Week 2

Date	Topic
WEEK 2	The world's global city-regions are increasingly interdependent economically and ecologically.
Jan. 16	The impacts of globalization on cities; Ecological flows and footprints Global population, urban-rural linkages and international migration; Mexico City: human settlements, state-society relations and the built environment. State of the World's Cities (ppt), Hurricanes Katrina-Rita and the Gulf Coast disaster (25m ppt file).
Jan. 18	Cities as consumers of the world's environment; Human settlements and sustainability. Cases studies from around the world (Recommend viewing Home Planet Documentary). Mexico City (16.5 MB)

Assigned Readings

Rees, W. and M. Wackernagel (1996). "Urban ecological footprints: Why cities cannot be sustainable--And why they are a key to sustainability." 16(4-6): 223-245. (jump to notes below)

Gleeson, B. and N. Low (2000). Cities as consumers of the world's environment. Consuming cities: the urban environment in the global economy after the Rio Declaration. N. Low, B. Gleeson, I. Elander and R. Lidskog. New York, Routledge: 1-24. (jump to notes below)

Pezzoli, K. (2000). Human settlements and planning for ecological sustainability: the case of Mexico City. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press: Parts I &2.(jump to notes below)

United Nations Human Settlements Programme (2006). The State of the World's Cities 2006/2007: The Millennium Development Goals and Urban Sustainability, 30 Years of Shaping the Habitat Agenda. Sterling, Va., Earthscan. 1.4. (jump to notes below)

Topic introduction

The world’s global city-regions are increasingly interdependent economically and ecologically. Interdependence among the world's cities and national economies has deepened dramatically over the past thirty years. There are many reasons for this and the move towards greater interdependence is tension laden. The tension stems in part from friction between the call for free international trade on the one hand, and the practice of protectionism at national and regional levels on the other. The growth and decline of cities in today’s increasingly global economy is driven by the interplay of global and local dynamics that involve firms, labor, capital and communities. The process has been described as “creative destruction.” While much attention has focused on the economics of global integration, less attention has been devoted to understanding, or dealing with, the impacts of urban-ecological interdependencies. City’s have an “ecological footprint,” that is, a hinterland upon which the city’s survival depends. Cities of affluent societies have comparatively large ecological footprints and a staggering throughput of natural resources. Most of us are only dimly aware of the enormity of these flows and their environmental impacts. Environmental problems on a global scale demands that we devise new strategies for urban and regional development. The challenge has prompted a rethinking of how we define wealth, progress and development. The notion of "sustainable development" is one of the products of this new line of thinking.

Context and orders of magnitude

Comparing the Earth to an Apple for perspective, click here
If the Earth was a Village of 1000 People, click here
Population of the world's cities and city-regions, click here

What did you eat for breakfast this morning? What is the status of the field or range land where your food came from? What is the status of the soil (is it healthy, or is it increasingly salty or eroded), what energy supply was used to grow and transport the food, are the crops gentically modified in some way? These questions invite you to think about the environmental services involved in our food supply. Environmental services come from stocks of natural capital (like soil). These environmental services are part of an integral web of life. Environmental economists are trying to put a price on the value of environmental services (not just rich soil, but also "sinks" such as the atmosphere and water bodies that absorb our wastes). Urban ecological footprint analysis puts this perspective to work in the context of cities.

Rees, W. and M. Wackernagel (1996). "Urban ecological footprints: Why cities cannot be sustainable--And why they are a key to sustainability." 16(4-6): 223-245.

Abstract. Although usually seen as an economic or demographic phenomenon, urbanization also represents a human ecological transformation. Understanding the dramatic shift in human spatial and material relationships with the rest of nature is a key to sustainability. Our primary purpose, therefore, is to describe a novel approach to assessing the ecological role of cities and to estimate the scale of the impact they are having on the ecosphere. The analysis shows, that as nodes of energy and material consumption, cities are causally linked to accelerating global ecological decline and are not by themselves sustainable. At the same time, cities and their inhabitants can play a major role in helping to achieve global sustainability.

