Can a city be sustainable?

[chris]

Derrick Jensen defines civilization in Endgame like this:

a culture — that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts — that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning state or city), with cities being defined — so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on — as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.

Derrick Jensen doesn't appear to believe that a city can be sustainable -- they are inherently imperial, they are a physical manifestation of Empire.

However, a friend of mine looks at it in another way:

Mayan and Incan cities were among the largest in the world at the time they were made known to 'the west', and yet they were essentially 'sustainable'.... they produced all of their dietary needs within the city or the immediate vicinity.... and the surrounding forest across most of the Americas was described by the conquistadors as pristine, unspoiled, even 'wild' (i should have said Aztec too or, just Mesoamerican and Andean... or something like that)

There were 'civilizations' in North America as well in fact, the continents were pretty much fully populated.... at maximum carrying capacity the epidemics that killed like 90% of the population allowed history to describe the 'new world' as a sort of uninhabited wilderness really it had just been, essentially, 'sustainably developed'.

I'm really enamored with the idea of "urban ecovillages" leading to entire "sustainable cities", because it's the only social organization i could envision that would really accomodate so many people while still allowing for the 'rewilding' of most of the earth's surface and there are some really interesting re-wilding proposals that would restore indigenous ecosystems and actually allow land to produce more than it does with modern methods of industrial agriculture... like the Great Plains region of the U.S. and the 'buffalo commons' idea that has been proposed for it all of the counties in the Great Plains region have basically been financially insolvent since they were founded... since the buffalo were slaughtered and, less suitable, domesticated livestock was introduced.. the plan was originally proposed by a couple of academics... look for the name Popper, in association with "buffalo commons".... you'll find something but it's something that really resonated with a lot of people.... especially indian tribes which still control some land in the area in fact, some of them are already doing it on the land they do control.

Here, check this out... it's about design, in general... but there's some good stuff about designing cities toward the end: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 3509501840

...I can't see the audience, but it sounds like his last city slide, delivered along with the last line of his presentation, brings out a standing ovation and i think some cities are naturally gonna fare better than others....

A lot of cities were quite huge cities well before the age of oil -- and who's to say how long some world cities could be sustained at pre-petroleum levels... or even pre-fossil fuel levels

Buenos Aires is surrounded by a province of pastures and fields, with two growing seasons... at the terminus of two rivers that empty half of the South American continent and are navigable for many hundreds of miles inland (to the center of the continent, really).... two rivers which create the widest river and largest estuary in the world... there were cities near present-day Memphis and Chicago when Columbus was just stumbling into the Caribbean... seems like they dig up the ruins of Aztec temples and urban structures nearly every time they build something in Mexico City not to ramble... heh... but I think we've got a LOOOOOOOOOOONG way to go before we see the end of cities.

The world is still rapidly urbanizing and for nearly every function of our current civilization, other than agriculture, cities are far more efficiently organized than other types of social organization... if people are going to be involved in relationships with each other, it's easiest if they are close together which has a lot to do with why it's more difficult to foment organized dissent in the U.S. than it used to be, or than it is in many other parts of the world -- because people in the U.S. are so spread out they fled the cities, for the most part.

The Americas are littered with examples of failed civilizations too, or it provides interesting examples of cultures that shifted from settled agrarian 'city-builders' to nomadic hunter-gatherers (which many would consider to be a 'regression' of cultural evolution) ....like the plains indians did after horses were reintroduced to the Americas by the Spanish the Sioux had been growing corn and building cities, like the Hopi or Navajo, but they decided to give it all up to go chase buffalo so, ummm... 'sustainable' is a malleable term.... if I ponder it too much, I start to wonder what it really means

Because I think, of course, the Incan or Aztec or Mayan empires would have eventually collapsed... parts of the Mayan empire were in decline upon contact....and there were Mesoamerican 'empires' before the Aztecs... they were just the latest... there was a huge civilization in what's now the most arid desert in the word, the Atacama, in Peru the Hopi remember their predecessors, the Anasazi... who perhaps overshot their carrying capacity and succumbed to drought...

As for knowing permaculture... it obviously wasn't called permacuture, but lots of indigenous agricultural techniques are obviously much more efficient and ecologically conscious than modern industrial monoculture farming, the Mayans had forest gardens, the Hopi and Navajo plant in what could be called 'guilds'-- in permaculture terms typically corn, beans, and some gourd layer squash, pumpkin, that sort of thing the beans climb the corn, and the gourd provides a sort of living mulch

I have this feeling that the question, can a city be sustainable? is only going to be answered after it's been seriously tried...

