The UN’s 2030 Agenda Transforming our World was launched in 2015 and introduced the global Sustainable Development Goals and Targets. We have now begun the second half of the period towards the 2030 horizon.

This paper reviews research: at the international level for over 250 cities in the UNECE region for Habitat III and more recently in the document Place and Life A Regional Action Plan for 2030 (published 2022); at the sub-national level through the Scotland’s Urban AGE research 2011-2022 (for Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh) published in two volumes; and, at the metropolitan level for Glasgow, through the work of the independent Place Commission (published 2023).

This work, led by the author, analysed and reported on trends across the UNECE including the identification of the ‘supercity’ concept and the paradigm shift from the post-industrial to the proto-knowledge city. It tested these trends at the sub-national level in Scotland and looked at the performance of metropolitan Glasgow within the international context. The work, across international, (sub)national and city scales looked at the trends identified in the UNECE work; the growing importance of the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, and has concluded that, whereas progress has been made across all the SDGs and targets, national and local governments have not yet grasped the systems nature of the SDGs in terms of their vertical and horizontal integration. The systems nature of the SDGs is clear but subtle in the declaration at the beginning of Agenda 2030. The paper concludes by arguing that only by grasping a systems approach to this work can we hope to achieve the aims of Agenda 2030.