Urban Sustainability: Problems and Prospects

The city, currently the overriding form of human settlement, typifies and exhibits the deep-seated apprehensions of the human condition. In an era of where globalization is on the rise, urban life pulls people into zones of severe interconnectivity. Cities are characterised as places of passion, hopes and dreams.

Nevertheless, they are entering an epoch of prolonged crisis. All urban settlements are going through a practical crisis of sustainability, while human beings face a wide-ranging crisis of social life on this planet. We need to understand that Planning for density is excellent only when it is based on high-quality planning and when the conditions for greater-than-before density are properly designed.

Electric vehicles are effective only when renewable resources are brought into play and when the vehicles do not become part of an obsession with green consumption. Although slums are often places of wretched housing, they can also be places of vibrant life and livelihoods.

However, defending them as being ‘productive too’ – just like ‘normal cities’ – is to concede that economic productivity is the pre-eminent quantifier of what is good. Inclusion is good only when the terms of positive exclusion are negotiated with care, transparency and so on. Cities are at the centre of these crises Across the world we are facing crises of sustainability, resilience, security, stability and adaptation.

Countless of our cities have become extensive and swollen zones of unsustainability Issues and problems associated with climate change or sustainable water supply to those relating to increasing economic disparity or the break-up of communities, processes such as increasing resource use or mounting cultural differences, nuisance that we once responded to as remarkable concerns are now bearing back on us in a whirl of multiple pressures. Cities are at the focal point of this human-constructed maelstrom.

For all their effervescence and liveliness, cities face a mounting challenge to offer safe, sound and sustainable places to live. Unvaryingly the world’s most ‘liveable cities’ – Melbourne, Munich, Vancouver and Vienna – are quite unsustainable in global ecological terms.

If all city residents across the globe consumed at the rate of the world’s most liveable cities the planet would be in disastrous trouble. Regardless of their inconsequential geographical footprint, cities are accountable for around 80 per cent of global energy consumption, and a number of the world’s most magnificent exciting cities contribute at a proportionally much higher rate.

As many writers now tell us, our cities confront various crises of sustainability be it economic, ecological, political or cultural. For example in Mike Davis’s words (2006), slums are all the time more becoming a part of our cities. Every day, 180,000 people join the global urban population; each year, the equivalent of two cities the size of Tokyo is built; one in six urban dwellers lives in slums, and we are heading towards that black figure of 2 degrees Celsius global warming. UN-Habitat research suggests that over the next decades practically all of the world’s population growth will occur in cities with massive consequences for infrastructure stress (2010, 2012).

Why, under these conditions, do we concentrate on symptomatic ways outs for example on white paint on roofs to amplify the albedo of the city, on bulldozers to clear away unnecessary and lopsided urban dwellers and on cranes to build new high-rise apartments in the hinterland cities of the new world? Why do we dither between easy quick-fix solutions and complex suspension, when it is so apparent that something much more essential needs to be done? Slum clearance appears to work for a while in particular locales, but displaced people, especially those who are shifted to the margin, tend to move back to more central urban sites of continuing hopelessness, seeking to maintain livelihoods. White roofs deflect heat in the cities of the global North, whereas in the global South, intensifying weather shifts and rising sea levels bring the chaos of floods.

Cities are at the heart of the problems facing this planet, but developing a positive and sustainable mode of urban living is the only way that we will be able to sustain social life as we know it past the end of this century.

In fact, given the world’s current population growth, sustainably increasing the density of our urban settlements along with increasing energy efficiency and decreasing resource use is the only alternative. It is simply no longer the case that building rural idylls on small, self-contained plots of land can save the planet. If without changing other considerations, we started dividing the non-urban world into rural allotments to cope with a bourgeoning global population, we would only speed up the crisis.

According to the World Bank (2014), the United States has only 0.5 hectares of arable land per citizen, while China has 0.08 hectares.

Unless there was a revolution in the way we live, neither would allow for allotment self-sufficiency We are now in the fourth phase of the Anthropocene period. If Tribalia, Agraria, and Industria were formerly leading and continuing ways of living, the most recent phase, still unnamed, began with our capacity to make our own lives on this planet unsustainable.

Through the intersection of techno-science and capitalism, from bioengineering to hyper commodification, we are now reconstituting the basic building blocks of nature including our bodies and in some way knowingly or unknowingly becoming self detrimental too. Talking about sustainability and resilience. For a large wealthy minority in some parts of the world, life in the city is materially good. The well-to-do, urban global North continues to export an increasing number of the urban problems associated with crude industrialism to the global south or the peripheral zones of their own countries.

