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Part I
Trajectories of change in the urban Anthropocene
Written by researchers located in both the global North and South, the chapters in Part I discuss the general trajectories of urban change that have emerged in the urban Anthropocene.
Chapter 1 by Mark Swilling (South Africa) – entitled ‘Towards sustainable urban infrastructures for the urban Anthropocene’ – challenges the ecologically disembodied conception of urban modernity by introducing into urban analysis an understanding of metabolic flows of resources through urban systems. Urban modernity tamed nature by reducing it to flows conducted by urban infrastructures whose designs and governance have not changed much since the nineteenth century. In order to establish a way of reconfiguring urban infrastructures, Swilling argues for the need to re-embed urban systems within a wider conception of bioregional resource flows which contrasts with how these flows are taken for granted within the traditional conceptions of urban modernity. In a resource-limited world where the distribution of resources needs to be more equitable, this is no longer feasible.
It is argued that the dominant mode of urban infrastructure governance is already being challenged in a number of ways, three of which are discussed specifically. The first two aim to tame the potential threats of resource limitations: either reinvigorate public sector infrastructure governance with a systems theory approach that recognizes the limits to centralized management, or privatize infrastructure governance using the smart city solutions. The co-production of urban services by organized social movements and state agencies is presented as another response, but this time as a response to the limits of state capacity to meet the needs of rapidly expanding urban settlements in poor and middle-class areas.
Despite the paradigms of urban planning that have implicitly denied the ecological contextualization of cities, Chapter 2 by Jenia Mukherjee (India) – entitled ‘Sustainable flows between Kolkata and its peri-urban interface: challenges and opportunities’ – argues that cities have always been embedded within local ecosystems which have been shaped and reshaped to suit urban requirements in very specific ways. The case study of Kolkata reveals how key actors have consciously planned and acted over many decades to tame the ecosystems that the city depends on for crucial services, from sewage treatment to food production. However, in recent years the emphasis has shifted from taming to outright destruction to make way for property developments. This, in turn, has resulted in attacks on the livelihoods of many who depend on Kolkata’s peri-urban ecosystems, and also new developmental challenges, as ecosystem services such as sewage treatment are eroded.
Adopting a Western perspective on urbanization and the history of urban planning, Chapter 3 by Maarten A. Hajer (The Netherlands) – entitled ‘On being smart about cities: seven considerations for a new urban planning and design’ – contends that the taming of the city to prepare for fundamental changes is a recurring theme in the history of urban development. He refers to the sanitation syndrome in the late 1800s and the highway boom in the mid-twentieth century as two of the most significant precedents. Today’s smart city agenda is the contemporary expression of this approach to city-wide restructuring. The smart city agenda is the most dominant contemporary discourse for taming the urban by invoking an algorithmic urbanism that promises to finally deliver on the nineteenth-century dream of the city as a seamless paradise of ‘lights, water, motion’ for all. However, Hajer’s conclusion is that this is a false promise delivered by some corporates at a time when governments have declared defeat when it comes to taming the city.
Titled ‘Is big sustainable? Global comparison of city emissions’, Chapter 4 by Dominik Reusser, Anna-Lena Winz and Diego Rybski (Germany) points out that while it is important to think of cities from a carbon perspective, this must be done by differentiating between different kinds of cities in the developed and developing world, since efficiencies and income growth have differential impacts in the two regions. Their evidence suggests that in the developed world larger cities are less carbon intensive per capita than smaller cities, but the opposite is the case in the developing world where larger cities tend to concentrate expanding numbers of people whose incomes are rising rapidly.
Chapter 5 by Gareth Haysom (South Africa) – entitled ‘Urban-scale food system governance: an alternative response to the dominant paradigm?’ – addresses the contested linkages between cities and globalized food systems in a changing global context of rising food prices and increasing concerns about the security of urban food supplies. These global food systems are crisis-ridden because they must find ever more efficient ways of taming ecologically and socially exploited food-producing regions around the world in order to deliver nutritionally poor foods to a rapidly expanding urban population. The emerging role of cities as actors in this space raises the potential for key city-based actors to contest this globalized taming of food-producing regions by securing and ensuring adequate and even higher-quality food supplies from local sustainably managed food bioregions.
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1 Towards sustainable urban infrastructures for the urban Anthropocene
Mark Swilling
Introduction
In recent years there have been numerous institutional reports, academic analyses and networks that have articulated the idea that cities are well positioned to lead the way when it comes to transitioning to more sustainable modes of production and consumption (Hoornweg and Freire 2013; Kamal-Chaoui and Roberts 2009; LSE Cities, ICLEI and Global Green Growth Institute 2013; Suzuki et al. 2009; Swilling et al. 2013; UN-HABITAT 2009, 2012; UNEP 2010; WWF 2010). The most recent reports by the World Bank (Hoornweg and Freire 2013) and UNEP (Swilling et al. 2013) have taken this further by emphasizing the significant opportunities for innovation and transformation provided, in particular, by the rising level of investment in urban infrastructures.
