City Futures in the Age of a Changing Climate

Tony Fry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415828741
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317659013
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

This book goes beyond current ways that the impact of climate change upon the city are understood. In doing so it addresses climate in a variety of its connotations. It looks to the nomadic behaviour patterns of the past for lessons for today's population unsettlement, and argues that as human survival will increasingly be linked directly to movement, the city can no longer be defined as a constrained space. The impacts of climate change must be understood as a combination of the actual and the expected, and have to be addressed both practically and culturally.

City Futures in an Age of Changing Climate looks at how cities can adapt and respond to the unsustainable conditions they are now facing. The book considers possible post-urban futures, exposing a range of very different urban forms, and addresses the concept of fragmentation; the breaking up of any coherent economic or cultural nucleic urban spaces.

Urban planners, designers, development practitioners, and anyone seeking to understand what the future is likely to look like for our cities, and how to prepare for it, will find this an essential read.

1
PASSAGE

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing: it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave.

Italo Calvino

The city is an edifice at the very centre of human centredness; thus to take responsibility for the city is equally to take responsibility for our anthropocentric being.

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Son Kul Lake, Kyrgyzstan, 2013

1.2
Nils Andersen Inga from Vesterålen (Nordland, Norway) with family, c. 1900

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Bedouin wedding series. Mounted Bedouins racing. Between 1900 to 1920

How we human beings currently live marks a moment in the passage from our past to our future mode of earthly dwelling. For the vast majority of our species’ existence we were nomads: we were the non-settled. Then slowly over the past ten millennia we became settled; now most of us are urban. But this is not the end of our journey. As we travel towards the unknown our past travels with us and, in transformed forms, it arrives as elemental to our future – a future in which the city as we know it is by no means assured. What now follows is a starting point to open a fundamental questioning of the fate of the city.

The most basic differences that exist between us as Homo sapiens – our ‘racial appearance’, ways of life, forms of shelter, diet and so on – resulted from responses to climate and the movement of populations that over tens of thousands of years distributed the human population differentially geospatially. This process had its origins in our genetic homeland in ‘Africa’, and this specifically in an area we now know as Ethiopia.

We moved in response to interconnected needs: major climatic changes, following the animals we hunted, foraging for plant food, searching for water, or as a result of territorial conflicts (be they from local population pressure over specific resources or competing tribal territorial claims). This process directly connected our physical evolution through our biophysical adaption to many varied environments. It was this process which created the visible physiological differences between us that were to become mischaracterised by the category of ‘race’ (Fry, 2012a: 75–90). As advances in genetics show, no matter how different we may appear we are all almost totally the same genetically.

To grasp the character of this process one needs to understand the combination of the slowness of nomadic movement and its geographic extent. It was this combination that allowed the processes of evolutionary adaptation to occur. For example, in one direction there was a migration out of Africa, to the Middle East, across Asia, into Northeastern Russia, then to Alaska, then eventually there were some people in the latter stages of this migration that eventually arrived in Tierra del Fuego. To gain some sense of this movement consider that just the leg from Alaska to Panama is believed to have taken around 60,000 years. Clearly the process of tribal formation, population density (and the splitting of groups once they reached a certain critical mass), territorial occupation and movement was protracted and complex.¹ Notwithstanding evolutionary biological and paleontological evidence, current knowledge on the patterns and process of migration remains ever partial.

For over 150,000 years nomadism was our sole mode of earthly habitation; then, around 10,000 years ago, our species mode of earthly habitation started to change. Eventually this change created the contemporary forms of urban life that are now familiar globally. However, it should be recognised that the transformation from the nomadic to the urban was uneven, complex and perhaps never fully secured. Nomadism was never totally displaced and, as we shall see, may well now already be returning in new forms.

To understand nomadism it is important to draw distinctions between forms of nomadic life, as well as acknowledging arguments over the definitions of what could and could not be classified as a nomadic life (some scholars, for example, define nomads as pastoralists and exclude hunters and gatherers, who are deemed a category in their own right (Khazonov, 1983: 14)). For our general purposes however, all non-settled people may be understood to be nomadic, with nomadism seen as the prior, plural and dominant condition of the species before the rise of widespread forms of settlement.

