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  • Perspective
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The debate on growth versus environment at the urban scale

Nature Cities volume 2, pages 685–692 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

The long-standing growth-versus-environment debate has centered on national and global scales, devoting little attention to cities despite steadily increasing urban concentrations of population, activities and emissions. This Perspective clarifies how this debate plays out for cities by relating four urban growth dimensions—economic, population, spatial and environmental—to the narratives of green growth, degrowth and post-growth. To this end, we review theoretical and empirical insights about links between growth dimensions. Specific issues addressed include horizontal spillovers among cities, vertical policy integration and local experiments. Thus we connect the abstract growth-versus-environment debate to evidence regarding urban environmental policy.

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Fig. 1: A tentative framework for assessing the growth-versus-environment debate at the urban scale.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Bellanca, O. Hansen, A. Huhtala, L. King, J. Morrison, P. Núñez Yebra and D. Torren Peraire for comments and discussion. ERC grant 101097924 (CLIMGROW) in EU Horizon-ERC provided financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Charlotte Liotta & Jeroen van den Bergh

  2. ICREA, Barcelona, Spain

    Jeroen van den Bergh

  3. School of Business and Economics & Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jeroen van den Bergh

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  1. Charlotte Liotta
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  2. Jeroen van den Bergh
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C.L. and J.v.d.B. conceptualized the paper, wrote the first draft and revised the paper.

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Correspondence to Charlotte Liotta.

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Nature Cities thanks Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Liotta, C., van den Bergh, J. The debate on growth versus environment at the urban scale. Nat Cities 2, 685–692 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00269-z

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