Under Dickensian conditions, the hardware supporting urban lifestyles is being produced in places such as China, Dhaka and Bangladesh. This occurs when ‘post-industrial’ cities are dressed in the superficial glamour of urban renewal. Formerly unexciting central business districts have been turned into entertainment zones. Any sense of face-to-face soreness or community isolation is recoloured by the relentless essentials of Facebook and media connectivity. The world’s poster cities come into sight as a cleaner, brighter, and more pulsating than ever before.

In the 2000s, Auden’s mass-produced Hobbesian Man has given way to the self-projecting urbanite who can choose amongst the amazing array of consumption opportunities on offer. In many cities across the world, fragmentary community relations have become secondary or residual, confined to disconnected periods of people’s lives or moments of celebratory focus. Urban dwellers increasingly come together in moments of screen time or as passing strangers in the street, moving in parallel and consuming parallel lifestyle possibilities.

One lineage of academic and popular writers celebrates this development. Richard Florida’s book who’s Your City? turns the important life-forming question of‘Where do you want to live?’ into a commodity choice. Why have others missed the where a factor,’ he asks disingenuously: ‘Perhaps it’s because so few of us have the understanding or mental framework necessary to make informed decisions about location’ (Florida 2009, p. 5).

The word future now seems to summon up either post-human scenarios of techno-science or greenfield new cities’ that have given us the disasters of the techno polis, the multifunction polis and the less-than-acceptable outcomes of zones that look best from the air.

For a Greenfield site, Canberra was beautifully designed as a garden city, but it for the most part failed to think about transport other than cars or to accomplish cultural vibrancy. Brasília was designed to look like a butterfly from above but has been criticized as a futuristic fantasy. Dubai is conceivably the ultimate futurist fantasy, utilizing high-end residential zones that reach into the ocean, designed from the air to look like a palm tree or planet Earth.

For a period, Dubai flits around on the edge of ecological and economic disaster. Futurism is not turning it around now in fact, to a certain extent, the careful planners of the Land Department and those solid developers are now trying to make an extraordinary city in which ordinary people live sustainably.

The principal way in which we currently imagine the future can best be seen in corporate advertising of the many companies that project the proposal of a good city as a high-tech ‘smart city’. It is visible in the global mammoth events in which a global imaginary of capitalism, techno-science and planetary saga come together. Techno-scientific projections of connectivity and competence are brought together with global projections of material wealth and local projections of lifestyle preferences.

The ‘Smart City’ future is therefore imagined as a contradictory mixture of controlled, regulated, inside, and as far from the messiness of uncultivated nature and organic chance as possible whereas contradictorily also being serendipitously exciting for all the individuals who inhabit that world. Out-of-place and badly conceived planning have over and over again produced inferior outcomes than have to leave the process to serendipity, but in the background of the global crisis, we now require long-term planning more than ever before.

Cities convey our aspirations and hopes. They are local citadels of the evolving global urban system, built to protect us from our fears and insecurities. Family by family, person by person, the world’s population is gravitating towards the bright lights of urban intensity and high mass consumption.

Across the globe, unevenly but inexorably, people have been entering the process that Raymond Williams (1974) calls ‘mobile privatization’ – making our lives increasingly private and linking to the public more than to each other by the means of television, the Internet and social media than by public engagement in the street or community settings.

Individual by individual, the dwellers of cities turn on air conditioners to deal with the elevated temperatures we all have produced and to fulfil our private ‘needs’ for increasing levels of comfort – thus ironically increasing the production of greenhouse gases which lead to higher temperatures. In other words, cities become a symbol of the best and the worst of us. They are the home to the most ridiculous and the very grandest things that we can accomplish. On the other hand, to make better of them, we need to pay attention to our weaknesses.

To put it another way, badly conceived utopian planning has in the past shaped outcomes that are unsustainable both objectively and emotionally. But this does not mean that communities and municipalities, together with planning and architectural experts, should not get together to bestow and argue over the future directions of the whole city, its priorities and directions even if this means revisiting first principles. Optimistic sustainable urban development requires out-of-the-ordinary visions that take seriously the essential importance of economic, ecological, political and cultural factors.

In particular, questions of culture need to be taken more seriously and directly. This is not to surrender to the culturalist view that the aesthetic visions of high-end architects should drive the remaking of cities. To a certain extent, it is to argue for a city where cultural friction is returned to the streets and where cars give way to people, public spaces, basketball courts and urban food gardens. It sounds simple, but current practices remain caught in unsuitable prevailing understandings.

Language is part of the problem, but it goes deeper into the relationship between knowledge, power and practice. As a means of going in a different direction, we begin with the four social domains that we earlier posited as useful for understanding the human condition: the economic, ecological, political and cultural.

A city or urban area can be defined as a human settlement characterized – economically, politically and culturally – by a noteworthy infrastructural base; a high density of population, whether it be as natives, working people, or transitory visitors; and what is perceived to be a huge proportion of constructed surface area relative to the rest of the region. Within that area, there may also be smaller zones of non-built-up, green or brown sites used for agriculture, recreation, storage, waste disposal or other rationales.

