The Urbanization of Green Internationalism

Yonn Dierwechter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783030010140
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030010157
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

The recent rise of cities in global environmental politics has stimulated remarkable debates about sustainable urban development and the geopolitics of a changing world order no longer defined by tightly bordered national regimes.  This book explores this major theme by drawing on approaches that document the diverse histories and emergent geographies of "internationalism."  It is no longer possible, the book argues, to analyze the global politics of the environment without considering its various urbanization(s), wherein multiple actors are reforming, reassembling and adapting to nascent threats posed by global ecological decay.  The ongoing imposition and abrasion of different world orders—Westphalian and post-Westphalian—further suggests we need a wider frame to capture  new kinds of urbanized spaces and global green politics.   The book will appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in global sustainability, urban development, planning, politics, and international affairs.  Case studies and grounded examples of green internationalism in urban action ultimately explore how select city-regions like Cape Town, Los Angeles, and Melbourne are trying to negotiate and actually work through this postulated dilemma.

© The Author(s) 2019

Yonn DierwechterThe Urbanization of Green InternationalismCities and the Global Politics of the Environmenthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01015-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Cities, States, Global Environmental Politics

Yonn Dierwechter¹

(1)

University of Washington Tacoma, Tacoma, WA, USA

Yonn Dierwechter

Abstract

The recent rise of cities in global environmental politics has stimulated remarkable debates about sustainable urban development and the geopolitics of a changing world order no longer defined by tightly bordered national regimes. This book explores this major theme by drawing on approaches that document the diverse histories and emergent geographies of “internationalism.” It is no longer possible, the book argues, to analyze the global politics of the environment without considering its various urbanization(s), wherein multiple actors are reforming, reassembling, and adapting to nascent threats posed by global ecological decay. The ongoing imposition and abrasion of different world orders—Westphalian and post-Westphalian—further suggests we need a wider frame to capture what the critical theorist of internationalism, Josep Antentas (Antipode, 47: 1101–1120, 2015), drawing on Daniel Bensaȉd, calls the “sliding scale of spaces.” The book will therefore appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners interested in global sustainability, urban development, planning, politics, and international affairs. Case studies and grounded examples of green internationalism in urban action presented later in the discussion ultimately explore how select city-regions are trying to negotiate and actually work through this postulated dilemma.

Keywords

Global environmental politicsUrban geopoliticsStateness(Post)Westphalia

End Abstract

We have to deal simultaneously with the abrasion and the imposition of two orders: the modern (national) and the postmodern (cosmopolitan) reality.

—Pavel Frankowski (2010, p. 98)

Overview

The recent rise of cities in global environmental politics —the main theme of this Palgrave Pivot book series—has stimulated fresh, even remarkable, debates about the particular meanings and practices of sustainable urban development. It has challenged scholars, for instance, to think increasingly about the urban geopolitics of a more complex world order that is, by all accounts, no longer defined only (or mainly) by tightly bordered regimes of national regulation and social investment (Moisio, 2018; Yacobi, 2009). The rise of cities in global environmental politics has furthermore encouraged everyone—scholars certainly, but also politicians, public officials, citizens, and activists—to reconsider, reimagine, and reappraise the potential roles and actual contributions of the sovereign Westphalian state system that has for so long shaped our collective view of the world political map. New policy and political relationships between cities, states, and global environmental concerns like climate change have created nascent spatialities of sustainability no less than novel spatialities of cities, states, and global politics.

The rise of cities, though, is a debate. Some feel that pragmatic cities provide the best hope—the only plausible fix—for a global governance project that has stagnated through the dysfunction of nation-states (Barber, 2013, 2017). Exploring urbanism late in his career, Benjamin Barber (2013), a political theorist, optimistically amplified this renewed enthusiasm for the rise (or return) of cities in world development (e.g., Engelke, 2013). He offered a devastating critique of the nation-state, which he dismissed as increasingly incompetent, democratically distant, and emotionally attenuated from citizens. But the solution to the pathologies of the nation-state, he ultimately argued, is found in one of our oldest, most familiar inventions: the vibrant propinquity of the polis, or what Ed Soja (2000) in several books and multiple public lectures thought of as an urban “synekism” that has long forged geo-historic change and innovation (cf. Taylor, 2013). These were—and are—voices of urban(ized) hope. Global progress—not just in cities but through cities; through politically creative urban efforts to transform nature’s bounty into socially just economies—endogenously within specific cities, of course, but especially across cities as they circulate ideas and lobby exogenous institutions for solutions to daunting problems. Barber’s thesis, in particular, and certainly his overriding normative concerns, thus border on a kind of “city-statism ,” a claim/dream predicated on the idea/l that cities are, after all, older than states and altogether more likely in practice to articulate vibrant democracy with green efficacy.

