Sustainability and urban education urban education
Geography
Vol 99 Part 1 Spring 2014
© Geography 2014
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
The critique offered in this first article is actually
part of a broader analysis of urban studies, which
aims to show that much of what is taken for
granted in the field is no longer appropriate. Urban
geography is relevant to this critique, but no more
so than several other disciplines. However – and
this is the main reason I have written these
articles – geography is very much central to what I
envisage as a re-structured urban studies. Indeed,
the need for this within public policy is so pressing
that it has, in my view, the potential to place
geography at the forefront of educational practice.
The remainder of this article is an elaboration of
this bold claim.
Andrew Kirby
Geography and the urban
opportunity
ABSTRACT: Geography possesses in its intellectual
DNA a unique ability to understand cities. Decades
ago, it embarked on this project but was distracted,
for a number of reasons. The emergence of a field
committed to sustainability has renewed the
relevance of urban education. This, the first of two
articles, begins to identify what geography has to
offer. In the second article, I will suggest in greater
detail how the discipline can provide leadership
both in schools and in public policy in relation to
studies of cities and sustainability.
Introduction
176
The purpose of this and a second, linked, article
(to be published later in 2014) is to explore the
possibility of a realignment of geographical
practice. As this is not a minor undertaking, in this
article I lay out what I believe to be missing from
contemporary geography, and, in the second
article, I provide a route map towards a different
disciplinary focus. Although this may be seen by
some as ‘angry geography-bashing’ (as one
reviewer put it) that is not my intention. I am not
professionally invested in criticism of the
discipline, but I am perplexed that geography’s
place in both school and the public sphere seems
to have been eclipsed in recent years.
First is a brief and highly selective assessment of
Anglophone geography in the twentieth century,
which, I am keen to show, had the potential to craft
a sophisticated field – urban geography – and to
provide intellectual leadership within urban
studies. However, this did not come about for
several reasons.
Geographers were once so concerned with regions
that it was very unusual to teach about cities (see
Pacione, 2005, for an excellent summary). This
situation changed in the 1960s as researchers in
the United States began to focus on cities and
systems of cities, using quantitative methods to
explore economic ideas. Concurrently, researchers
in the UK began to look at the internal
mechanisms of urban structure, and invoked more
social and political forms of explanation.
Geography was, therefore, uniquely placed: the
discipline possessed the potential to see cities
within complex urban networks, and yet as part of
the landscape in its broadest sense. But these
were fated to be disparate endeavours. Since then,
urban ideas have not only become more
sophisticated, they have also travelled a significant
distance from geography’s essential concern with
place. And, as Pacione observes, ‘increased
diversity is a source of potential weakness that
may lead ultimately to disintegration’ (2005, p.
28).1
© Geography 2014
Geography
Green
thinking
Neoliberalism
Brown
revolution
Green thinking has promoted an environmental
consciousness, although that observation itself
masks the complexity of contributions to this
evolution. The anti-technological stance dates
back at least to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
(1962); an anti-population-growth stance that can
be traced to the time of Robert Malthus (the
nineteenth-century cleric), and an anti-urban
sentiment that extends back to the Romantic
ideals of the nineteenth century. It has also tended
to be global in its consciousness (Castells, 1996).
In contrast, the brown revolution has argued –
and fought – for individual and collective rights,
especially in the global South. Linked to urban
social movements (also identified by Castells,
If we turn to contemporary cities, we find diversity
and much contradiction as to what they represent.
Figure 1 indicates some of the complexity of how
cities are now viewed, identifying three distinct
perspectives: green thinking, the brown revolution
and neoliberalism (see, for instance, Vojnovic,
2013).
Together, these very different perspectives have
produced a complex and even contradictory
characterisation of what cities are. This notion of
complexity is developed further in Figure 2
(overleaf), which focuses on specifically academic
literatures – i.e. world cities, anti-global and
climate change perspectives – as they relate to our
urban understanding.
When we bring all of these different strands
together we see that we have a remarkably
Vol 99 Part 1 Spring 2014
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
1983), the demands for basic services such as
water and housing have highlighted the
inequalities manifested in the rapidly-expanding
megacities of Latin America, India and Africa.
Taken together, green and brown thought are the
obverse of neoliberalism . This was arguably the
most powerful strand of public policy-thinking in
the decades prior to the financial meltdown of
2008. With its critiques of public spending and its
claims for unfettered global competition,
neoliberalism has powerfully implicated cities as
engines of capital accumulation and transfer, while
focusing attention on urban competition via such
things as branding, bond ratings and a discourse
of ‘creative cities’.
Figure 1: Current
perspectives on the city:
green thinking, the brown
revolution and
neoliberalism. See text for
explanation.
confusing tableau: on the one hand cities are seen
as a basic component of the global economic
project, and on the other is the view that urban
development is destroying the planet. The historian
Carl Schorske (1981) has defined this as a
fundamental struggle between city as ‘good’ and
city as ‘evil’. The most recent attempt to resolve
this contradiction has manifested itself in a broad
literature of urban sustainability and concomitant
efforts to redesign cities in order to achieve
climate change mitigation goals.
