Cities and Nature

Lisa Benton-Short, John Rennie Short

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136244940
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

Cities and Nature connects environmental processes with social and political actions. The book reconnects science and social science to demonstrate how the city is part of the environment and how it is subject to environmental constraints and opportunities. This second edition has been extensively revised and updated with in-depth examination of theory and critical themes. Greater discussion is given to urbanization trends and megacities; the post-industrial city and global economic changes; developing cities and slums; urban political ecology; the role of the city in climate change; and sustainability.

The book explores the historical relationship between cities and nature, contemporary challenges to this relationship, and attempts taken to create more sustainable cities. The historical context situates urban development and its impact on the environment, and in turn the environmental impact on people in cities. This provides a foundation from which to understand contemporary issues, such as urban political ecology, hazards and disasters, water quality and supply, air pollution and climate change. The book then considers sustainability and how it has been informed by different theoretical approaches. Issues of environmental justice and the role of gender and race are explored. The final chapter examines the ways in which cities are practicing sustainability, from light "greening" efforts such as planting trees, to more comprehensive sustainability plans that integrate the multiple dimensions of sustainability.

The text contains case studies from around the globe, with many drawn from cities in the developing world, as well as reviews of recent research, updated and expanded further reading to highlight relevant films, websites and journal articles. This book is an asset to students and researchers in geography, environmental studies, urban studies and planning and sustainability.

1 The city and nature

Around four in the afternoon, on January 12, 2010 an earthquake measuring a devastating 7 on the Richter scale occurred in Haiti. Over 300,000 were killed, a similar number were injured, almost one million people were made homeless and much of the capital city of Port au Prince was reduced to rubble. Despite international relief efforts, even by 2012 half a million people still live in temporary shelter, often in appalling conditions. The environmental disaster revealed not only the unstable nature of the underlying geology, but also the fractures in society: the dysfunctional nature of the Haitian state; the shoddy building in the nation's capital; the crippling poverty of most of its citizens; and the marked inequality that allowed the tiny elite to remained unaffected while the poorest people were most negatively impacted.

Another story from a richer country: in the summer of 1995 a heat wave struck the city of Chicago. For over a week in July the temperature reached over 100°F every day. By July 20, over 700 people had died. It was referred to in the press as a “natural disaster,” the unfortunate outcome of a freak meteorological condition. In his 2002 book Heat Wave Eric Klinenberg questioned this assumption and undertook a social autopsy of the event. He found that deaths were greatest among more elderly people living on their own. The tragedy was not simply a natural disaster, but the outcome of the social isolation of seniors, retrenchment of public assistance and declining neighborhoods. Most victims were seniors who lived alone in neighborhoods that lacked a sense of community, and where there was perception of danger in the streets. Trapped inside their homes, and with few visits from public health officials, many poor isolated seniors overheated and died. The disaster was not the result of high temperatures, but high temperatures as mediated through a complex set of social and political relationships.¹

We take two points from these stories. First, the city is situated in broader physical processes and entangled in the ecosystem—in these cases, respectively situated on plate tectonic fault lines and part of the rising temperatures of summer warming. Second, these environmental processes, exposed by the extreme nature of the events, are filtered through social arrangements of political and economic differences. There are no such things as “natural” disasters in cities, just as there are no cities independent of nature.

BOX 1.1

Words and definitions

Words are important, slippery, relational things. We need to make clear what we mean when we use the terms nature, environment and city. Nature has many different meanings, but two of the most important are essential quality (as in “it is in his nature to do these things”) and the material world that can include or exclude human beings. Words are relational and nature was often counterpoised against technology and/or culture. In this book we will use the term “nature” to refer to the material world that includes human beings. We use it less in opposition to human society and more as the container of physical resources and cultural meanings. We will use nature and environment interchangeably.

There has long been a distinction between nature and city in linguistic usage. The main point of this book is to show that the city is part of the material world and this materiality is shaped and structured by and in cities. Rather than situating the city on one side of a crude binary of nature-society, we suggest understanding the city as a hybrid space that constitutes and reconstitutes the natural and the social, a complex space of physical and socio-economic flows. The city is both an environmental and a social construct. The city is an integral part of nature and nature is intimately interwoven into the social life of cities. The city is a vital node in entangled networks of flows of technology, socio-physical processes and socio-economic relations. The city is a site where the emergent connections between the political and the ecological are revealed and contested.

We need to make the point that “natural” disasters are, on closer inspection, much more closely connected to social processes than we often acknowledge. When people build on eroding hillsides or locate houses in earthquake zones, then the natural disaster turns out to be in part a social construction. And the term “natural” disaster also hides the social-economic implication of their effect. Citizens of poor countries are more affected by floods and storms because they do not have expensive technology to provide as much early warning or as rapid evacuation as richer countries. The same storm will have vastly different human consequences in different places. And even within the same city the experience of disaster by rich and poor residents can be vastly different. In Port au Prince the elite rich who lived in the green suburb of Petionville, up in the hills above the city, escaped the plight of the urban poor trapped in the devastated city below. Here few homes were destroyed and police were quickly mobilized to protect the residents and their property. Haiti's elite, because they were rich enough to live in Petionville, were spared from much of the devastation of the earthquake.² In the US a few years earlier, the searing images of those trapped in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina also reminded us of the gulf that separates the socio-economic status of those able to leave compared to those stranded in the city.