Others wonder, however, just how cities (or city-regions) can unleash their presumed policy and project creativity in global affairs—in so far as they can or do—without the political support of a reformed, yet still institutionally relevant, kind of national state apparatus (Curtis, 2016). Arguing for “a new internationality,” Herrschel and Newman (2017) are nonetheless careful to note, for example, that while cities are “international actors,” they have joined rather than replaced states in forging a novel kind of global geopolitics and solution-seeking policy world. Cities and regions are going “beyond” the nation-state, in their estimation, but the state has hardly vanished. Indeed, Herrschel and Dierwechter (2018) have suggested more recently that efforts by key city-regions to balance urban competitiveness with global sustainability through new forms of “smart ” regionalization are actually better understood as a “dual transition.” One transition is “internal” to the politics of city-regions; the other, “external” to the city-region . Simon Curtis (2016, p. 456) further observes, quite compellingly in my view, that the rise of the city in world (environmental) politics “should not be seen as a symptom of the exhaustion of the state but rather as an adaptation of the state as it tries to cope with a changing environment.”

The thesis of the state’s “adaptation” is also central to the work of Andy Jonas and Sami Moisio (2016). They chart recent forms of city-regionalism as part and parcel of a new type of geopolitics rather than, say, an updated city-statism of disembodied globalized city-regions independently building a twenty-first-century version of the Delian, Lombard, or Hanseatic Leagues of different (urban) geopolitical pasts.¹ In particular, they suggest, efforts to sustain city-regions —to green up metropolitan areas—are deliberate strategies in how today’s increasingly “polycentric states” now secure and project political power across the spaces of global governance. This is changing international relations, without question, but also the geographies of the state (and of cities). Simon Curtis (2016, p. 456) again helps us to sharpen up this point. The “nation-state,” he argues, “is being reassembled into new forms.” As societies have urbanized, we might say, so too have their states, though unevenly and in ways we do not really quite understand. The unsustainable urban is changing world politics, in this view, even as unsustainable world politics are changing what cities are, what they do, how they act, and how we theorize their spaces. For Moisio (2018, p. 1) in particular, “…cities—and attendant urban politics—have not been passive outcomes of state territorial formation processes but instead have occupied a pivotal role in the dynamic geopolitical processes of the nation-state.”

Several key questions emerge. Can we count on the hypothesized creativity of cities (on their own or in still ill-formed horizontal networks) to revive the existentially non-negotiable project of global sustainability ? As much as we fear the state, as much as we worry about its militarization, “bluntness,” and regressive neoliberalization—about its powers over us—can we really jettison the state’s capacities to help social collectives puzzle through shared problems (Skocpol, 1985)? For some observers, including both eco-radical municipalists and market libertarians, we can—and we should (Bookchin, 2014). But if we still do need the state, should we not spend more time thinking critically about how reassembled, adapted, polycentric, urbanized states—“smarter,” “eco-states ,” for instance—might edify and work productively with increasingly creative, internationalized cities and their urbanized hinterlands (Backstrand & Kronsell, 2015; Dierwechter, 2017; Eckersley, 2004)? Finally and most importantly for my purposes here, as we think about the new relationships between cities, states, and global environmental politics how do we think about the various geographies of these relationships in different cultural and historical settings? Indeed, what new geographies are these developments now creating?

Evidence mounts daily that the global community—however defined—needs and looks to cities more than ever before (Mohieldin & Ijjasz-Vasquez, 2018). Taki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Cities, States, Global Environmental Politics
• 2. Contending Internationalisms: Times, Spaces, Frames
• 3. The Greening of Internationalism: From Growing Impact Crisis to Stagnated Reconciliation Project
• 4. Romancing the City: Three Urbanization(s) of Green Internationalism
• 5. Conclusions: Global Space and Urban Sustainability
• Back Matter