So, our challenge: How can we make Sheffield sustainable, what does this mean and how can it be done as quickly as possible?

[chris]

Some interesting thoughts in Cities Made by War:

So, what will these cities look like in 50 or 100 years? Will they further devolve into economic engines for imperialism, militarized slums, half preserved in ruins, perpetual conflict, urbicide, crumbled under the strategic weight of the Pentagon's networked battlespaces? Or, can the Third World help bring forth new models of an 'anti-imperialist urban regime', as this great article explores? Not just localized cities of resistance, or bunkers for an "urbanized insurgency", but post-imperial cities reinvented out of Empire in a new egalitarian form, beyond the inequal wealth distribution paradigm that cities have served through out history? What will the cities of a post-Empire landscape look like, how will they function, how will they be governed, and more interestingly, how will they emerge?

The article that the above references, Cities and Imperialism by Stephan Kipfer and Kanishka Goonewarda can be found on the Internet Archive, it concludes:

Calling for an Urban Anti-imperialism

The Left in Canada clearly needs an urban antidote to these imperial voices — hard and soft. Instead of seeing cities uncritically as embodiments of (Western) civilization and “engines of growth,” and thus the opposite of (non-Western?) “barbarism,” we could use an urban vision sensitive to the contradictions of the modern urban experience. This vision would be critical of actually existing urban regions as centres of exploitation and imperial profiteering, but also capable of embracing urban life as the ground for radical politics and solidarity both local and global. Calling for an urban anti-imperialism might appear counter-intuitive. In the 20th century, much anti-imperialism was strongly anti-urban in tone and orientation. In Canada, too, left-national populist forces have often mobilized the resentment against Toronto and Montreal by treating these cities simply and only as places where the country’s natural wealth is appropriated and sold off to imperial agents.

Today, there is no way out of our urban world. In many parts of the world, and certainly in Canada, radicals have literally nowhere else to go. In the South, moreover, urban social struggles have already assumed an explicitly anti-imperial dimension. In the North too, sources for an urban resistance to imperialism are evident.

Canada’s cities played their part in the massive anti-war demonstrations in 2003 — an “urban moment” Tariq Ali described as the “first truly global mobilization.” More recently and modestly, campaigns against the deportation of immigrants in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto have taken issue—under the increasingly global banner “No One Is Illegal” — with the domestic impacts of imperialism compounded by the “war on terrorism”: racial profiling, intensified spatial segregation, and authoritarian policing of dissent (see Govind Rao’s and Grace-Edward Galabuzi’s articles in Canadian Dimension vol. 38 no.1). It is from such struggles — and a recognition that empire cannot be civilized — that an urban anti-imperialism may emerge.

[chris]

I haven't looked into any of these yet:

http://www.sustainablecities.org.uk/
http://www.sustainable-cities.org.uk/
http://www.sustainable-cities.eu/
http://www.sustainablecitiesnet.com/
http://sustainablecities.net/

And a Wikipedia page on this subject:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_city

[chris]

We aim to make St Davids the first carbon neutral city in the world and to demonstrate how we can all help reduce the environmental damage caused by global warming. Examples of renewable energy technology and biodiversity can be seen on the eco trail around the city.

http://www.eco-city.co.uk/

[andi]

actually

some wonderful "traditional " cultures

went bust from overuse, unscientific & imblanced use of land. Even though genocide, child sacrifice loads of bread n circuses - additional creative industries rescue bundles were heaped on to assuage the economic gods

All by their own evil - without the blessings of modern agribiz

Some didn't go bust & worked wonderfully

Uncritical romanticisation of past eco balance myths may be uplifting - & ornate academic discrete analysis
may be diverting

What we can learn from cultures is what works & what doesn't

& why

& how to use what works for us now

x

[chris]

some wonderful "traditional " cultures went bust from overuse, unscientific & imblanced use of land.

Sure.

Some didn't go bust & worked wonderfully

Right.

Uncritical romanticisation of past eco balance myths may be uplifting - & ornate academic discrete analysis
may be diverting

What we can learn from cultures is what works & what doesn't

& why

& how to use what works for us now

I agree.

