Another City is Possible
Excerpt from this story from Earth Island Journal:
Our cities occupy less than 4 percent of Earth’s land surface, but they are resource-gobbling behemoths with ecological footprints that reach far beyond their boundaries. Herbert Girardet, cofounder of the World Future Council, refers to the modern city as the “petropolis,” a place that requires “massive injections of non-renewable fossil fuels” to keep it running and supplied with goods and services. The “metabolism” of such cities follows the linear input-output model of the Industrial Age, he says. Like a vortex, the city pulls in energy and resources from a depleting biosphere via global supply chains, and spits out refuse and waste that the biosphere cannot reuse. This system, says the German-British cultural ecologist and author of Creating Regenerative Cities, turns “inherently renewable systems like soils, forests, and rivers into non-renewable systems.” Today’s cities use up two-thirds of the world’s energy, account for more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, have humongous water and waste footprints, are responsible for large-scale land conversion and degradation, loss of natural habitats, and land, water, and air pollution both locally and beyond — and they are growing.
It is time we reimagine cities, and urgently. According to the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, over the next eight years (the same amount of time we have to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius), the world is projected to add 10 more megacities — those with 10 million or more inhabitants — bringing the total to 43. Future projections also show that in less than 30 years, three out of four major cities will have a completely different climate from that for which their infrastructure was designed. In other words, while humanity is trending towards an urban future, the current fossil-fueled model of the city itself is trending towards collapse. Urban decline, accelerated by heat waves, droughts, and flooding, will be messy, and likely lead to local and regional conflicts over resources. And, as always, the heaviest costs will be borne by their most vulnerable residents: the old, the poor, the powerless.
FOR CITIES TO THRIVE, we need to rapidly transform the petropolis into an “ecopolis,” Girardet posits, shifting a city’s metabolic cycle to a “resource-efficient and regenerative circular system.” Such cities would incorporate the ecological principle that all things are connected, that there is no “waste” in nature. An ideal city would have a reciprocal relationship with living systems within and beyond its reaches, returning materials in forms that would allow those systems to reabsorb and regenerate as well. It would rely on locally or regionally sourced food and energy and be a natural refuge for plants and animals.