The Electric City as a Solution to Sustainable Urban Development

Comprehensive frameworks for sustainable urban development have been advanced by many scholars and global institutions in recent years. These frameworks are broad and overlapping in nature, but each has its own structure and emphasis. We review a cross-section of these frameworks, examining their foundations and general predictions for an urban future. From this review, we cultivate an argument that continued progress toward sustainable urban development hinges on low-carbon electrification. Our position for electric cities is supported by the sustainability literature and by empirical evidence gathered from the world's largest cities, which shows that economy, physical environment, and basic service delivery improve with per capita electricity consumption. We close with an overview of the challenges associated with urban electrification.