The professional
consensus: what is a
sustainable city?
There is strong professional agreement on the
importance of sustainability, which urban
177
Geography
Vol 99 Part 1 Spring 2014
© Geography 2014
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
The first strand can be classified as the world or
global cities literature. This has various
components, all of which share an emphasis on
the networks – Castells (1996) terms them ‘flows’
– that connect cities within the global economy.
These flows can be financial transfers, but ideas,
workers and commodities (and even drugs and
people who are trafficked) are included.
178
Figure 2: Three strands
of academic literature on
the city: world cities, antiglobal and climate
change.
From this standpoint, cities should not be
implicated in the processes whereby social,
political and economic inequalities are manifested
in urban landscapes, nor should they reify
segregation, food deserts and obesity, social
stress and violence.
The third, climate change, is perhaps the most
powerful perspective on the city of all. This
The second strand comprises the many different
emerging body of knowledge has placed attention
empirical projects that focus on the lived
firmly upon the planet as the crucial scale of
experience of urban residents. In the same way
policy development. It has underscored the
that world cities research is rarely ‘pro-globalism’, dangers that result from greenhouse gas
most contemporary work on is not explicitly antiemissions, implicated the automobile in this
global rather its stance is broadly critical of urban equation, and emphasised relentlessly that
life. In essence, the anti-global perspective offers
mitigation is the only appropriate course of action.
a critique of the privatisation and the loss of
What this means is that we now have a powerful
public space; the fragmentation of the city and the argument which states that cities are the
creation of private spaces (such as shopping
fundamental cause of climate change and that
malls and gated communities); and the
this has arisen as a consequence of industrial
gentrification of neighbourhoods, endemic
development in the nineteenth century, suburban
homelessness and life in slums. In large measure, development in the twentieth and rural-to-urban
the anti-global is a literature that mourns the
migration in the twenty-first century. This thinking
dense organic city and bemoans the creation of
extrapolates that, for mitigation to occur (for the
suburbs; its nemesis is sprawl and its champion
planet to survive), cities must be re-conceived and
is smart growth. It is multidisciplinary but
redesigned and sustainable cities are the crucible
connected in its implicit belief that urban space
within which our future rests.
can and should reflect progressive social values.
© Geography 2014
geography acknowledges. Ellin writes that, ‘there is
now a virtual consensus among planners and
urban designers about what constitutes good
urbanism’ (2013, p. 1), but it is less clear just
what the pathway to sustainability might be and
how it is to be accomplished.
Some of the challenges become apparent in our
attempts to find a robust definition of ‘sustainable
urbanism’, which has inherited the vagueness of
the broader sustainability field (see Jackson,
2009). In an editorial launching a journal devoted
solely to this topic (entitled Sustainable Cities and
Society), Riffat can only offer this anodyne
statement:
’A new model of sustainability is needed. This
will provide greater incentives to save energy,
reduce consumption of resources and protect
the environment. Sustainable cities should be a
dense and socially diverse environment where
economic and social activities overlap and
where communities are focused around
neighbourhoods. Cities increase energy
efficiency, consume fewer resources, produce
less pollution and avoid urban sprawl. Future
cities must be developed or adapted to meet the
emerging needs of its [sic] citizens’
(2011, p. 1).
Geography
London (UK), Paris (France), Freiburg (Germany),
Copenhagen (Denmark), Helsinki (Finland), Venice
(Italy) and Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain) (Beatley, 2012).
The antitheses to these ‘good’ cities, automobiledependent metro areas such as Houston, Las
Vegas and Phoenix (USA) are typically excluded,
due to their indiscriminate sprawl. In fact, Ross
claims that Phoenix, Arizona, is the ‘least
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
Figure 3: A word cloud of
high school students’
(aged 14–18) definitions of
‘sustainability’.
This does not take us very far beyond the kinds of
ideas that can be generated by any individual.
Figures 3 and 4 show ‘word clouds’; these are
aggregations of the definitions of ‘sustainability’
created by high school and college students,
respectively.2 As we can see from the students’
responses, issues of resource use and
environmental health predominate, although some
more nuanced ideas are represented, including
‘citizenship’ and ‘waste’.
Perhaps because of the complexities and
contradictions identified above it is more usual to
find statements in the literature about what
constitutes an unsustainable city. In a
representative passage, Roseland points to ‘lowdensity single-family dwellings, car-dominated
transport systems, unchecked waste, omnipresent
air conditioning and profligate water use’ (2012, p.
23). Working with these indicators, plenty of
examples describe what constitutes good (and
bad) practice. In the United States, Portland
(Oregon) is frequently used as an exemplar of a
sustainable city – the city has become something
of a poster child, although high-density, compact
cities with public good transport systems, such as
Manhattan and San Francisco, are also lauded
(Glaeser, 2011). Singapore is also on the ‘good
city’ list, alongside European examples such as
Vol 99 Part 1 Spring 2014
Figure 4: A word cloud of
college students’ (typically
18- to 21-year olds)
definitions of
‘sustainability’.
sustainable city [on the planet]’ (2011).
