evolving. Planning instruments have often been built around expectations of relatively predictable urban growth, effective formal institutions, clearly defined administrative responsibilities, reliable data, and development that can be managed 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. This mismatch is increasingly visible at the implementation level. The United Nations (2026), in its assessment of progress in implementing the New Urban Agenda, reports that despite the 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. These broader constraints are also evident in rapidly urbanizing Saudi cities, where population growth, environmental pressures, implementation limitations, and mismatches between national priorities and local urban conditions have challenged planning practice (Almulhim & Cobbinah, 2024). These conditions reinforce the need for context-sensitive planning approaches in the Global South, particularly given the limitations of uncritically transferring planning knowledge and models developed in substantially different socioeconomic and institutional contexts (Verdini et al., 2025).A second limitation lies in the fragmented treatment of problems that are systemically interconnected. Land-use decisions influence mobility and infrastructure demand; housing conditions shape exposure to climate hazards; water, energy, ecosystems, and public health interact across administrative and sectoral boundaries. Yet institutions responsible for these systems often operate through separate mandates, budgets, datasets, and planning cycles. The United Nations (2026) similarly identifies fragmented institutional mandates and weak coordination across levels of government as persistent barriers to translating urban policy into spatially coordinated investment and implementation. Evidence from urban climate governance illustrates how fragmented institutional arrangements can constrain integrated responses even where climate risks are recognized (Pazhuhan, 2023). Similar problems appear in adaptation finance: analysis of projects in the Global South found limited attention to uncertainty and relatively weak mechanisms for generating transformative effects across sectors (Forino et al., 2022).Climate change further exposes the limits of planning based predominantly on stable baselines and anticipated trajectories. Increasing climatic variability, compound risks, migration, economic disruption, and rapid technological change make urban futures progressively harder to predict. This does not eliminate the need for long-term plans; rather, it changes what long-term planning must be capable of doing. Earlier work on cities in the Global South already argued that climate adaptation requires governance approaches able to connect different spatial and temporal scales, accommodate multiple forms of knowledge, and integrate formal and informal responses (Birkmann et al., 2010). More recent research similarly emphasizes that adaptive governance must be interpreted through the particular institutional and social conditions of the Global South rather than transferred uncritically from elsewhere (Yasmin et al., 2019). These limitations should therefore not be understood as isolated failures of individual plans or institutions. Collectively, they point to a deeper mismatch between a planning paradigm designed largely around sectoral organization, predictability, formality, and control, and urban realities increasingly characterized by interdependence, uncertainty, informality, and rapid change.The task ahead is not to abandon established planning instruments, but to reposition them within a broader paradigm capable of integrating systems, adapting to uncertainty, recognizing diverse forms of urbanism and knowledge, prioritizing equity and ecological processes, and learning continuously from implementation. Figure 1 conceptualizes this transition through six interrelated paradigm shifts that, taken together, provide a framework for rethinking sustainable urban planning in the Global South. Six paradigm shifts for rethinking sustainable urban planning in the Global South. The framework does not imply the wholesale replacement of conventional planning approaches. Rather, it represents a reorientation of planning toward more systemic, adaptive, inclusive, equitable, ecological, and learning-based approaches capable of responding to increasingly complex and uncertain urban conditions.The limitations outlined above suggest that the challenge is not simply to improve individual planning instruments, but to reconsider some of the principles through which urban planning understands and responds to change. The six shifts presented below are neither mutually exclusive nor intended as universal prescriptions for the highly diverse cities of the Global South. Rather, they identify complementary directions through which planning can become more capable of engaging with interdependence, uncertainty, informality, inequality, ecological limits, and institutional change. Their value lies not in replacing established planning practices wholesale, but in expanding the ways in which urban problems are framed, decisions are made, and implementation is evaluated. Overall, the six shifts provide an integrated, Global South-focused perspective for framing the interconnected challenges that sustainable urban planning must address over the next decade and for linking these challenges to the research priorities outlined in Section 4.Urban sustainability is inherently multidimensional and multiscalar, meaning that interventions that generate