Excerpts:
Our analysis starts from the premise that the late 20th century marks a nontrivial turning point in the ecological history of human civilization. For the first time, since the dawn of agriculture and the possibility of geographically fixed settlements 12,000 years ago, the aggregate scale of human economic activity is capable of altering global biophysical systems and processes in ways that jeopardize both global ecological stability and geopolitical security. Examples abound--more artificial nitrate is now applied to the world's croplands than is fixed from the atmosphere by microbial activity and other natural processes combined (Vitousek 1994); the rate of human-induced species extinctions is approaching the extinction rates driven by "the great natural catastrophes at the end of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic era--in other words, [they are] the most extreme in the past 65 million years" (Wilson 1988); "residuals" discharged by industrial economies aredepleting stratospheric ozone and altering the preindustrial composition of the atmosphere, and both these trends contribute to (among other things) the threat of climate change, itself the most potent popular symbol of widespread ecolog ical dysfunction. Perhaps most significant from an ecosystems perspective is the evidence that human beings, one species among millions, now consume, divert, or otherwise appropriate for their own purposes 40% of the product of net terrestrial photosynthesis (Vitousek et al. 1986) and up to 35% of primary production from coastal shelves and upwellings, the most productive marine habitats (Pauly and Christensen 1995).

Calculate Your Ecological Footprint: Assess Your Use of Nature
http://www.myfootprint.org/

ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINTS OF NATIONS
http://www.rprogress.org/newpubs/2004/footprintnations2004.pdf
This report provides an introduction to the conceptual basis of the Ecological
Footprint™ Index (Ecological Footprint, or Footprint, hereafter) and summarizes the
major findings of the National Ecological Footprint Accounts in 2000, the most recent year
for which data are available. The key findings of the National Footprint Accounts at the turn
of the Millennium were that:

Humanity’s total Ecological Footprint increased to 13.2 billion global hectares, growing
by 147 million global hectares between 1999 and 2000;
The per capita global Ecological Footprint continued its twenty year decline; and
The United States became the nation with the largest per capita Ecological Footprint
on the planet.

For an excellent study using ecological footprint analysis (applied to a case in Spain) see the the following book (published in Spanish): [Note: I wrote the prologue for this book, click here to read it in English].

Martín Palmero, F., Ed. (2004). Desarrollo sostenible y huella ecologica: Una applicacion a la economia gallega. A Coruna, Spain, Netbiblo, S.L.

Gleeson, B. and N. Low (2000). Cities as consumers of the world's environment. Consuming cities: the urban environment in the global economy after the Rio Declaration. N. Low, B. Gleeson, I. Elander and R. Lidskog. New York, Routledge: 1-24.

Click here for a review of this book by Keith Pezzoli

What do the authors say is happening globally with respect to "environmental distribution" and "ecological distribution"?

Pezzoli, K. (2000). Human settlements and planning for ecological sustainability: the case of Mexico City. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press: Parts I &2.

Mexico City is a dynamic and historically magnificent place. At the same time, it is home to some of the world’s most serious urban-environmental problems. The gigantism of Mexico City has given it legendary status. It has become a sort of Titanic of urban studies. Indeed, the city is literally sinking. But unlike the Titanic, the citizens of Mexico City may change their course. This book examines the type of grassroots innovation that gives one hope. But the story I tell in the book is steeped in realism. The popular struggle to create a more livable city is a story about blood and sweat, creation and destruction, hope and despair. Much of this story comes from the grassroots community-builders themselves. But this is not just an anecdotal tale. My intent in writing the book was to begin theorizing about the political ecology of human settlements and the so-called quest for sustainable development. We need to make sustainability a much more rigorous concept in both theory and practice. This book cites the work of many Mexican scholars who are making crucial advances along these lines.

With respect to the production of human settlements at the outskirts of Mexico City:

What are the politics of containment? Are the urban growth boundaries working?
What is the so-called industry of destruction and desalojo machine?

Urbanization under conditions of resource and income scarcity demands the integration of concerns about the environment and development. Douglas and Zoghlin (1994) capture this point well: "While much of the concern over the environment has disregarded or even opposed questions of income and livelihood, the concern over the economics of livelihood in the city has tended to dwell on employment and income generation over environmental resource conservation and renewal. Unless both questions are tackled simultaneously, sustainable cities as a concept that entails human-environmental relations has little utility" (p. 171).

From an historical perspective, how have Mexico City's urban and environmental systems coevolved?
How do state-society relations in the production of human settlements in Mexico City compare to state-society relations in the production of human settlements in other areas of the developing world?

1.4 The Struggle to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals will be Won or Lost in Cities.

Cities Drive National Economies, select details on p. 1 of this pdf
Cities the New The Locus of Poverty, select details on p. 2 of this pdf