There are two significant limits to this literature.
First, while it may encompass many facets (for
example, the Freiburg Charter – an annual award
given to outstandingly sustainable cities (see
179
Geography
Vol 99 Part 1 Spring 2014
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
Academy of Urbanism, 1992) – has 12 elements
ranging from diversity to governance), the concern
for compact cities rests ultimately on a single key
goal: climate change mitigation. Second, in
emphasising a narrow selection of city design
‘norms’, it may produce socially-unjust outcomes.
Here, it is important to note this critique is
introduced en route to a different set of goals and
outcomes, which will be developed in depth in the
second article. Consequently, this discussion
should neither be taken as evidence of scepticism
of climate change nor as an endorsement of
mindless consumerism and profligate energy use.
Rather, it is intended to be read as consistent with
reminders that any consideration of capitalist
development is both complex and often at odds
with the norms on display within the urban
sustainability literature (see, e.g. Westaway, 2009).
The limits to mitigation
For more than 30 years, the blueprints for
arguments about natural resources have become
fixed on the depletion of fossil fuels, the move to
energy alternatives and the pressing need to
reduce carbon emissions. These arguments do not
exist in a vacuum: statements about
overpopulation and famine warnings have
continued for decades (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1991).
However, these claims are of the direst sort; their
advocates brook no dissent and no alternatives –
see, for instance, Gore (2006) and Lambert (2008)
on the obligations to deal with climate change;
Hornborg (2009) on the extinction of the human
species; and Heinberg and Lerch (2010) on the
peak oil scenario, the depletion of energy
resources and the obligations to develop clean
alternatives.
180
However, one problem with such observations is
that the planet’s health and energy future are
much more complex than is claimed in these
dystopian scenarios. The emergence of natural gas
as a fuel cleaner than coal (although gas is neither
a clean nor a renewable resource) is an example
from the United States. Crying ‘wolf’ comes at a
price in terms of allowing opponents to
delegitimise the entire issue and in terms of trying
to deny energy options to the global South (e.g.
Glaeser, 2011). The more pressing policy issue
here is that there is no evidence that mitigation is,
or can be, a successful strategy (e.g. Susskind,
2010). This is a controversial posture, and it is no
exaggeration to state that nay-sayers like Bjørn
Lomborg (2001) have been branded climate
sceptics, which is (professionally) only one step
away from being accused of holocaust denial
(Oreskes and Conway, 2010). However, as Pielke et
© Geography 2014
al. (2007) argue, the debate is not about the
rightness of the science (another equally complex
issue in itself), instead it concerns the expense of
this policy obligation and the zero sum costs it
imposes elsewhere – a point I will return to in my
follow-up article. Here it is sufficient to state
agreement with the view of Pielke and colleagues:
that the sums being spent on mitigation (with little
result) could be better spent on helping those in
poverty adapt to life in marginal locations which
should result in more extensive and positive social
outcomes.
Sustainability: for whom?
The second strand of critique offered here is that
sustainability – asserted in a narrow context
focused on resource use and abuse – cannot be
simplistically applied to a complex social context
such as a city. As several commentators, including
Peter Marcuse (1998) and David Satterthwaite
(2011), have argued, there are many social
arrangements that are very sustainable (in the
sense that these arrangements endure), but this
tells us little to nothing about who benefits under
such arrangements. The same is true of the more
recent version offered within the engineering and
planning literature: that of ‘resilience’. Just as the
concept has been examined in the context of
mental health, it is not only important that human
arrangements endure, but also that they have
positive outcomes for all concerned. When we
begin to consider collective social outcomes in this
way, it is more likely that merely sustaining or
enduring in the face of climate change outcomes is
not enough (Davoudi, 2012).
What this implies is that the rubric of ‘sustainable
cities’ is an essentially empty vessel into which we
may pour whatever we choose. With an emphasis
upon environmental concerns, we can prioritise
specific design features and spatial outcomes, but
as we have seen, these tend to produce
problematic social outcomes. Compact cities tend
to be unaffordable cities, from which we can infer
that the commonly-understood meaning of
sustainability – i.e. a city with a minimal footprint,
locally-sourced foods and a walkable environment –
is (for most of us) as much an artificial construct
as ‘Main Street’ in Walt Disney World. Portland,
Oregon, may be the poster child for smart growth
(see Figure 5), but the city offers affordable
housing in only of 8 of its 225 neighbourhoods
(Butz and Zuberi, 2012).
The same is true of many European cities, where
the rental or purchase costs per square metre of
space far exceed what is charged in lower-density
© Geography 2014
Geography
Vol 99 Part 1 Spring 2014
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
Figure 5: Often cited as
the poster-child for smart
city growth, Portland,
Oregon, has an integrated
transport system which
includes cycle parking at
all light rail transport
stops. Photo: © Steve
Vance (Creative commons
licence).
environments. The results of these economic
pressures are clearly manifested in illegal infill,
overcrowding, social anxiety and, often, health
outcomes that pose a significant cost for the
residents of these compact cities. Furthermore,
this is evident in the megacities of the emerging
economies, where we see an attenuated version of
what comes with dense urban environments: traffic
congestion, air and noise pollution and severe
constraints on social and economic progress.