benefits in one dimension or at one spatial scale may produce different outcomes or trade-offs in others (Seto et al., 2017). Urban sustainability challenges rarely conform to the administrative and sectoral boundaries through which cities are planned. about land influence mobility, infrastructure housing, ecological and exposure to environmental risks, while water, energy, and infrastructure systems on one Sustainable urban systems are therefore increasingly understood through the interactions social institutions, ecological processes, and interconnected rather than through individual sectors et al., A housing for example, may environmental and of inequality. This need for is also in the United Nations (2026) assessment of the New Urban Agenda, which emphasizes more coordinated approaches across the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable urban systems perspective requires planning to on the and between these The planning should therefore increasingly become the urban rather than the individual as urban infrastructure and can how interventions in one generate consequences elsewhere and more integrated et al., systems should not become with increasingly complex In many Global South cities, data, fragmented institutional responsibilities, and limited capacity may constrain highly approaches. More models or about benefits from particular planning The Grand Challenge is therefore to systems from a into planning practice under data, and resource must which for planning how trade-offs can be and how integrated approaches can remain where and governance capacity are urban planning has on the ability to infrastructure, and development needs with Yet the conditions urban futures are increasingly Climate migration, resource change, economic and can development in ways that plans Evidence from for example, how with climate change and can beyond effective limits, reinforcing the need to from planning toward approaches based on continuous monitoring and adaptation et al., and resilient planning therefore requires a from planning and implementation as a largely toward an in which and are continuously This is with planning, which conceptualizes urban planning not as a static but as one that must respond to the and nature of urban systems & planning, adaptive and resilience can enable cities to for multiple futures rather than on a single This does not imply long-term Rather, long-term sustainability should provide while the toward to as risks, knowledge, technologies, and urban conditions change. from and further that sustained institutional and capacity are for adaptation within urban governance rather than it as a planning et al., Grand Challenge is therefore to adaptive planning to become or decision-making. should how monitoring and adaptive can be within planning systems while institutional and long-term sustainability many cities across the Global South, the city extends far beyond the city in plans and formal regulatory systems. The scale of this challenge is more than in or informal in an of over (United Nations, 2026). informal peri-urban development, and forms of are therefore not but of how urbanization and how cities across cities similarly shows that formal planning often to accommodate and urban processes, despite the role these practices in urban space and responding to than practices simply as from formal planning, more inclusive approaches can as and integrate informal and forms of urban development into planning processes et al., This is also in the United Nations (2026) assessment of the New Urban Agenda, which for integrated and approaches to informal that housing with climate public and while planning systems can these realities informality is as a regulatory to be rather than as a complex urban that must be understood and informality should not be with or as it may also be through and the of across formal and informal institutional boundaries et al., on adaptation in informal across the Global South shows that local knowledge, organization, participatory governance, and can adaptation, while limited weak governance, and constrain wider and Evidence from diverse Global South contexts further the of knowledge, and participatory approaches in adaptation, while and governance constraints on responses et al., adaptation emphasizes context-specific knowledge, inclusive local and attention to while also the need to connect with wider governance et al., urbanism therefore requires more than formal planning into informal requires planning to and as of urban knowledge and in urban Evidence from illustrates how of infrastructure and public services can for more inclusive governance communities and in sustained 2016). is from informal in shows that a in participatory processes does not into influence over decisions et al., 2025).The Grand Challenge is therefore not simply how to informal urban systems, but how planning can and improve them the social and economic on which should identify institutional arrangements through which local and knowledge, and meaningful can influence planning while and to development has long been through of economic growth, investment, infrastructure and recent shows that economic growth is a poor for multidimensional sustainable development, as in socioeconomic can coexist with environmental conditions and spatial (Guo et al., 2026). these dimensions remain they provide an of urban transformation or its benefits planning itself has been as a broader paradigm toward long-term and across economic, and 2016). A more meaningful of sustainable urban development