Regarding the history of the Americas and European imperial genocide, this article is interesting:

1491: The Truth About the Americas Before Columbus

In many high school history classes students are told that before Columbus arrived the Americas were full of untamed wilderness loosely populated with savage Indians. Charles Mann’s book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus proves that the opposite is true.

the city of Tiwanaku, in what is now Bolivia, had 115,000 people living in it in 1000 A.D., a population that Paris would not reach for five centuries.

the British and French, not the indigenous people, were the savages. The Europeans arriving in North America smelled horrible; some of them had never taken a bath their whole lives. On the other hand, the indigenous people were generally very clean, strong and well nourished.

sicknesses such as small pox and Hepatitis A which ravaged the native populations of the Americas shortly after the arrival of the Europeans. The death toll is as surprising as the size of the populations before Columbus. When Columbus landed, there were an estimated 25 million people living in Mexico. At the time, there were only 10 million people in Spain and Portugal. Central Mexico was more densely populated than China or India when Columbus arrived. An estimated 90-112 million lived in the Americas, which was a larger population than that of Europe.

The bloodshed unleashed by the Europeans had a lot do with killing off of these populations. Yet sickness played perhaps an even larger role. Smallpox hit the Andes before Spain’s Pizarro did, killing off most people and plunging the area into civil war. The sickness is thought to have arrived to the region from the Caribbean. Hepatitis A killed off an estimated 90% of the population in coastal New England in 3 years. Within first years of European contact, 95% of native populations died.

This book proves that the wilderness in the Americas before the Europeans arrived was far from wild and untouched by humans. Mann argues that pre-Columbus wilderness was totally affected and shaped by the native people that lived there. For example, the Mayans destroyed their own environment; they cut down too many trees and exhausted the soil. As their population expanded the environment and agriculture could no longer sustain them. This greatly contributed to their collapse.

Other indigenous groups altered their ecosystems to facilitate their survival. Societies in the Amazon regularly burned down vast expanses of the forest; the charred soil was good for agriculture and the fire flushed out animals for food. The plains the US are believed to be a result of similar forest-burning techniques. Indigenous hunters before Columbus sought out pregnant animals to lower the population; indigenous people competed with animals for food, berries and nuts. Indigenous societies also built vast canals, cities, irrigation systems, large agricultural fields, entirely changing the wilderness for human use.

http://web.archive.org/web/200607011825 ... /view/2174

[chris]

I though this was interesting:

what we are trying to invent here – a society that can support some approximation of modern technology on a sustainable basis – has never existed on Earth. We have no working models to go by; all we have, again, is a mix of agrarian practices that seem to have been sustainable, on the one hand, and some experiments that seem to be working so far on a very small scale, on the other. Our job is to piece something together using these, and other things that don’t exist yet, to cope with future challenges we can only foresee in the most general terms.

...

the last round of energy crises in the 1970s saw a great deal of energy go into making plans. A great deal of energy also went into improvisation, in a wide range of fields – notably alternative agriculture, renewable energy, and home design and construction. The plans have been forgotten; I don’t know of a single one that was still in force a decade down the road. The improvisations, on the other hand, have not; they include today’s organic intensive gardening, permaculture, most of today’s arsenal of solar energy methods, a range of alternative homebuilding methods, and much more.

Nobody drew up plans to develop these things, after all; the developers simply developed them, working things out as circumstances demanded, and shared what they learned with others as they went. Thus nearly all the ingredients being inserted into the current crop of plans for the deindustrial future were themselves the product of improvisation. It might be worth suggesting on this basis that our best option would be to skip the plans altogether and get to work on more improvisations.

All the points made here can be phrased in another way: a society is more like an organism than an artifact, and while artifacts can be planned and manufactured, organisms must evolve.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... sdara.html

[Gordon Ferguson]

What has attracted to me to the transition towns/cities movement is that it appears to *believe* in cities. Big ones. Like Sheffield. My experience of the green and eco-movement through most of the 'nineties', and of course, from what I have read, is that many many people in the alternative movements emphatically *do not* believe in cities - or even largish towns.

I do believe in cities, and I think that this is a necessary first step in any exercise in envisioning a sustainable future for our own city – Sheffield. I am not interested in dismantling Sheffield, but turning it around.