Moving to closure
This discussion opened with the observation that
geography has not capitalised on its opportunities
to provide strong intellectual leadership with regard
to understanding urban development. Instead, it
has joined the crowd with ‘critical’ rejections of the
contemporary urban experience, a standpoint that
offers no succour to residents of a planet with a
population that is growing and which must (literally)
accommodate 2 billion more urban residents.
These families cannot be housed in versions of
Portland, sustained by a lifestyle of heightened
gentility. Nor, obviously enough, should they be
crammed into a twenty-first-century version of
Bijlmermeer (the vast and notorious housing
development in Amsterdam), or the Lea Valley in
the UK (see Pacione, 2013), or any one of the
thousands of brutalist slums offered up by
architects and planners in former decades.
The challenges of urban growth and urban poverty,
especially in the global South, underline the reality
that while mitigation is not the answer, adaptation
truly is. We face an environmental crisis, but it is a
variegated one. How shall we deal with an
uncertain future of climate change, or perhaps that
should be a certain future of climate change, with
such unknown and highly contextual outcomes? If
this needs a clear demonstration, let us look to
the example of New Orleans, perhaps the leastadapted city on the planet. As has already been
demonstrated this century, the city is extremely
vulnerable to natural damage (viz Hurricane Katrina
in 2005), and, as it sinks year-by-year, is actually
becoming less adapted while sea levels rise and
storms become more unpredictable. We must
confront the fact that world-wide there are 10,000
cities that demand this kind of attention: cities
that are vulnerable to floods of all kinds, to fires,
to earthquakes, to hurricanes, to tornadoes, and
so on. Cities that demand an adaptive response in
order to make them sustainable, places that truly
provide their populations with some security for the
future (Satterthwaite, 2012).
The discipline of geography has enormous
potential here. The subject has, within its DNA if
not in its current practice, all the elements to
provide strong intellectual leadership. Practitioners
have studied the city and done so in an
ideographic, contextual manner, which is what will
181
Geography
Vol 99 Part 1 Spring 2014
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
be demanded in the future. Geography has the
ability to integrate its understanding of both human
and social systems in a way that other disciplines
do not. It also has the powerful techniques to show
how and where adaptive planning must take place,
for example, via geographical information systems
analysis.
Conclusion
This, the first of two articles, has deliberately taken
several risks in questioning the efficacy of climate
change mitigation and the robustness of thinking
on urban sustainability. Its purpose is to propose a
more radical alternative. The article holds out no
comforting illusions concerning the safety of the
planet; rather it demands that geography confronts
the existing threats to life and livelihood faced by
millions throughout the world on a daily basis. It is
also intended as a call for geography to take action
in order to bring about urban adaptation, which will
be explored in more depth in the second article.
Notes
1. I should emphasise that, while I believe Michael
Pacione (2005) is correct in his observations about
increased diversity and disintegration, he himself
does not appear to support this position.
2. The word clouds shown in Figures 3 and 4 are based
on exercises undertaken with students in high schools
and colleges respectively. Individual students were
asked to provide a written definition of ‘sustainability’
and their responses were then converted to word
clouds using Wordle.
References
182
Academy of Urbanism (1992) Freiberg Charter for
Sustainable Urbanism. Available online at
www.academyofurbanism.org.uk/freiburg-charter (last
accessed 8 November 2013).
Beatley, T. (2012) Green Cities of Europe. Washington, DC:
Island Press.
Butz, A. and Zuberi, D. (2012) ‘Local approaches to
counter a wider pattern? Urban poverty in Portland,
Oregon’, The Social Science Journal, 49, pp. 359–67.
Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring. Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin.
Castells, M. (1983) The City and the Grassroots. London:
Arnold.
Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society.
Massachusettes: Blackwell.
Davoudi, S. (2012) ‘Resilience: a bridging concept or a
dead end?’, Planning Theory and Practice, 13, 2, pp.
299–307.
Ehrlich, P. and Ehrlich, A. (1991) The Population Explosion.
London: Simon & Schuster.
Ellin, N. (2013) Good Urbanism. Washington, DC: Island
Press.
Glaeser, E. (2011) The Triumph of the City. New York, NY:
Penguin.
Gore, A. (2006) An Inconvenient Truth: The planetary
emergency of global warming and what we can do
about it. Emmaus, PA: Rodale.
© Geography 2014
Heinberg, R. and Lerch, D. (eds) (2010) The Post Carbon
Reader: Managing the 21st century’s sustainability
crises. Bristol: Watershed Media.
Hornborg, A. (2009) ‘Zero-sum world challenges in
conceptualizing environmental load displacement and
ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system’,
International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 50, 3–
4, pp. 237–62.
Jackson, P. (2009) ‘Editorial: thinking about
sustainability’, Geography, 94, 1, pp. 2–3.