must therefore not cities are more or sustainable, but for these are knowledge and priorities shape planning and at particular urban futures are This requires attention toward of and the and spatial dimensions of urban is particularly in this broader of urban well-being because planning and decisions shape population health through environmental mobility, to housing, and social conditions Sustainable infrastructure, and urban can therefore generate benefits that beyond environmental to and health and of More contemporary urban health increasingly health and health equity as outcomes of interconnected social, economic, and institutional and approaches to urban planning and governance et al., 2025). Yet health remains integrated into urban climate an analysis of city climate adaptation plans found that health impacts recognized, health adaptation largely with and social health particularly & 2026). This the need to health as an dimension of sustainable urban planning and rather than as an of environmental interventions & 2026). research on urban sustainability has found that, some principles of sustainability are in and dimensions of remain relatively reinforcing the need to more within sustainability & 2019). This question is particularly in the Global South, where planning frameworks influence knowledge is recognized, how environmental risks are framed, and which sustainability futures become sustainability interventions are not inherently Urban climate adaptation, and sustainability can generate uneven risks between or to of are et al., on for example, that environmental improvements can to socio-spatial environmental is by or to its Evidence from illustrates this in the Global South, where infrastructure interventions have communities of and social et al., should therefore be not as a of sustainable planning, but as a by which its is evaluated. More sustainability should be not by environmental outcomes but also by social consequences and the to which are in the of and dimensions of Grand Challenge is to planning frameworks and capable of not urban sustainability are but the and has influence over the decisions that shape should beyond urban toward approaches that how sustainability outcomes are across and social and interventions or sustainability has long on infrastructure to water, and environmental infrastructure remains but engineering-dominated approaches are increasingly inadequate for challenges by interactions ecological processes, infrastructure systems, and urban The is therefore not from to but toward a broader of urban infrastructure in which and ecological systems are This is particularly in the Global South, where ecological planning has increasingly services, ecological and the translation of ecological knowledge into urban while also weak institutional limited investment in and services, and inadequate policy and planning frameworks et al., The United Nations similarly emphasizes the need to nature-based solutions within planning and local investment decisions rather than them as environmental solutions, infrastructure, planning, approaches, and resource systems can this infrastructure by multiple ecological and social alongside conventional approaches can this transition by urban resource from of and toward more and of energy, and while and expanding for and & of Global South cities that nature-based solutions are through and infrastructure to address including climate and et al., 2024). A of research on urbanization in similarly shows that can provide for infrastructure that urban needs while et al., research also identifies and climate resilience as of urban nature-based solutions in the Global South, alongside and social et al., 2025).The of these approaches, however, depends on the social, ecological, economic, and infrastructural contexts in which they are reinforcing the need for context-sensitive and integrated planning et al., 2025). also remains by and institutional constraints, including financial sustainability, institutional capacity, and to et al., 2025). research to challenges to governance, and long-term assessment et al., 2026).The planning challenge is therefore not to between and infrastructure, but to how they can be within infrastructure systems to local ecological, social, and institutional conditions. The Grand Challenge is to approaches for and these systems while that benefits are should not long-term environmental but also governance capacity, social and including and has to uncertainty through and Yet the growing complexity and of urban systems make it increasingly to how environmental change, technological disruption, pressures, and social responses will interact over Planning must therefore the capacity of cities to and as conditions change. and mechanisms can this adaptive capacity by planning to be in to and 2025). This requires a more in which planning a continuous of and can this learning capacity by expanding how urban conditions are and The United Nations (2026) identifies persistent gaps in and urban data, while the of technologies, and to urban and Urban data, and can and the of and value vary A recent study of and urban resilience relatively for and in and infrastructure and remain more at or et al., 2025). on urban similarly highlights for complex urban processes and while and as implementation challenges & planning as learning on technological In the Global South, the adoption of and remains by infrastructure, institutional and governance capacity, financial constraints, and to 2025). and can the knowledge to by local and but is similarly