Yes there are examples in the past of both success and failure. Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’ makes interesting and sobering reading. And by the way, the Mesoamericans did their whole thing without the wheel.

In other words, the only thing we lack is imagination. But what imagination we do have is ham-strung by extremely negative past attitudes amongst English speaking peoples to cities. Continental Europeans have always had a much more positive attitude to cities, right back to ancient Athens. Look at Florence with its magnificent ‘palazzos’ right in the middle of the town. But the English speaking peoples have in the main glorified the country and the wilderness. In Britain, as soon as people had money they built country estates and (read it in Austen) ‘went up to town’. In the US, it is the wilderness and the open road and the frontier that captivates the followers of Thoreau.

Where are the dreamers and the poets of the city and the urban landscape? As I see it, at the turn of each of the last three centuries the opportunity to make cities work for people has been lost and may be lost again - this last time forever.

At the beginning of the 19th century, whilst writers and poets followed Wordsworth to the Lake District it was left to Engels to point up the horrors of newly urbanised Manchester, whilst the Luddites tried to turn the clock back to rural manufacture. And thus the negative idea of the Imperial city was born. Yes we need Engels and Dickens and Sinclair to show us all that is wrong, but we also need the voices of celebration of all that can be good.

At the beginning of the 20th Century followers of William Morris went out into the countryside to build their arts and crafts workshops whilst the urban poor were impoverished aesthetically as well as materially under the smokestacks.

Now at the beginning of our century, the green and eco movements are rejecting cities again, hiding behind the myth of the imperial city. Cities are made of people, not rulers – the rulers are utterly dependent on the urban infrastructure of people - and those people can dream and rise up and improvise and transform for themselves – for ourselves.

[steve]

The concept of a city is actually poorly defined. In the UK it means somewhere with a cathedral. London is a city with 8.2 million people, Sheffield is a city with 500,000 and St Davids is a city with around 2000 inhabitants. Clearly the problems will be different for these very different entities.

I think what we're really talking about is population density. In a new low energy world the advantages of high population density areas are unlikely to outweigh their newly apparent disadvantages (importation of goods requiring significant amounts of precious energy).

There is also the question of the distribution of large cities. For instance if it was found that Sheffield needed a land area surrounding the city with a radius of say 40 miles then that would impinge on the land area of similar sized cities: Manchester and Leeds for instance.

Richard Heinberg's view is that cities (and civilization) will slowly collapse but that may be spread over several centuries. So perhaps cities will gradually be depopulated until a point where they are reasonable to live in. Or maybe they'll eventually just be abandoned: given up as a bad idea. Who knows?

Meanwhile nothing is going to change suddenly and overnight so we've got to work with what we've got.

[Gordon Ferguson]

Colin Tudge, in 'Feeding people Is Easy' (http://www.colintudge.com/articles/article12.php) suggests that 'enlightened agriculture' would imply at least 20% of the UK population working the land. That’s a big dent in the current urban population, although I reckon an 'enlightened economy' would be much more mixed, with a lot more food being grown in 'urban' areas as well. I also like ‘Grow Sheffield’ (http://www.growsheffield.com/)

In a lecture I attended he suggested that many people might hold both 'urban' and 'rural' jobs, possibly seasonally. A good spin on city dwellers in the last century going out to pick the harvest - and getting clean air, exercise and money into the bargain.

Colin Tudge, like Rob Hopkins, is someone I admire for having a vision.

The driver for optimal urban populations can easily be economic - when energy is expensive, food in the middle of cities will be expensive. Already a problem in another part of the economy with service workers in the middle of London, so rich people (and I count myself, even on my modest pension, amongst the rich) will either pay vastly more for the service infrastructure, or choose to live in smaller conurbations.

Another economic driver I came across was public transport infrastructure efficiency. I think it was Richard Rodgers - as in here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2002/jul/21/regeneration.comment
If I remember correctly, he suggested that for public transport to operate efficiently *and that's at today's energy costs* you need a density of 200 houses per acre/hectare? and we currently design to 40. There goes not just suburbia, but a lot of peoples' ideas of urban living....

An abiding memory of visiting Rome (when I used to feel OK going by 'plane) was on the trip from the airport. Small fields full of stuff growing and then blocks of flats.

In my vision of sustainable cities, they may be smaller, but are very densely populated, to the level of Manhattan (which I have also visited and would love to live in) and Hong Kong.