Lambert, D. (2008) ‘Inconvenient truths’, Geography, 93,
1, pp. 48–50
Lomborg. B. (2001) The Skeptical Environmentalist:
Measuring the real state of the world. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Marcuse, P. (1998) ‘Sustainability is not enough’,
Environment and Urbanization, 10, 2, pp. 103–12.
Oreskes, N. and Conway, E.M. (2010) Merchants of Doubt:
How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on
issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing.
Pacione, M. (2005) ‘Sustainable urban development in the
UK: rhetoric or reality?’, Geography, 92, 3, pp. 248–
65.
Pacione, M. (2013) ‘Urban sustainability in the UK’ in
Vojnovic, I. (ed) Urban Sustainability, Ann Arbor, MI:
Michigan University Press, pp. 611–32.
Pielke, R., Prins, G., Rayner, S. and Sarewitz, D. (2007)
‘Climate change 2007: lifting the taboo on
adaptation’, Nature, 445, 7128, pp. 597–8.
Riffat, S. (2011) ‘Welcome to a new journal – Sustainable
Cities and Society’, Sustainable Cities and Society, 1, 1,
pp. 1–2.
Roseland, M. (2012) Toward Sustainable Communities:
Solutions for citizens and their governments. Gabriola
Island, BC: New Society Publishers.
Ross, A. (2011) Bird on Fire: Lessons from the world’s
least sustainable city. New York: Oxford University
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Satterthwaite, D. (2011) ‘How urban societies can adapt
to resource shortage and climate change’,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A:
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1942, pp. 1762–83.
Schorske, C.E. (1998) Thinking with History: Explorations
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University Press, 1998.
Susskind, L. (2010) ‘Policy and practice: responding to
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choice but to adapt’, Town Planning Review, 81, 3, pp.
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Vojnovic, I. (2013) Urban Sustainability: A global
perspective. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press.
Westaway, J. (2009) ‘A sustainable future for geography?’
Geography, 94, 1, pp. 4–12.
Andrew Kirby is Professor of Social Sciences in
the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences,
Arizona State University, Pheonix, USA (email:
[email protected]).
Vol 99 Part 1 Spring 2014
© Geography 2014
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
The critique offered in this first article is actually
part of a broader analysis of urban studies, which
aims to show that much of what is taken for
granted in the field is no longer appropriate. Urban
geography is relevant to this critique, but no more
so than several other disciplines. However – and
this is the main reason I have written these
articles – geography is very much central to what I
envisage as a re-structured urban studies. Indeed,
the need for this within public policy is so pressing
that it has, in my view, the potential to place
geography at the forefront of educational practice.
The remainder of this article is an elaboration of
this bold claim.
Andrew Kirby
Geography and the urban
opportunity
ABSTRACT: Geography possesses in its intellectual
DNA a unique ability to understand cities. Decades
ago, it embarked on this project but was distracted,
for a number of reasons. The emergence of a field
committed to sustainability has renewed the
relevance of urban education. This, the first of two
articles, begins to identify what geography has to
offer. In the second article, I will suggest in greater
detail how the discipline can provide leadership
both in schools and in public policy in relation to
studies of cities and sustainability.
Introduction
176
The purpose of this and a second, linked, article
(to be published later in 2014) is to explore the
possibility of a realignment of geographical
practice. As this is not a minor undertaking, in this
article I lay out what I believe to be missing from
contemporary geography, and, in the second
article, I provide a route map towards a different
disciplinary focus. Although this may be seen by
some as ‘angry geography-bashing’ (as one
reviewer put it) that is not my intention. I am not
professionally invested in criticism of the
discipline, but I am perplexed that geography’s
place in both school and the public sphere seems
to have been eclipsed in recent years.
First is a brief and highly selective assessment of
Anglophone geography in the twentieth century,
which, I am keen to show, had the potential to craft
a sophisticated field – urban geography – and to
provide intellectual leadership within urban
studies. However, this did not come about for
several reasons.
Geographers were once so concerned with regions
that it was very unusual to teach about cities (see
Pacione, 2005, for an excellent summary). This
situation changed in the 1960s as researchers in
the United States began to focus on cities and
systems of cities, using quantitative methods to
explore economic ideas. Concurrently, researchers
in the UK began to look at the internal
mechanisms of urban structure, and invoked more
social and political forms of explanation.
Geography was, therefore, uniquely placed: the
discipline possessed the potential to see cities
within complex urban networks, and yet as part of
the landscape in its broadest sense. But these
were fated to be disparate endeavours. Since then,
urban ideas have not only become more
sophisticated, they have also travelled a significant
distance from geography’s essential concern with
place. And, as Pacione observes, ‘increased
diversity is a source of potential weakness that
may lead ultimately to disintegration’ (2005, p.
28).1
© Geography 2014
Geography
Green
thinking
Neoliberalism
Brown
revolution
Green thinking has promoted an environmental
consciousness, although that observation itself
masks the complexity of contributions to this
evolution. The anti-technological stance dates
back at least to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
(1962); an anti-population-growth stance that can
be traced to the time of Robert Malthus (the
nineteenth-century cleric), and an anti-urban
sentiment that extends back to the Romantic
ideals of the nineteenth century. It has also tended
to be global in its consciousness (Castells, 1996).