by and conditions et al., can influence to and, what in the et al., planning as institutional inequalities, and risks of can constrain the and of transformation should therefore not be as a technological for participatory approaches can and but persistent and risks of reinforce the need to and forms of (Almulhim & 2026).The Grand Challenge is therefore to planning institutions that can continuously from and knowledge while that increasingly data-driven systems remain and The central are not what and can do for planning, but the data, knowledge in and may be from the learning these six paradigm shifts the of the research challenge for the next decade is to how they can be and across highly diverse Global South This challenge extends beyond planning approaches to the conditions under which they can generate and urban urban research similarly complexity, equity and environmental change, and in contexts, alongside between knowledge and urban et al., 2025). further toward priorities also the need to beyond of toward implementation and at while integrating governance, and technological change into urban sustainability research et al., 2026). This implementation challenge is also the United Nations (2026) emphasizes that translating urban commitments into outcomes depends on local and effective governance, institutional capacity, and coordination across levels of research priorities from this challenge systems how can integrated urban systems models become and context-sensitive planning in cities where data, institutional capacity, and remain planning under how can adaptive institutions make and long-term decisions under economic, and uncertainty informality and local how can informal urban systems, and knowledge be into planning generating displacement, or equity and which context-sensitive and can in health and well-being alongside the and dimensions of urban rather than them within of urban while meaningful across cities and over ecological and under what ecological, and social conditions can nature-based and infrastructure provide resilience while and and how can and planning while and from in implementation and how can the between policy and implementation be and how can beyond isolated to become and planning particularly where governance capacity, and institutional are The research priorities are and connect to multiple paradigm research needs that can the transformation in sustainable urban They are intended to the planning for the next urban complexity, responding to uncertainty, equity and resilient and learning and adapting over These the through which the paradigm shifts can be into more and context-sensitive planning across diverse Global South these will also a should be on and research capable of how planning interventions across contexts and over alongside and research that and knowledge into the research The need for more and urban sustainability research across regions, and spatial scales has been recognized for some (Seto et al., from cities the of approaches to connect different forms of knowledge and the institutional and challenges in them et al., research can generate learning across cities but requires to for across diverse urban et al., cities in the Global South should not remain in which and planning models developed elsewhere are or should increasingly them as of and theory capable of how urban sustainability itself is This also requires attention to the of Global South cities for and and to the to urban sustainability that may from particular conditions & Persistent in urban knowledge and research further reinforce the need for and more knowledge across and contexts et al., 2025). work on Global South climate urbanism similarly for planning knowledge to be more in and local contexts and for forms of knowledge (Verdini et al., 2025). This requires not broader but a of over which urban are which forms of knowledge and in the that will sustainable urban planning over the next six paradigm shifts are not They point toward a deeper transformation in how sustainable urban planning is understood and Planning for sustainable cities increasingly requires from assumptions toward adaptive approaches, from sectoral interventions toward from toward more inclusive forms of governance, from of progress toward and from responses toward integrated systems, and from planning as control toward planning as a continuous of learning and These shifts do not imply established planning formal institutions, or technological They for these within a broader planning paradigm capable of responding to complexity, uncertainty, ecological limits, social inequality, and diverse forms of urban a paradigm be into a single for the Global South. The term encompasses cities with different institutional ecological economic technological and of formal and informal must therefore be a of sustainable urban planning rather than an universal models have been The challenge is to approaches that can across contexts that they will the produce the or the institutional The value of this framework lies in these interrelated directions within a Global South-focused perspective and them to a research for the next over this should be not by the of technologies, or sustainability but by they to more equitable, and resilient urban futures and planning the capacity to urban complexity, respond to uncertainty, equity and resilient and and over The challenge of the next decade is therefore not simply to improve conventional planning, but to sustainable urban planning around the knowledge systems, and of cities in the Global South.