When thinking over what large urban centers might look like in a sustainable world, the conclusion is that they cannot be concrete, glass and asphalt sprawls. The reason I say this is because the world sustainability implies self-sufficiency and current large urban centers are anything but self-sufficient. Nearly everything a modern city needs has to come in from outside the city (see previous post). It therefore becomes obvious that large urban centers will need to hybridize into something that resembles more semi-rural environments – at least in the near future if they are to approach anything that is sustainable. Whether they will be controlled centrally through a city council or reverse back into more localized village-like civic councils within a broader overarching regional authority is yet to be debated. Let’s look at some of the various models of sustainable living and how they differ from what we have now – the urban-suburban sprawl. We are talking about an orderly and planned transition and not something out of a Mad-Max movie where we are plunged into a post-apocalyptic world and are forced into change. We might yet get to this latter concern, but I am optimistic in seeing humanity recognize the options for change and take them long before we are forced in to doing so.
From the US-EPA site, “Smart Growth covers a range of development and conservation strategies that help protect our health and natural environment and make our communities more attractive, economically stronger, and more socially diverse.” Now that’s a bit vague, but the principles of ‘Smart Growth’ are more specific. One of the fist statements is of ‘mixed land use.’ This is much more than zoning, but more an integration of rural agricultural land back into urban environments. Think of crop gardens instead of lawns, and garden allotments for each block of a city. One only has to look at the bankrupt decayed city of Detroit to see images of community gardens in action. Detroit has been an urban city in a long decline and had to reinvent itself to survive. And guess what, they by default set themselves up on a slow path to sustainability as the best solution. The need to preserve or reestablish open space, farmland within the urban landscape, and other kinds of critical natural environmental areas becomes a priority over sprawl. Each community essentially becomes a self-governing unit that encourages a strong sense of place and pride – in essence a self-enclosed walkable neighborhood with mass-transport options linking it to every other neighborhood. Each community would have stakeholder collaboration in all growth and development decisions that take into account the needs of the community and also those of surrounding communities for maximum harmony. By necessity, the sprawl of suburban style housing with surrounding land would need to change to more compact building design and land focused on food and beauty – think urban agroforestry (community food forests) and permaculture design.
When I was writing my Sustainable Living textbook, I went around looking at various models of sustainable living. One I visited was the community of Stapleton in Denver that was being developed on the old city airport land (Stapleton – Denver moved its airport 15 miles east to what is now DIA). I interviewed the development manager about this ‘New Urbanism’ project. From the CNU (Congress for New Urbanism) site; “New Urbanism is a planning and development approach based on the principles of how cities and towns HAD been built for the last several centuries: walkable blocks and streets, housing and shopping in close proximity, and accessible public spaces. In other words: New Urbanism focuses on human-scaled urban design” – I emphasize the word HAD in the definition. When I asked the Stapleton manager to tell me about his vision for this New Urbanism project, he said that he thought of it more as Old Urbanism since that was how we used to live in cities until about a century ago. While the city center had been fully urbanized the outlying communities (the future suburbs that would be absorbed by the growing city) had been relatively self-sufficient. This manager said that urban systems did have an advantage in that the metropolitan meshing of people created more innovation. The vibrant and often progressive culture of urban life promotes research, education, and inventiveness we rarely see in conservative rural systems.
A field of research for the past 20 years has been Urban ecology. Yet, while this is a hybrid of biology and sociology, the research findings have not gained much traction with community leaders and policy makers in decisions addressing sustainable development issues. Ecology is understanding the complex interactions of living things within their natural environments, while sociology studies the development, structure, and functioning of human society. Now merge the idea as an interdisciplinary study of humans’ interactions within the built and natural environmental and also the intricately complex natural world. This inevitably means thinking about how humans engineer the world around them and how the natural processes are affected and in turn affect human living. All sounds very academic, but as we struggle to make changes that allow humans to live in an ever-changing world in which current conditions of human development will fail to adapt, urban ecology will become a critical discipline to recognize. In a nutshell, current human living is failing and the reasons are many.
By 2024, we will reach a human population of 8 billion people, and even with a predicted decrease in the human population growth rate, 9 billion by 2042 (remember the exponential function where even with a small growth rate, large numbers quickly become much larger in a short period of time). If we don’t take steps to understand human and urban ecology and start applying that knowledge with the plethora of information we already have about sustainable living, then nature will begin its own remedy of our problems. People always give me alarmed stares when I say this in a presentation. Nothing grim about this statement, just a logical observation. It’s a lot like dental hygiene – ignore teeth hygiene problems and they will go away – quite literally. Likewise, ignore our environmental problems and a lot of humanity will go away. Not my first option, but it would seem to be for a lot of people around the world who deny we have problems because it messes with their beliefs in what constitutes their standard of living.
It seems I am tip-toeing around the idea of centralization versus decentralization, but it must seem clear by now that I am promoting a decentralization to community level control, but this doesn’t mean that these self-sufficient communities cannot exist with a more hierarchical structure to ensure adherence to accepted sustainable principles of development over a larger region. Ecosystem services for any given region will vary and the way we successfully live within those systems by default must vary as well. (I describe ecosystem service more in earlier post Biophilia and Biodiversity 2: Nature – love it or leave it, why we need it!) As a closing thought for this post, consider what you would accept as a good standard of living where your community was sustainably self-sufficient. If you’re thinking of now just with lots of green technology, you need to go back and start reading this blogsite from the beginning. My thoughts on a new way of living in the next post – be interesting to see how your thoughts match up with mine, or not.
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