The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Cities

David Satterthwaite, David Satterthwaite

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317762614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The last five years have brought an enormous growth in the literature on how urban development can meet human needs and ensure ecological sustainability. This collection brings together the most outstanding contributions from leading experts on the issues surrounding sustainable cities and urban development.The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Cities is fully international in scope and coverage. It will be the basic introduction to the subject for a wide range of students in urban geography, planning and environmental studies, and is essential reading for professionals involved with the successful running and development of cities.

Part I
Sustainable Cities: An Introduction

Chapter 1

The Key Issues and the Works Included

David Satterthwaite

WHAT THE READER COVERS

The last five years have brought a considerable growth in the literature on how cities (or urban development in general) can be made compatible with sustainable development goals. This Reader brings together a diverse range of published articles and extracts from books which cover the key issues on this topic. It includes not only general works but also papers focusing on cities and environmental justice, health, transport, industry, agriculture, planning, designing with nature and waste management. The Reader includes case studies of cities with innovative sustainable development plans (usually called local agenda 21s – see Box 1.1) and papers discussing how best to assess, measure and monitor progress towards the achievement of sustainable development goals at city and national levels. It also has papers considering the ethical underpinnings of sustainable development and cities and how ‘sustainable cities’ need to be considered within a regional and global context.

Various factors influenced the choice of the pieces included in this Reader. The first was simply what I and those who I consulted find most interesting, stimulating and relevant. Other factors include: a desire to mix conceptual works with case studies; a need to cover as many of the key topics that fall within the theme of sustainable cities; and a desire to ensure strong coverage of regions and continents other than Europe and North America. It is surprising how many books on urban issues claim to have a world coverage and yet have so little material on Asia, Africa and Latin America, and so rarely draw on the rich and diverse urban literature by specialists from these regions.

This Reader has works that take different perspectives from my own research programme on ‘sustainable development’ and on ‘sustainable cities’. It includes some which make points that I disagree with. It would seem inappropriate for any compiler of a Reader covering a subject as broad and important as this to include only works that reflect their own perspectives. However, as discussed in more detail below, the term sustainable development was taken to imply a simultaneous commitment to meeting human needs and to ‘sustaining’ or keeping intact environmental capital, so this Reader does not include works which choose to use the term sustainable development to mean other things.

The selection of works reproduced here was much helped by the suggestions of a wide range of people (whose help is acknowledged in the Preface), including the assessments of what the students taking a course I teach¹ on ‘The City and the Environment’ have found useful. But there were limits to the length of this Reader. There are many fine and important works that I had hoped to include but that had to be left out, although hopefully the lists of Further Reading after Parts II, III, IV and V help to highlight these.

Box 1.1 A guide to some of the acronyms and phrases used in this Reader

Agenda 21: This is the most substantive document formally endorsed by all the government representatives attending the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992; see Box 1.2 for more details about this and its link to local agenda 21.

Brundtland Commission: The term often given to the World Commission on Environment and Development since it was chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and now Director General of the World Health Organization. See ‘Sustainable Development’ below.

Ecological Footprints: A concept developed by William E Rees through which to make evident the large land area on whose production the inhabitants and businesses of any city depend for food, other renewable resources and the absorption of carbon to compensate for the carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuel use. Many chapters use this concept while Box 20.7 has a summary of the concept.

Environmental capital: A term used interchangeably with natural capital – see below.

ICLEI: The International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives is an association of local governments dedicated to the prevention and solution of local, regional and global environmental problems through local action. Some 300 cities, towns, counties and their associations are members. ICLEI was launched in 1990 as the international environmental agency for local governments and has had a major role in helping to develop and implement the concept of local agenda 21s (see Box 1.2).²

IIED: The International Institute for Environment and Development, a non-profit policy research institute founded in 1971 which helped to develop the concept of sustainable development during the 1970s and which has sought to ensure that it is applied at local, regional, national and global levels ever since.³

Local Agenda 21: This is the name often given to sustainable development plans developed within particular cities or localities. The term Local Agenda 21 comes from Chapter 28 of Agenda 21, which was the principal output of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). See Box 1.2 for more details.