In this chapter I hope to reconcile what have hitherto been between separate trajectories of my research over the past five years: on the one hand an interest in the dynamics of the global polycrisis using long-wave theory (Swilling 2013), and on the other an interest in urban infrastructure transitions using a synthesis of material flow analysis and transition theory (Swilling 2013; Swilling and Annecke 2012). Given that previous industrial cycles have required particular spatial configurations (Swilling and Annecke 2012, ch. 5), I am fascinated by what the contemporary reimagining of the future of our cities (primarily in the global South) can tell us about what may be unfolding on a global scale.
The point of departure for this chapter is the long-wave perspective expressed in the Introduction that the global polycrisis marks a key turning point that brings into focus the global significance of the current rising level of investment in urban infrastructure. However, because this time round there are resource limits to what is possible, it needs to be accepted that in order to secure more sustainable metabolic flows through decoupling, it will be necessary to reconfigure urban infrastructures. This is unlikely if prevailing approaches to infrastructure planning and governance persist. Hence, a new discussion has started within the engineering profession about alternatives to the nineteenth-century infrastructure governance paradigm that remains dominant today. Two direct threats to the nineteenth-century paradigm are then discussed: the smart city agenda propagated by global technology companies, and the ‘co-production platforms’ emerging from the social movements active in the informal settlements of cities in the global South.
Urban metabolism and transition
Projections for urban growth over the next 30 years are staggering, but they assume that the available supply of energy and materials will be sufficient to meet growing demand. Given that many of the energy and resource flows that cities currently depend on are finite and in some cases are already reaching their limits, it follows that achieving ever more prosperous urban lifestyles for more people will depend on whether it will be possible to do much more with limited resources than is currently the norm. A new literature on the metabolism of industrialized societies has emerged that establishes the linkages between socio-technical and socio-ecological systems (Baccini and Brunner 2012; Farrao and Fernandez 2013; Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007; Giampietro, Mayumi and Sorman 2012).1
Although contested (Jackson 2009), the term ‘decoupling’ has come to be associated with efforts to break the causal link between economic prosperity and the depletion of finite resources or degradation of environments, and can be used as a lens through which to envision the reconciliation of human and environmental interests in rapidly growing cities (Fischer-Kowalski and Swilling 2011; Swilling et al. 2012).
Conventional approaches to delivering services to urban dwellers use gigantic networks of centrally controlled interlocked wires, pipes, roads and other infrastructures to manipulate the vast and varied flows of resources that enter into, circulate within and exit from cities in support of particular conceptions of city living (see Swilling and Annecke 2012, ch. 5). Industrial ecologists refer to the build-up of what they call ‘socio-economic stocks’ within the city, consisting of material stocks (such as buildings and infrastructural systems) and the flows of resources that go into maintaining and using these stocks (such as energy and water). Studying the patterns of matter and energy moving through and within cities is critical in finding solutions to optimize them in the pursuit of better resource management (Costa et al. 2004; Farrao and Fernandez 2013; Swilling et al. 2012) and decoupling.
Urbanists outside industrial ecology who are interested in sustainability have in recent years integrated the general concept of resource flows into their analyses of urban economies (Crane and Swilling 2008; Guy et al. 2001; Heynen et al. 2006; Hodson and Marvin 2009, 2010; Robinson et al. 2013; Swilling 2010a, 2010b).The application of material flow analysis (MFA) to the city scale provides a useful framework for understanding the complex empirical dynamics of these flows (for recent examples see Barles 2009, 2010; Costa et al. 2004; Farrao and Fernandez 2013; Fernandez 2007; Kennedy et al. 2007; Robinson et al. 2013; Weisz and Steinberger 2010). Policy-makers wishing to promote a more sustainable city can use this kind of research to enable them to make decisions about the building of new – or retrofitting of existing – urban infrastructures that take into account the long-term flows of strategic resources into and out of the city. (For three major recent reports on this see Hoornweg and Freire 2013; Suzuki et al. 2009; Swilling et al. 2013.)
Rethinking urban infrastructure planning and governance
Urban infrastructures hold the key because they are potentially the focus of fiscal expenditures and private investments to stimulate economic growth; key fiscal investments in poverty reduction/eradication; and as social-ecological-infrastructural systems, determinants of the future ecological sustainability of the city and, by extension, the global economy. A number of leading global consulting companies are already encouraging investors to focus on the long-term returns on investments in urban infrastructure, which they estimate could rise to over $40 trillion in the next 20 years (Airoldi et al. 2010; Doshi et al. 2007). The World Bank estimates that annual investments in basic urban infrastructures in the global South need to be doubled to achieve the $1–1.5 trillion annual investment levels that are needed to meet basic needs (Hoornweg and Freire 2013: 8). Following two major global reports that focused attention on the key role that urban infrastructures will have to play in the building of green economies (Hoornweg and Freire 2013; Swilling et al. 2013), the question is whether these investments in a new generation of (new and retrofitted) urban infrastructures – often with life spans of up to 100 years – will in reality equip cities to handle the linked challenges of increasingly complex and therefore largely unpredictable dynamics of resource depletion, climate change, eco-system restoration, economic development and social equity. In short, can long-term infrastructure planning and investment be reconciled with uncertainty?
There are obviously problematic implications for cities in the fact that the power to make these capital investment decisions lies with a small group of major investors. Besides this, much will depend on whether it will be possible to reconceptualize the governance of urban infrast...
