CityReads | Why Everyone Thinks Cities Can Save the Planet?

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Why Everyone Thinks Cities Can Save the Planet?

Sustainability’s urban turn

Angelo, H., & Wachsmuth, D. (2020). Why does everyone think cities can save the planet? Urban Studies, doi:10.1177/0042098020919081

Picture source: Getty Images / H. Armstrong Roberts / Stringer, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/climate-change-optimism-ecomodernism-new-conservation

Today is World Environment Day. The theme for World Environment Day 2020 is, 'Time for Nature,' with a focus on its role in providing the essential infrastructure that supports life on Earth and human development. The foods we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the climate that makes our planet habitable all come from nature. For instance, each year, marine plants produce more than a half of our atmosphere's oxygen, and a mature tree cleans our air, absorbing 22 kilos of carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen in exchange. Despite all the benefits that our nature give us, we still mistreat it. The ongoing pandemic of COVID-19 is a wake-up call for us. Nature is sending us a message: to care for ourselves we must care for nature.

What’s the relationship between cities and sustainability? Are they contradictory with each other? Or are they mutually reinforcing? The latest special issue article from Urban Studies, Why does everyone think cities can save the planet? reviews and explains the changes in the understanding and policies on cities and sustainability, especially the transitions in global urban policy and discourse from the city as a sustainability problem to the city as a sustainability solution.

This article argues that contemporary policy discourses of cities saving the planet should be understood in the context of three major historical developments which have their roots in the 1970s and which intensified throughout the 1990s. The first is sprawl: the urban sustainability policy agenda in the Global North has been in large part a reaction to several decades of urban expansion and car-based planning. The second is informal settlements: since the introduction of UN-HABITAT in 1978, an international policy agenda has formed around addressing the environmental deficits associated with processes of informal urbanisation above all in the Global South. And the third is climate change, as the overarching concern that connects urban-environmental problems and policies in the North and South.

Each of these problems had a common pattern-first highlighting the connection between cities and the natural environment in an oppositional relationship, and then in a potentially harmonious one. Taken together, the urban-environmental agendas that emerged in response to these concerns have added up to a decisive shift in the environmental imaginary of the city: from a 20th century sustainability problem (requiring non-city solutions), to a 21st century sustainability solution.

Urban sprawl

Urban sprawl has been a leading symbol of the city as a sustainability problem across a range of spatial and historical contexts. It is now broadly understood as an urban challenge worldwide, with affluent suburbs and poor informal settlements both accounting for a disproportionate share of new urban development in Global South metropolises.

From the early days of industrial urbanisation into the post-war era, suburban development in the USA was a commonly proposed corrective to the environmental deficits of urban life–from questions of poor health and overcrowding in polluted, densely packed tenements to racially uneven exposure to industrial pollutants.

But the USA, in addition to being the epicentre of post-war suburbanisation itself, hosted the first major popular and intellectual opposition to suburbanisation on environmental grounds, beginning in the 1960s. Inspired by works such as Rachel Carson’s (2002 [1962]) Silent Spring, Barry Commoner’s (1971)The Closing Circle and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth, the growing environmental movement saw in suburban sprawl unsustainable patterns of resource consumption, land use and pollution. Importantly these critiques all tended to see suburbanisation as synonymous with urban development more broadly and therefore derived generic critiques of urbanisation from more specific characteristics of suburban sprawl. In identifying economic growth as the driver of sprawl and therefore environmental degradation, many of these critiques effectively made anti-capitalist.

In contrast to previous waves of opposition to sprawl throughout the 20th century, however, current anti-sprawl ideals of urban density and the compact city have become the concrete imaginary of the city as a sustainability solution. This shift began with the oil crisis of the 1970s, which foreshadowed the end of cheap oil, and grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s as city governments began trying to attract the white middle class back from the suburbs by reinvesting in hollowed-out downtowns, and as concerns about pollution and carbon emissions grew.

Informal settlements

Early 20th century urban slums were understood as by-products of industrial development and were expected to give way to formal settlements as that development progressed. But by the 1970s, informal settlements were expanding rapidly in cities throughout the Global South and largely unaccompanied by the predicted industrialisation. Because of their apparently inexorable growth, these settlements also rapidly began to be seen as environmental problems – a perception that remained through the end of the 20th century.

Through the beginning of the 21st century, the main strategies for coping with informal settlements were to clear or ‘upgrade’ them, in both cases in the name of ‘development’.

