Targets are the easy part. The hard part is the spatial logic that makes them real.
Every time I hear a city announce a net zero target, I think the same thing: that’s the easy part.
Amsterdam net zero by 2040. Copenhagen aiming for carbon neutrality. London by 2030. The UK legally bound by 2050. Istanbul has a goal of reducing all GHG 52% by 2030.
These are real commitments. It took years of advocacy and political pressure to get here. But a target is not a delivery plan. And as someone who works in urban planning, what I see most often is a significant gap between the commitment and the actual logic of how it gets delivered.
My argument is simple: the missing piece in most net zero strategies is place. Not technology. Not funding. Place.
Net Zero target years of different cities and countries.
Place is the Unit of Delivery towards net-zero
Here’s what I think urban planners and urban designers see while others often miss. Net zero targets are set nationally or at city level. Carbon registers track emissions by asset or sector.
But neither of these is where people actually live, travel, or make the daily decisions that either accelerate or undermine a city’s emissions trajectory.
The neighbourhood is. The street is.
I’ve seen this many times. A city invests in a low-emission building. Impressive on the carbon register. But it’s in a location where residents have no choice but to drive for everything.
The building performs. The city doesn’t. Because the unit of planning and the unit of actual behaviour are different things.
The Healthy Streets Approach in London is a useful counter-example. The programme didn’t start from a carbon target. It started from a street where a daily journey wasn’t working.
When interventions are designed at street and neighbourhood scale, combining walking routes, cycling connections, public transport access and green space, the effect on travel patterns and air quality consistently goes beyond what any single asset-level programme achieves.
The question I’d ask any city with a net zero commitment is this: which neighbourhoods are you transforming, and in what sequence? If the answer is a list of buildings and fleets, we have to worry. If the answer is a spatial strategy with a logic behind it, we’re getting somewhere.
Investment Follows Streets
One of the most frustrating patterns I’ve seen is that cities have genuine ambition but can’t access the finance to act on it. It’s not always a funding problem. The capital exists such as in EBRD Green Cities, Horizon Europe Cluster 5, ADB urban climate programmes, the UK Shared Prosperity Fund. What’s often missing is the institutional capacity to make a place-based case for the net-zero targets.
I think this is where urban planners have something specific to contribute.
Let me give an example: Green City Action Plan (GCAP) with the EBRD is a framework with a carbon mapping exercise of defined actions. Where is the city most exposed to heat, flooding, air quality problems? Where would investment have the highest combined effect on emissions and quality of life?
The GCAP becomes something lenders could engage with because it is grounded in specific places and a clear spatial logic connecting investment to outcome. It speaks the language of finance because it starts from the language of place.
Cities that can present this kind of case (here is the neighbourhood, here is the problem, here is what it costs and what it delivers) consistently do better with IFI finance than cities presenting a portfolio of assets.
Targets Are Fragile. That’s Exactly Why We Need Them.
Denmark generates more than half its electricity from wind. And yet Denmark has publicly acknowledged it may miss its own 2030 target of a 70% emissions reduction. The reason is structural. Large-scale energy projects, when delayed or cancelled, can set a national trajectory back by years. One facility that is not built might change the numbers in net-zero targets.
Denmark and bicycle highways for achieving Net Zero targets. source: Ursula Bach
A net zero commitment for 2040 or 2050 isn’t a delivery plan. It’s a forcing function. It creates the political conditions under which hard policies become possible: congestion charges, low emission zones, building retrofit mandates, investment in active travel networks.
These policies face enormous resistance without a clear destination to justify them. The target doesn’t deliver net zero by itself. But it makes possible the policies and investments that do.
And when targets slip, the cities continue to translate the national target into place-specific actions: this neighbourhood gets the heat network this year, this corridor gets the cycle infrastructure next year. When a national project is cancelled, these cities absorb the shock. Cities with only a target and no place-specific projects and actions might lose years.
So my advice is: Use the target for what it is, and build the place-based systems that keep moving.
Start with Place
I want to finish with something that I think gets lost in most net zero conversations, which tend to focus on technology, finance, and political commitments.
The cities that are actually delivering are asking a different question. Not: which technology? Not: which fund? But: where, exactly, are we going to make this real?
That question is answered at the street level. It requires the spatial logic. And it requires understanding that national targets and a bike infrastructure are part of the same story.
Start with place. Everything else follows.