Urban Environmental Policy Analysis

Heather E. Campbell, Elizabeth A Corley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317452775
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This timely book provides a wealth of useful information for following through on today's renewed concern for sustainability and environmentalism. It's designed to help city managers, policy analysts, and government administrators think comprehensively and communicate effectively about environmental policy issues.The authors illustrate a system-based framework model of the city that provides a holistic view of environmental media (land, air, and water) while helping decision-makers to understand the extent to which environmental policy decisions are intertwined with the natural, built, and social systems of the city. They go on to introduce basic and environment-specific policy-analytic models, methods, and tools; presents numerous specific environmental policy puzzles that will confront cities; and introduces methods for understanding and educating public opinions around urban environmental policy.The book is grounded in the policy-analytic perspective rather than political science, economic, or planning frameworks. It includes both new scholarship and synthesis of existing policy analysis. Numerous tables, figures, checklists, and maps, as well as a comprehensive reference list are included.

Part I

A Model and Policy Tools for the Urban Environment

	1	An Environmental Policy System Framework for the City

When beginning to think about urban environmental policy, the task can seem overwhelming. Just envisioning the urban system is difficult. A city incorporates infrastructure, including transportation modes (for example, public roads, private roads, bridges, railroads, airports, and ferries); water, sewer, and gas pipes and water treatment plants; electricity generating stations and the distribution grid; wire-based and wireless communication structures; street lighting, including traffic lights; public buildings; private buildings; and a vast stock of signs. A city also includes a complex aggregation of institutions—the embodiment of government and laws—including the organizations that allow for policing, firefighting, education, recreation services, zoning, and the collection and disposal of waste. Clearly, the list could go on, and the enumerated items can overlap and interact. Additionally, they defy tidy aggregation with private elements such as gated communities and private schools.

Thinking about environmental issues is an equally complex task. Urban environmental issues may encompass anything from the effects on air quality and human health of heavy dust raised during construction, to the effects on and interaction of non-native species with native species, to tradeoffs between water and urban heat—if we reduce lawns, we will save water, but will we increase urban heat-island effects?

Because of the complexity of each of these topics, it is useful to have a model, or mental framework, for thinking about urban environmental policy. Such a framework is a simplification of reality that focuses the analyst’s attention solely on those specific factors important to the task at hand.

This chapter presents a new, graphical, systems-based framework model designed to help researchers and decision makers understand the extent to which environmental policy decisions are intertwined with the natural, built, and social systems of the city. Such a framework can provide a mental checklist to help reduce the likelihood of neglecting key elements of urban environmental issues. Use of the term “graphical” indicates that this new framework is primarily pictorial and conceptual, and is not described with a set of equations. Similarly, it is “systems-based” because it is inspired by systems thinking—including concepts of sources, sinks, feedback, etc.—but it is not expressed as a computer-based dynamic model. The framework is designed as both a teaching tool and an analysis tool, especially to serve those who are now or will become urban policymakers and administrators throughout the world as they struggle with issues of sustainability, arguably the most important challenge of our age (Heffernon, Welch, and Melnick, 2007).

A model is a simplification of reality for a specific analytic purpose. The interior designer’s model of an airplane’s seats, rugs, and overhead bins is as valid as the aerospace engineer’s fuselage model used for testing lift and stresses—but each is valid as a completely different simplification of the same object for a different purpose. At least in the social sciences, we currently are far from having some type of unified theory that can explain all phenomena. Like the interior designer and the engineer, we select models that can help us with our tasks.

In this book, we simplify the urban environmental policy framework by depicting the city as three different layers that interact with each other. Our goal is to maintain a holistic view of urban environmental policy analysis and help readers learn how the policy and governmental aspects can affect the other pieces of the urban environmental system.

We call the three layers the “Natural” System, the “Concretion” System, and the “Social” System. Together the Natural and Concretion Systems form the Physical System. A key element of the Social System is the Governmental Subsystem. All of the layers are part of “an interconnected system held together by flows of energy, water, people, ideas, and materials” (Gober, 2006, 9). Each of these layers is explained in detail later but introduced briefly in the next few paragraphs.

The Natural System is that part of the city that is provided by nature. The Natural layer is the biogeophysical system that the city is placed upon and within; it includes the physical geography of the space, the plants and animals that inhabit it, and the climate, especially temperatures and precipitation. Generally, these are attributes that nature supplies to the city. Though all of these are affected by human occupation, they also serve as constraints on urbanization.