A suburban area can be defined as a comparatively densely inhabited urban district characterized by a prevalence of housing land-use – as a residential zone in an urban area contiguous with a city centre, as a zone outside the politically defined limits of a city centre, or as a zone on the outer rim of an urban region (sometimes called a peri-urban area). For example, suburban areas in cities of the global South can be made up of village communities or squatter settlements, sometimes edged by bushland. This also includes ‘settlements’ or ‘squatter areas’.

Thus, our definition of suburb does not make the customary distinction between formal suburbs and informal or squatter settlements – they are in our terms different forms of suburbanization. A peri-urban area is a zone of transition from rural to urban. These areas time and again from the immediate urban-rural interface and may eventually evolve into being wholly urban. Peri-urban areas are lived-in environments. The majority of peri-urban areas are on the periphery of established urban areas, but they may also be clusters of residential development within rural landscapes and along transport routes.

Periurban areas in the global North are most commonly an outcome of the continuing process of suburbanization or urban sprawl, even though this is different in places where usual land relations continue to prevail. A hinterland area can be defined as a rural area that is located sufficiently close to a main urban centre for its inhabitants to orient a noteworthy proportion of their activities to the dominant urban area in their region. A rural area is an area that is either sparsely settled or has a relatively dispersed population with no cities or major towns.

Even though agriculture still plays an imperative part in numerous rural areas, other sources of income have developed such as rural tourism, small-scale manufacturing activities, residential economy (location of retirees), and energy production. A rural area can be characterized either by its constructed (though non-industrial) ecology or its relatively home-grown ecology.

All these zones bear on the formation and reproduction of cities or urban settlements. They are spatial domains. On the other hand, there is another way of understanding spatial domains that complements what has just been outlined. It concerns processes rather than zones- precise, processes of globalization and localization.

Cities in the current world are characterised by extreme global interconnections: consequently understanding the processes of globalization and localization is essential. Globalization is always enacted at the concrete local level. Even the global financial crisis was evident in patterns of local practice, including how poor people bought houses in depressed urban neighbourhoods such as New York and Miami.

At the same time, the feasibility of the local now for the most part depends on the global. The crisis made stronger the. Notions of ‘glocalization’ or the ‘glocal’ have long been part of the vocabulary of the increasing transdisciplinary field of global studies (e.g. see Robertson Contemporary globalization, they argue, is ‘not the chief or only cause of global environmental change, although it has, without doubt, intensified such change to the point where we are moving towards an environmental crisis of planetary proportions ‘Cities are crossed by diverse kinds of globalization processes.

One possible way of enlightening our analytical understanding of different kinds of globalization to help with this overlaying spatial change involves the following set of distinctions:

• Embodied globalization – the movements of people across the world

• Object-extended globalization – the movements of objects across the world, in particular, traded commodities• Agency-extended globalization – the movements of agents of institutions such as corporations, NGOs and states
• Symbolically extended globalization – the movements of symbols across the world, often carried as objects, but also now overwhelmingly projected as electronic images
• Disembodied globalization – the movements of immaterial things and processes, electronic texts and encoded capital

Cities have options– constrained options – about how they handle these different ways of globalization. Embodied globalization extends across the globe in networks of the movement of people, but it is also the most transparently localized in the way in which it is lived. Migrants usually come to particular places, increasingly urban places, through chains of connection those link localities, families’ and ethnic diasporas.

On the other hand, at the most materially abstract end of the spectrum, disembodied globalization, although always localizing in some way or other, and with thoughtful consequences for how people live locally, is the least embedded in local places. All of this means that the current approach to global cities, to the extent that it emphasizes global financial connectivity, is reductive and skewed.

Ever since Ferdinand Tönnies (1963) introduced the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to explain a change from a society dominated by relatively steady, mainly non-urban, communities that emphasized mutual obligation and trust (Gemeinschaften) to further mobile, extremely urbanized societies in which individual self-interest comes to the fore (Gesellschaften), commentators have been interested in the ever-changing nature of the community.

Until recently, belonging to a community was more often than not seen as unqualifiedly positive. While the community is now seen in more circumspect terms, the wearing away of community is still principally interpreted as being the cause of social problems.

Taking all of this together, sustainability thus relates not only to questions of environmental crisis or to the nexus between economy and ecology. It also concerns the human condition from the local to the global, including both the nature of urban settlements and the forms that community life takes. It concerns the fundamental question of how we are to live and how to be more resilient and attain sustainability.

To conclude, The three pillars of the concept of sustainability are as follows, based on which the whole of sustainability can be described or explained: Environment, Economy and Social.

I is equal to P into A into T, where I is Environmental Impact, P is Population, A is Affluence and T is Technology.