Title : Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges
From Local To Global And Back
Editor : Peter J Marcotullio and Gordon McGranahan
Publisher : International Institutute of Environment and Development and United Nations University/Institute of Advanced Studies, 2007
Pages : 384 PB
Price : On request
 

Those who live in cities depend upon resources outside city boundaries. To name one, the use of external water resources is one of the important ways a city affects, and is affected by, its surroundings. During rapid urban growth, these interactions become increasingly important for both the city and its environment. Both urbanisation and economic growth are the two quantifiable trends of recent world history most closely associated with ‘conventionable’ development. Like development itself, they represent disputed concepts. The use of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ to describe different forms of human settlement is now being called into question by new indicators and settlement patterns. Both the measures and meanings of economic growth are also being increasingly challenged. Yet, poorly understood and quantified though they may be, urbanisation and economic growth relate to phenomena that are undoubtedly changing humanity and the world we live in—and not just its urban or affluent parts.

Both urbanisation and economic growth have been experienced unevenly. Unbanisation is uneven by definition: if half the world’s population becomes urban, the other half remains rural. In practice, economic growth has also been experienced unevenly; at the end of the twentieth century, almost half of the world’s population was still living on less than US$2 per day – roughly half of average earnings in 1900. And while the economic growth of the last two centuries has been concentrated in urban centres, both urbanisation and economic growth have been concentrated in certain regions and countries.

Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges considers the full range of urban environmental burdens, from the local environmental health burdens typically associated with urban poverty, to the urban-regional pollution pollution and resource depletion burdens typically associated with motorisation and urbanisation, to the global ecological footprints typically associated with urban affluence. In this book, the scale of an urban environmental burden is linked to its spatial extent; if the physical cause and consequence are within the same neighbourhood or district it is of local scale; if the effects span the urban settlement or extend into the surrounding region they are urban-regional; if they cross international borders, and especially if their impact is spread across the continents, they are global. The chapters here explore a range of other spatial aspects to urban environmental burdens and how they relate to economic status, and political influence. Throughout the book, three recurrent questions have been addressed from several different perspectives in different chapters of the book. How are the spatial characteristics of urban environmental burdens changing? What are the socio-economic and political causes and consequences of these changes? What are the implications for urban environmental policy?

Central to our exploration of these questions is the concept of urban environmental transition, and the claim that conventional urba growth and economic development is associated with a shift from immediate, local environmental burdens whose primary impact is on human health, towards delayed and dispersed environmental burdens whose primary impact is on life-support systems. This volume challenges the more economic interpretations of this transition, and elaborates its political and social aspects.

Considerable attention has been devoted to the scale isues inherent in emerging global problems, including most notably climate change. A multitude of local actors must change their ways if greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced, but the nature of the challenge is such that without some form of governance structure they have no economic incentive to act. The most obvious solution is to create global governance structures through which the collective need to reduce emissions is to be agreed upon, with responsibilities then then delegated down to localities.

Written by leading experts in the field of urban development and environmental planning, the book reviews the urban environmental shifts that have shaped today’s challenges, and examines the conditions and problems in the urban centres of low-, middle- and high-income countries. Case studies address economically divese cities as Accra, New Delhi, Mexico City and Manchester, while thematic chapters explore issues including water, sanitation and transportation. q

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