In contrast, the brown revolution has argued –
and fought – for individual and collective rights,
especially in the global South. Linked to urban
social movements (also identified by Castells,
If we turn to contemporary cities, we find diversity
and much contradiction as to what they represent.
Figure 1 indicates some of the complexity of how
cities are now viewed, identifying three distinct
perspectives: green thinking, the brown revolution
and neoliberalism (see, for instance, Vojnovic,
2013).
Together, these very different perspectives have
produced a complex and even contradictory
characterisation of what cities are. This notion of
complexity is developed further in Figure 2
(overleaf), which focuses on specifically academic
literatures – i.e. world cities, anti-global and
climate change perspectives – as they relate to our
urban understanding.
When we bring all of these different strands
together we see that we have a remarkably
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1983), the demands for basic services such as
water and housing have highlighted the
inequalities manifested in the rapidly-expanding
megacities of Latin America, India and Africa.
Taken together, green and brown thought are the
obverse of neoliberalism . This was arguably the
most powerful strand of public policy-thinking in
the decades prior to the financial meltdown of
2008. With its critiques of public spending and its
claims for unfettered global competition,
neoliberalism has powerfully implicated cities as
engines of capital accumulation and transfer, while
focusing attention on urban competition via such
things as branding, bond ratings and a discourse
of ‘creative cities’.
Figure 1: Current
perspectives on the city:
green thinking, the brown
revolution and
neoliberalism. See text for
explanation.
confusing tableau: on the one hand cities are seen
as a basic component of the global economic
project, and on the other is the view that urban
development is destroying the planet. The historian
Carl Schorske (1981) has defined this as a
fundamental struggle between city as ‘good’ and
city as ‘evil’. The most recent attempt to resolve
this contradiction has manifested itself in a broad
literature of urban sustainability and concomitant
efforts to redesign cities in order to achieve
climate change mitigation goals.
The professional
consensus: what is a
sustainable city?
There is strong professional agreement on the
importance of sustainability, which urban
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education
The first strand can be classified as the world or
global cities literature. This has various
components, all of which share an emphasis on
the networks – Castells (1996) terms them ‘flows’
– that connect cities within the global economy.
These flows can be financial transfers, but ideas,
workers and commodities (and even drugs and
people who are trafficked) are included.
178
Figure 2: Three strands
of academic literature on
the city: world cities, antiglobal and climate
change.
From this standpoint, cities should not be
implicated in the processes whereby social,
political and economic inequalities are manifested
in urban landscapes, nor should they reify
segregation, food deserts and obesity, social
stress and violence.
The third, climate change, is perhaps the most
powerful perspective on the city of all. This
The second strand comprises the many different
emerging body of knowledge has placed attention
empirical projects that focus on the lived
firmly upon the planet as the crucial scale of
experience of urban residents. In the same way
policy development. It has underscored the
that world cities research is rarely ‘pro-globalism’, dangers that result from greenhouse gas
most contemporary work on is not explicitly antiemissions, implicated the automobile in this
global rather its stance is broadly critical of urban equation, and emphasised relentlessly that
life. In essence, the anti-global perspective offers
mitigation is the only appropriate course of action.
a critique of the privatisation and the loss of
What this means is that we now have a powerful
public space; the fragmentation of the city and the argument which states that cities are the
creation of private spaces (such as shopping
fundamental cause of climate change and that
malls and gated communities); and the
this has arisen as a consequence of industrial
gentrification of neighbourhoods, endemic
development in the nineteenth century, suburban
homelessness and life in slums. In large measure, development in the twentieth and rural-to-urban
the anti-global is a literature that mourns the
migration in the twenty-first century. This thinking
dense organic city and bemoans the creation of
extrapolates that, for mitigation to occur (for the
suburbs; its nemesis is sprawl and its champion
planet to survive), cities must be re-conceived and
is smart growth. It is multidisciplinary but
redesigned and sustainable cities are the crucible
connected in its implicit belief that urban space
within which our future rests.
can and should reflect progressive social values.
© Geography 2014
geography acknowledges. Ellin writes that, ‘there is
now a virtual consensus among planners and
urban designers about what constitutes good
urbanism’ (2013, p. 1), but it is less clear just
what the pathway to sustainability might be and
how it is to be accomplished.
Some of the challenges become apparent in our
attempts to find a robust definition of ‘sustainable
urbanism’, which has inherited the vagueness of
the broader sustainability field (see Jackson,
2009). In an editorial launching a journal devoted
solely to this topic (entitled Sustainable Cities and
Society), Riffat can only offer this anodyne
statement:
’A new model of sustainability is needed. This
will provide greater incentives to save energy,
reduce consumption of resources and protect
the environment. Sustainable cities should be a
dense and socially diverse environment where
economic and social activities overlap and
where communities are focused around
neighbourhoods. Cities increase energy
efficiency, consume fewer resources, produce
less pollution and avoid urban sprawl. Future
cities must be developed or adapted to meet the
emerging needs of its [sic] citizens’
(2011, p. 1).