The Concretion layer encompasses the physical parts of the city that are or have been created by humans. The Concretion System represents the physical elements that people place upon and within the Natural layer. They include buildings and roads, public works, utility systems, mines, and dumps. If all the people suddenly left the city, the concretions would still be there. These elements are affected by the Natural layer, and also affect it, not only in very visible ways—such as via dams—but also in less obvious ways, such as by affecting patterns of movement and habitation of plants and animals. Use of the term “concretion” (House, 1973) is intended to remind the analyst that the physical structure of the city builds up over time, like the layers of a seashell, and that newer concretions may lie upon older ones.

The Social layer includes the social institutions that humans create. In this context, an “institution” is not a physical place, but a social organization (Ostrom, 2005). An institution can include something like a club or a bureaucracy, but it can also include laws (for example, the U.S. Constitution is an institution) or even social norms. Thus, the city’s economy is an institution (a form of social organization), as are neighborhoods, neighborhood associations, religious congregations, firms, and nonprofit organizations (also called nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs). Both the Natural and Concretion layers affect the Social layer—and vice versa.

It is fairly easy to see how the Natural and Concretion layers affect each other and how the Social and Concretion layers affect each other. Floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes remind us that the Natural System affects the Social System. Ensconced in our own cultures, it can be more challenging to see how the Social System affects the Natural System, yet our cultural assumptions and habits definitely affect the Natural System.

What is culture? In its most basic sense, it is defined as a “way of life, lifestyle; customs, traditions, heritage, habits, ways, mores, values” (Oxford American Dictionaries, 2005). However, significant social science research on culture may provide additional illumination. Ostrom (2005, 27) notes, “The term culture is frequently applied to the values shared within a community. Culture affects the mental models that participants in a situation may share” (emphasis in original). In their book Risk and Culture, which focuses on the perception of environmental risk, Douglas and Wildavsky (1982, 8) argue that the perception of environmental risk is inextricably embedded in culture: “Our guiding assumptions are that any form of society produces its own selected view of the natural environment.” They define culture as a “set of shared values and supporting social institutions” (1982, 8). Culture varies from city to city, from nation to nation, from religion to religion. Our habits, ways of life, traditions, mental models, and so on affect how we interact with nature.

What is culture? A “way of life, lifestyle; customs, traditions, heritage, habits, ways, mores, values” (Oxford American Dictionaries, 2005). Culture varies from city to city, from nation to nation, from religion to religion. Our customs, way of life, traditions, etc. affect how we interact with nature.

Case 1.1 and Case 1.2 demonstrate the influence of culture (part of the Social System) on the Natural System. The “environmental services” we ask of nature depend on attributes of our society. Under current conditions, Case 1.1 could not arise in, for example, the United States. Case 1.2, on the other hand, is possible only in a society with significant use of toilet paper and condoms. There are parts of the world where toilet paper is not routinely used, and condoms were illegal, for example, in Ireland until the 1970s (Collier, 2007, 171). Depending on your “mental models,” one use of the river may appear strange while the other appears normal (though “normal” and “desirable” are not necessarily the same).

■———Case 1.1———■

An Example of the Effect of the Social System on the Natural System—Rivers in Indian Cities

Statues of Hindu God Causing River Pollution

New commercially made idols used in the Hindu festival Ganesh Caturthi are releasing toxic dyes into India’s waterways, spurring a campaign to return to traditional, natural materials.

[In Surat, an Indian city of about 3.8 million people, it was estimated that more than 26,000 Ganesh idols made from a paste-like form of calcium sulfate known as plaster of Paris were submerged in the Tapi River in September 2009. The statues were coated with paints containing mercury, cadmium, lead, and carbon, all of which are hazardous (TNN 2009).]

Ganesh Statues Causing Trouble

The “Ganesh Chaturthi” festival celebrates the birthday of the elephant god Ganesh, and is held during the beginning of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Frontmatter Page
• Part I A Model and Policy Tools for the Urban Environment
• Part II Bridging Policy, Politics, Economics, Ecology, Media, and Communication
• Part III Environmental Media and Environmental Justice
• Part IV Communicating About Environmental Policy
• Index
• List of Contributors