Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
No precedent exists for feeding, sheltering, employing or transporting so many
people. No precedent exists for protecting the environment from the pollution
and resource consumption required by such multitudes. Urban regions, entire
countries and ultimately the entire Earth could be affected by cities improperly
managed.
Within cities, poor citizens face the worst environmental consequences.
In low-income settlements, services such as water, sewage, drainage and garbage
collection are often non-existent. Lacking the resources to purchase or rent
housing, between one-third and two-thirds of urbanites in developing countries
become squatters on dangerously steep hillsides, flood-prone riverbanks and
other undesirable lands.
The solution does not lie in simply scaling up solutions that work in small urban
regions or directly transferring technologies from mega-cities in the developed world,
but rather in creatively devising new solutions, urban management practices and
modes of governance based on sound sustainability principles. Thus, as Haughton
(1999) states, the fates of cities are intimately tied to the fates of their broader
hinterlands, and with global economic trading, global exchanges of environmental
resources and wastes, it will not be possible, or desirable, to create a sustainable
city in total isolation from the rest of the planet. Satterthwaite (1997) discusses how
the environmental costs of consumers in many growing cities are increasingly being
transferred across national boundaries or into the future, although 'the scale and
severity of environmental problems in cities reflect the failure of governments' (Hardoy
et al.
, 2001: 7). The sustainable city model which Haughton prefers is one that
combines bioregional self-reliance with the values of environmental justice or 'fair
shares', where basically environmental assets should be traded between cities and
regions on the understanding that any damage or degradation should be adequately
repaired or compensated.
In praise of cities
In a short article entitled 'Environmental heresies', the futurist Stewart Brand writes
that environmentalists need to rethink many of their ideas. Brand (2005) writes that
environmentalists tend to overvalue the rural ideal and despise cities even though
life in many rural locations is far from idyllic, particularly for the poor. Hardoy
et al
. (2001) also argue that cities offer many potential opportunities for promoting
sustainable development, not least through economies of scale and proximity of
infrastructure and services, water reuse and recycling, reduced heating and motor
vehicle use, the funding of environmental management, and the establishment of
good governance, participation and democracy. Following Hurricane Sandy, which
hit the east coast of the US in 2012, a number of high-profile American urban
planners and politicians started to talk more enthusiastically about how cities could
be at the forefront of dealing with the impacts of climate change. As David Biello
(2013) wrote in
Scientific American
, cities are responsible for about 70 per cent of
global greenhouse gas emissions and about 75 per cent of this is under the direct
control of city governments adopting measures that reduce the energy costs of
sanitation, constructing buildings that are energy efficient, developing green municipal
power stations and acquiring private land necessary to build light rail lines which