Natural capital: Also termed environmental capital, this is the stock of natural assets which includes renewable resources (living species and ecosystems), non-renewable resources (for instance, fossil fuels) and the waste-assimilation capacities of ecosystems or of the whole planet. William E Rees describes and discusses natural capital in Chapter 2. It is also discussed in Donella Meadows’ paper on indicators and information systems for sustainable development (Chapter 17).

Sustainable development: There is no agreement as to a definition but most agree with the World Commission on Environment and Development’s 1987 definition that it is ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.⁴ However, the term sustainable development was in use at least ten years earlier than this and the discussion of the need to join these two basic principles goes back at least to the early 1970s – for instance, in the books and articles of Barbara Ward, the founding President of IIED – the International Institute for Environment and Development (see note 17 at the end of this chapter for more details).

The South (and the North): ‘The South’ is a term widely used when there is a need to refer to all the low- and middle-income nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, in preference to the conventional United Nations terms of ‘developing’ or ‘less-developed’ countries. The term ‘the North’ came to be used for Europe, North America and high-income countries in Asia and Oceania, instead of the UN term ‘developed countries’. Geographic inaccuracy (as many countries in ‘the South’ are in the Northern Hemisphere and as Australia and New Zealand are considered part of ‘the North’) is preferred to the UN terminology which implies that countries in Europe, North America and Australasia are superior (‘developed’) to other (‘developing’ or ‘less developed’) countries. The level of per capita income reached by countries is also rather a limited (and inaccurate) basis by which to classify countries as ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ (or less developed). An alternative would be to replace the term ‘the South’ with the ‘non-industrialized’ countries but this is also inaccurate as certain Asian and Latin American countries are among the world’s major industrial producers and include some with higher proportions of their labour force in industry than North America and most European countries. However, there is such diversity within the countries in ‘the South’ that, where possible, generalizations about ‘the South’ are avoided.⁵

Third World: It encompasses the same group of countries as the term ‘the South’ – see above. The term is less widely used since the demise of the Soviet Union and other centrally planned economies (which were the Second World). Although the term ‘Third World’ is sometimes interpreted as having pejorative implications, its original use (especially by the non-aligned nations themselves) and its origins (the term based on ‘the third estate’ as they contained most of the world’s population) never had this intention.

The Reader includes papers that focus on particular sectors that are important within ‘sustainable development and cities’ such as transport or industry, but the limits on length meant that only one work could be included within each sector. It is also perhaps inaccurate to characterize many of these as sectoral – for instance, as the paper on health by the World Health Organization stresses, ‘creating healthy cities’ is not about health programmes but about ensuring that all sectors include concerns for health. Other papers such as those on urban design, planning and indicators for sustainable development are also not sectoral but about how to ensure that the relevant intersectoral linkages are understood and acted on.

DEFINING THE BOUNDARIES FOR ‘SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND CITIES’

One of the difficulties in choosing literature for this Reader is knowing where to draw the boundaries. Virtually all work on sustainable development has relevance for cities, if sustainable development includes an interest in reducing ecological disruption or damage and protecting natural capital, given that a high proportion of the world’s production, consumption and waste generation is concentrated in cities. In addition, all works on meeting human needs (including those focusing on poverty reduction) have relevance to the theme of this Reader, if sustainable development includes an interest in meeting human needs, since close to half the world’s population and a large proportion of all poverty and the deprivation associated with it are concentrated in urban areas.⁶

It did not seem necessary to include in this Reader a paper on the scale of the world’s urban population, but Table 1.1 is included to show the distribution of this population between different regions and each region’s level of urbanization. It is a reminder of how much of the world’s urban population is outside Europe and North America. For instance, although more than three-fifths of Asia’s population may still be in rural areas, Asia now contains close to half the world’s urban population. The scale and level of urbanization in Asia is also probably understated in Table 1.1 as some of the most populous Asian countries use definitions for urban centres that understate their urban populations.⁷ By 1990, Asia also had 44 of the world’s 100 largest cities.⁸ Latin America now has a much larger urban population than North America and more of the world’s 100 largest cities. Even Africa, which is generally perceived as so unurbanized, now has a larger urban population than North America. Table 1.1 also includes data on the regional distribution of the world’s 100 largest cities in the years 1800 and 1900 to emphasize the point that, historically, Asia...