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Berber tent near Zagora, Morocco, 2006

Unlike its prehistoric form, all current and emergent forms of nomadic life are now non-autarkic – which means that nomads now cannot function without an outside world; they are now unable to be completely sovereign (Khazonov, 1983: 198). For many centuries, the dominant interaction between the non-settled and the settled has been trade, and this continues to be the case. Thus, for example, pastoral nomads of the Near East of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bought millet, dates and fresh produce from oasis communities, while they sold meat, butter and cheese to those same communities. Thus, historically, nomads existed in varied forms of engagement with both settlement and territory, which was often transformed by their passage through it (1983: 207–208). As A.M. Khazanov remarks: ‘What we are dealing with here is the wide spectrum of turbulent interrelations between nomads and the sedentary world which appeared as a result of advantages contained in certain aspects of their nomadic way of life – mobility and military superiority’ (1983: 222). As suggested above, the story is far from being over. The nomadic, in modern idiom, is likely to become a significant future way of life (and in some ways already is). In some cases it will be chosen, but in many others it will not. Rather, it will be imposed by dramatically changing environmental and geopolitical circumstances that will prompt both territorial defence and abandonment.

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Nomadic gypsies, Egypt, 2013

The age of non-settlement

As indicated above, variations in the nomadic way of life were considerable. Differences became increasingly large as our distant ancestors traversed ever more varied environments and gained new knowledge of how to survive the challenges these environments presented. Life could be, and often was, extraordinarily harsh, especially in the extremes of Ice Ages when the total population numbers of our species were dramatically reduced – at one stage to just a few thousand (Fry, 2012a: 122).

Nomadism had a number of salient features that changed according to the manner of sustenance and climate: the size of self-organised groups (their only structure of power), the patterns of movement of groups across space, and claims to rites of passage that were no doubt contested at times. One believed antagonistic relation that has received attention, and gained controversy, was possibly between aggressive Homo sapiens and the thought to be more passive Neanderthals (now being recognised as no less intelligent than us). Knowledge gained from ‘reading the environment’ (not least the topography, geology, the direction of water courses, the movement of animals, the distribution of plant life and observation of the sun, moon and stars) would have been highly developed and a key to survival. Fire (the use of which pre-dated our species by perhaps as much as 250,000 years) was another crucial factor in the survival of hominoids as it transformed diet and metabolic process, enabled the cold to be tolerated, environments to be altered, allowed materials to be transformed, and more generally, provided a basis for technological development (Roebroeks and Villa, 2011).

The rise of settlement

The narrative of the history of transformation of non-settlement to settlement centred on events in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East some 10,000 years ago.

Available accounts suggest that the climate changed in the West where it became colder, while in the East it became drier; thus people converged on the Fertile Crescent where food remained plentiful (Fagan, 2004: 13–98). Eventually, if the season was good, people roamed, hunted and gathered, but if the season was bad they mostly harvested crops like wild einkorn (an early form of wheat). Of course, all of this happened unevenly over an extensive period of time. As these now semi-nomadic people travelled they took seed with them, which meant that the plants became dispersed, either accidentally or deliberately, and new cropping areas developed. Thus again, very slowly, processes of cultivation and agriculture started to emerge and develop, together with small farming settlements. With creation of these settlements, and the eventual rise of the exchange of surplus produce and grain (when available), the foundation upon which urban life would eventually form about 3000 years later had commenced.²

Such events equally triggered a major escalation of human action towards what may now be called the formation of ‘a world within the world’ (the world of human fabrication within the given biophysical world). What this did was to start to create a rupture between ‘the world’ as the home of human beings and their making of a place in the world that sought increasingly to become an independent environment. Unknowingly, this action instigated those processes that were eventually to lead to contemporary conditions of material and structural unsustainability in which we now, knowingly or unknowingly, live. Effectively, this condition of our being is leading to the establishment of homelessness at its most fundamental (the making of ‘the world itself’ as an inhospitable environment). Direct and indirect environmental destruction is not simply the destruction of ‘the environment’, but of our environment of dependence, and thus of us.

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Fighting measles. Mugunga camp for internally displaced people, Goma, DRC, 2007

For several thousand years the number of mostly small agricultural settlements proliferated. Not only did these changes co-exist alongside nomadic ways of life but, as indicated, they also changed the nature of nomad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Passage
• 2 World
• 3 Cities, the future and space
• 4 Adaptation
• 5 The urban
• 6 The post-urban (contesting)
• 7 Moving towards fragmentation
• 8 Learning again
• 9 Making and unmaking
• 10 Fight or flight
• References
• Illustration credits
• Index