Geography
London (UK), Paris (France), Freiburg (Germany),
Copenhagen (Denmark), Helsinki (Finland), Venice
(Italy) and Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain) (Beatley, 2012).
The antitheses to these ‘good’ cities, automobiledependent metro areas such as Houston, Las
Vegas and Phoenix (USA) are typically excluded,
due to their indiscriminate sprawl. In fact, Ross
claims that Phoenix, Arizona, is the ‘least
Geographical
leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
Figure 3: A word cloud of
high school students’
(aged 14–18) definitions of
‘sustainability’.
This does not take us very far beyond the kinds of
ideas that can be generated by any individual.
Figures 3 and 4 show ‘word clouds’; these are
aggregations of the definitions of ‘sustainability’
created by high school and college students,
respectively.2 As we can see from the students’
responses, issues of resource use and
environmental health predominate, although some
more nuanced ideas are represented, including
‘citizenship’ and ‘waste’.
Perhaps because of the complexities and
contradictions identified above it is more usual to
find statements in the literature about what
constitutes an unsustainable city. In a
representative passage, Roseland points to ‘lowdensity single-family dwellings, car-dominated
transport systems, unchecked waste, omnipresent
air conditioning and profligate water use’ (2012, p.
23). Working with these indicators, plenty of
examples describe what constitutes good (and
bad) practice. In the United States, Portland
(Oregon) is frequently used as an exemplar of a
sustainable city – the city has become something
of a poster child, although high-density, compact
cities with public good transport systems, such as
Manhattan and San Francisco, are also lauded
(Glaeser, 2011). Singapore is also on the ‘good
city’ list, alongside European examples such as
Vol 99 Part 1 Spring 2014
Figure 4: A word cloud of
college students’ (typically
18- to 21-year olds)
definitions of
‘sustainability’.
sustainable city [on the planet]’ (2011).
There are two significant limits to this literature.
First, while it may encompass many facets (for
example, the Freiburg Charter – an annual award
given to outstandingly sustainable cities (see
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Academy of Urbanism, 1992) – has 12 elements
ranging from diversity to governance), the concern
for compact cities rests ultimately on a single key
goal: climate change mitigation. Second, in
emphasising a narrow selection of city design
‘norms’, it may produce socially-unjust outcomes.
Here, it is important to note this critique is
introduced en route to a different set of goals and
outcomes, which will be developed in depth in the
second article. Consequently, this discussion
should neither be taken as evidence of scepticism
of climate change nor as an endorsement of
mindless consumerism and profligate energy use.
Rather, it is intended to be read as consistent with
reminders that any consideration of capitalist
development is both complex and often at odds
with the norms on display within the urban
sustainability literature (see, e.g. Westaway, 2009).
The limits to mitigation
For more than 30 years, the blueprints for
arguments about natural resources have become
fixed on the depletion of fossil fuels, the move to
energy alternatives and the pressing need to
reduce carbon emissions. These arguments do not
exist in a vacuum: statements about
overpopulation and famine warnings have
continued for decades (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1991).
However, these claims are of the direst sort; their
advocates brook no dissent and no alternatives –
see, for instance, Gore (2006) and Lambert (2008)
on the obligations to deal with climate change;
Hornborg (2009) on the extinction of the human
species; and Heinberg and Lerch (2010) on the
peak oil scenario, the depletion of energy
resources and the obligations to develop clean
alternatives.
180
However, one problem with such observations is
that the planet’s health and energy future are
much more complex than is claimed in these
dystopian scenarios. The emergence of natural gas
as a fuel cleaner than coal (although gas is neither
a clean nor a renewable resource) is an example
from the United States. Crying ‘wolf’ comes at a
price in terms of allowing opponents to
delegitimise the entire issue and in terms of trying
to deny energy options to the global South (e.g.
Glaeser, 2011). The more pressing policy issue
here is that there is no evidence that mitigation is,
or can be, a successful strategy (e.g. Susskind,
2010). This is a controversial posture, and it is no
exaggeration to state that nay-sayers like Bjørn
Lomborg (2001) have been branded climate
sceptics, which is (professionally) only one step
away from being accused of holocaust denial
(Oreskes and Conway, 2010). However, as Pielke et
© Geography 2014
al. (2007) argue, the debate is not about the
rightness of the science (another equally complex
issue in itself), instead it concerns the expense of
this policy obligation and the zero sum costs it
imposes elsewhere – a point I will return to in my
follow-up article. Here it is sufficient to state
agreement with the view of Pielke and colleagues:
that the sums being spent on mitigation (with little
result) could be better spent on helping those in
poverty adapt to life in marginal locations which
should result in more extensive and positive social
outcomes.
Sustainability: for whom?