But even as informal settlements were being widely cited as environmental problems and international development touted as a solution, a second narrative-of informal settlements as vibrant, innovative forms of a potentially sustainable urbanism–was growing. 2010 marked something of a watershed in this regard. In contrast to some of its earlier work, UN-Habitat’s (2010) report, Cities for All: Bridging the Urban Divide, changed its tone, describing urbanisation as a ‘positive force for transformation’ in the Global South. Stewart Brand (2010), the American environmental visionary and founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, wrote an article entitled ‘How slums can save the planet’, in which he described informal settlements as ‘unexpectedly green’ by virtue of their extreme density. Brand observed a ‘reversal of opinion about fast growing cities – from bad news to good news’ for the environment–across the first decade of the 21st century, as researchers conducting interviews in informal settlements started to notice their unexpected positive qualities: their efficiency, walkability, recycling practices, economies of scale, thriving informal economies, strong networks of community support and residents’ steadily improving quality of life

And many of the very characteristics which were conceptualised as environmental problems in the 20th century–informality, impermanence, living with less and extreme density – are now being taken up as “models for sustainable living”. In short, whereas informal settlements in the Global South were once understood as environmental problems for which ‘development’ was the solution, they are now seen as potential resources for sustainable urbanism on a global scale.

Climate change

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as scientific understanding of climate change developed, discussion of cities as sustainability problems grew. Cities were understood to be key sources of global GHG emissions, both because of the growing percentage of the world’s population living in them and the lifestyle and consumption practices of their more affluent residents.

It was at the 1992 Rio Conference that cities were ‘fully recognised as an area through which sustainability could and should be pursued’. Because the majority of the world would soon live in cities, scholars and policymakers argued, it was in and through cities that sustainability goals must be pursued.

The 2000s  have  also been marked   by  a growing awareness of cities’ vulnerability to climate change-induced changes in weather patterns and the rise of urban ‘resiliency’ planning and discourse.

Today, the profile of climate change issues is significantly urban; city leaders recognise ‘both unusual vulnerability and significant responsibility’ for climate change impacts.

The emergence of these urban-environmental problems was not simultaneous; sprawl, informal settlements and climate change developed as successive environmental problems between the 1960s and the 2000s. And each of these problems eventually led to distinctly different types of solutions, in spatial planning, architecture and design, and urban governance.

But each of the three policy areas underwent a similar shift. Initial efforts were non-city – which is to say that initial proposed solutions to problems of sprawl, informal settlements and climate change (limiting growth, sustainable international development and multilateral treaty processes) did not target specifically city planning, city design or city governance. Only later did city solutions to sprawl, informal settlements and climate change become commonplace–in the form of compact/smart cities, ‘resilient’ neighbourhoods and strong mayoral networks–along with a distinctly urban vision of contemporary sustainability more generally.

Sustainability’s urban turn was a consequence of urban change. This turn initially came in the form of concerns about the  environmental  impacts of sprawl and informal settlements. Subsequently, concerns about climate change were understood as a new kind of environmental pressure resulting from urban growth: worries about the vulnerability of urban assets and populations to extreme weather events; increasing global emissions as a result of accelerating urban development in the Global South, particularly China; and large carbon footprints resulting from the lifestyle and consumption practices of the world’s more affluent urban residents.

Habitat I  (1976) marked a recognition of the ‘urban poor’s exposure to environmental risk’ (1976: 531). By Habitat II, in 1996, cities were seen as ‘strategic sites in a globalising economy,’ and the international development community was ‘focused essentially on managing urbanisation in the global south and on the urban poor’ (1996: 532). 2016’s Habitat III marked a consolidated ‘view of the world as an urban system’ and, in terms of development practice, a ‘shift from cities as sites for sustainable development action to a call to see cities as the drivers of global environmental change’ in which sustainable urban development became key to sustainable development more generally.

While all three of the problem domains we have discussed show a similar trajectory from ‘non-city’ to ‘city’ solutions, sprawl and informal settlements differ from climate change in one significant way. While the first two sustainability problems were initially to be solved with ‘less city’ (by limiting growth in the North and supporting sustainable development in the South), climate change has (thus far) offered no obvious  ‘less city’ solution.

In the past decade cities have become the dominant solutions to the world’s sustainability problems, along with a new kind of pressure to design better – understood as more resilient and sustainable – cities in the future.

A contemporary research agenda on cities saving the planet

In conclusion, the article outlines a new research agenda for decoding the notion that cities can save the planet, which emphasises the need for an historical, multi-spatial, political and representational analysis of urban sustainability thinking and policy.

• Historical, emphasising the embeddedness of specific urban-environmental concerns within specific historical junctures, and the path dependency of urban- environmental problems and solutions.

• Multi-spatial, emphasising the co-constitution of urban-environmental concerns across city/non-city boundaries, the multiple (sometimes conflicting) geographical scales at which urban-environmental concerns are articulated, and the uneven spatial development of urban nature.

• Political, emphasising the power differentials and conflicting interests which characterise actually existing urban sustainability questions, and the centrality of both growth and equity questions to environmental concerns.

• Representational, emphasising the importance of cultural, aesthetic and ideological framings of cities and nature in the formation of urban sustainability policy ‘common sense’.

Sustainability and urbanism have become a powerful pair of master discourses for our time, and their intersection offers up sustainable cities as a solution for a wide set of social, economic and environmental problems.

The city–environment conjuncture is not simply a matter  of urbanists turning  to  the  environment  but also of environmentalists turning to the city. For example, the Nature Conservancy has recently launched an urban programme, which aims to ‘demonstrate what nature can do for cities–and what cities can do for nature’.

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