Disasters provide a visible connection between nature and the city. Upon closer inspection the natural appears more social and the social life of cities is more accurately seen as implicated in environmental processes. The city is the center of a society—environment dialectic. We develop this theme more fully in subsequent chapters.

The intellectual background

Cities provide an inevitable contrast to the “natural.” A consistent strand of thought has sought to place the city as a human invention in opposition to the “natural,” the “pristine,” and the “wilderness.” Protecting the environment has usually meant halting the encroachment into pristine areas such as rainforests and tundra. Most often, environmental protection has been defined as meaning something outside of, and mostly unrelated to, the concerns and interests of our cities. Cities have been described and understood as somehow separate from the so-called “natural world.” This has been reinforced by the increasing separation of life in the city from the wider environmental context. When food is more available in a supermarket aisle instead of in the fields outside our homes and when we can turn up the heating to keep out the cold and/or turn on the air-conditioning to keep out the oppressive heat, there is a tendency to see the city as somehow removed and independent from the physical world.

Urban theorizing for a long time was developed as if a city was on a flat, featureless plain. Urban studies have long ignored the physical nature of cities; instead, the emphasis was on the social, political and economic rather than the ecological. And yet cities are ecological systems, they are predicated upon the physical world as mediated through the complex prism of social and economic power. In recent years there has been a renewal of interest in the city as an ecological system, with emphasis on the complex relationships between environmental issues and urban concerns, and between social networks and ecosystem flows. Take three examples of what we will term the new urban political ecology. First, William Solecki and Cynthia Rozenzweig look at the biodiversity—urban society relationships in the greater New York Metropolitan Region.³ They use such concepts as the “ecological footprint” and vulnerability to global environmental change to analyze the current interactions between biodiversity and urban society. Second, Paul Robbins considers the flows and networks that link the suburban lawn to the chemical industry, pollution and toxic waste.⁴ The green strips of lawn in front of the suburban house are a recreation of the “natural” created by heavy doses of the “chemical.” Third, Julian Yates and Jutta Gutberlet analyze the flows of food waste in the Brazilian city of Diadema.⁵ The flow of food waste is collected by recyclers, then used by urban gardeners as a vital fertilizer of soils in community gardens. The urban connections between physical and political processes are revealed through tracing such flows and examining their effects.

In the emerging and fast-developing field of urban political ecology, cities are viewed as imbrications of the physical and the social, the ecological and the political. The city is implicated with the “natural” world in connections that embody and reflect social, economic and political power. The city is an integral part of nature and nature is intimately interwoven into the social life of cities.

The city as ecosystem

Physical geographer Ian Douglas suggested that the city can be modeled as an ecosystem with inputs of energy and water, and outputs of noise, climate change, sewerage, garbage and air pollutants.⁶ Another way to consider the city—nature dialectic then is to consider the city as an ecological system with a measurable amount of environmental inputs and outputs. Table 1.1 gives

Table 1.1 London's environmental inputs and outputs

Inputs	Tons/year
Oxygen	40,000,000
Water	876,000,000,000 (litres)
Food	6,900,000
Paper	2,200,000
Plastic	2,100,000
Construction material (bricks, sand, concrete)	27,000,000
Energy needs (tons of oil)	13,276,000
Outputs	Tons/year
Carbon dioxide	41,000,000
Sulfur dioxide	400,000
Nitrogen oxide	280,000
Sewage and sludge	7,500,000
Industrial/commercial waste	14,029,000
Household waste	3,900,000

Source: The City Limits project: a resource flow and ecological footprint analysis of Greater London at www.citylimitslondon.com

an estimate of the range and amount of inputs and outputs for London. Among the most obvious inputs are energy and water.

Human activity in the city is dependent on large and consistent inputs of energy. When we leave heated buildings to drive in cars to purchase goods we use energy. The commercial activities we pursue and the microclimates we create (heating in winter, cooling in summer) all use energy. In seeking to overthrow the tyranny of nature, cities use prodigious amounts of energy. Cities are deeply dependent on energy sources. In the US, since the beginning of the twentieth century, petroleum has traditionally been very cheap and cities now sprawl across the landscape. In countries where energy is more expensive cities tend to be higher in density and more reliant on public transport. Large-scale suburban sprawl is a function of cheap energy. It is tempting to theorize the impact of a long-term, sustained increase in energy prices on suburban sprawl and urban structure.

Water is an essential ingredient of life. The people and commerce of cities are utterly dependent upon water. One of the largest urban differences

Figure 1.1 Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. This image evokes the sense of the city as a physical—social artifact, imbrications of the social and the ecological. This transect reveals the interconnections between ocean, beach, built form and river as water surfaces and green spaces intersperse with roads, houses and commercial buildings in a complex space

Source: Photo by John Rennie Short

in the world is between cities and citizens with clean, easily accessible water and others with expensive, inaccessible and polluted water supplies. Immense engineering projects have been undertaken to provide inexpensive and clean water, and as cities have grown the catchment areas...