The second strand of critique offered here is that
sustainability – asserted in a narrow context
focused on resource use and abuse – cannot be
simplistically applied to a complex social context
such as a city. As several commentators, including
Peter Marcuse (1998) and David Satterthwaite
(2011), have argued, there are many social
arrangements that are very sustainable (in the
sense that these arrangements endure), but this
tells us little to nothing about who benefits under
such arrangements. The same is true of the more
recent version offered within the engineering and
planning literature: that of ‘resilience’. Just as the
concept has been examined in the context of
mental health, it is not only important that human
arrangements endure, but also that they have
positive outcomes for all concerned. When we
begin to consider collective social outcomes in this
way, it is more likely that merely sustaining or
enduring in the face of climate change outcomes is
not enough (Davoudi, 2012).
What this implies is that the rubric of ‘sustainable
cities’ is an essentially empty vessel into which we
may pour whatever we choose. With an emphasis
upon environmental concerns, we can prioritise
specific design features and spatial outcomes, but
as we have seen, these tend to produce
problematic social outcomes. Compact cities tend
to be unaffordable cities, from which we can infer
that the commonly-understood meaning of
sustainability – i.e. a city with a minimal footprint,
locally-sourced foods and a walkable environment –
is (for most of us) as much an artificial construct
as ‘Main Street’ in Walt Disney World. Portland,
Oregon, may be the poster child for smart growth
(see Figure 5), but the city offers affordable
housing in only of 8 of its 225 neighbourhoods
(Butz and Zuberi, 2012).
The same is true of many European cities, where
the rental or purchase costs per square metre of
space far exceed what is charged in lower-density
© Geography 2014
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leadership,
sustainability
and urban
education
Figure 5: Often cited as
the poster-child for smart
city growth, Portland,
Oregon, has an integrated
transport system which
includes cycle parking at
all light rail transport
stops. Photo: © Steve
Vance (Creative commons
licence).
environments. The results of these economic
pressures are clearly manifested in illegal infill,
overcrowding, social anxiety and, often, health
outcomes that pose a significant cost for the
residents of these compact cities. Furthermore,
this is evident in the megacities of the emerging
economies, where we see an attenuated version of
what comes with dense urban environments: traffic
congestion, air and noise pollution and severe
constraints on social and economic progress.
Moving to closure
This discussion opened with the observation that
geography has not capitalised on its opportunities
to provide strong intellectual leadership with regard
to understanding urban development. Instead, it
has joined the crowd with ‘critical’ rejections of the
contemporary urban experience, a standpoint that
offers no succour to residents of a planet with a
population that is growing and which must (literally)
accommodate 2 billion more urban residents.
These families cannot be housed in versions of
Portland, sustained by a lifestyle of heightened
gentility. Nor, obviously enough, should they be
crammed into a twenty-first-century version of
Bijlmermeer (the vast and notorious housing
development in Amsterdam), or the Lea Valley in
the UK (see Pacione, 2013), or any one of the
thousands of brutalist slums offered up by
architects and planners in former decades.
The challenges of urban growth and urban poverty,
especially in the global South, underline the reality
that while mitigation is not the answer, adaptation
truly is. We face an environmental crisis, but it is a
variegated one. How shall we deal with an
uncertain future of climate change, or perhaps that
should be a certain future of climate change, with
such unknown and highly contextual outcomes? If
this needs a clear demonstration, let us look to
the example of New Orleans, perhaps the leastadapted city on the planet. As has already been
demonstrated this century, the city is extremely
vulnerable to natural damage (viz Hurricane Katrina
in 2005), and, as it sinks year-by-year, is actually
becoming less adapted while sea levels rise and
storms become more unpredictable. We must
confront the fact that world-wide there are 10,000
cities that demand this kind of attention: cities
that are vulnerable to floods of all kinds, to fires,
to earthquakes, to hurricanes, to tornadoes, and
so on. Cities that demand an adaptive response in
order to make them sustainable, places that truly
provide their populations with some security for the
future (Satterthwaite, 2012).
The discipline of geography has enormous
potential here. The subject has, within its DNA if
not in its current practice, all the elements to
provide strong intellectual leadership. Practitioners
have studied the city and done so in an
ideographic, contextual manner, which is what will
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be demanded in the future. Geography has the
ability to integrate its understanding of both human
and social systems in a way that other disciplines
do not. It also has the powerful techniques to show
how and where adaptive planning must take place,
for example, via geographical information systems
analysis.
Conclusion
This, the first of two articles, has deliberately taken
several risks in questioning the efficacy of climate
change mitigation and the robustness of thinking
on urban sustainability. Its purpose is to propose a
more radical alternative. The article holds out no
comforting illusions concerning the safety of the
planet; rather it demands that geography confronts
the existing threats to life and livelihood faced by
millions throughout the world on a daily basis. It is
also intended as a call for geography to take action
in order to bring about urban adaptation, which will
be explored in more depth in the second article.
Notes
1. I should emphasise that, while I believe Michael
Pacione (2005) is correct in his observations about
increased diversity and disintegration, he himself
does not appear to support this position.
2. The word clouds shown in Figures 3 and 4 are based
on exercises undertaken with students in high schools
and colleges respectively. Individual students were
asked to provide a written definition of ‘sustainability’
and their responses were then converted to word
clouds using Wordle.
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Andrew Kirby is Professor of Social Sciences in
the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences,
Arizona State University, Pheonix, USA (email:
[email protected]).