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how just as cities become more prosperous, clean
and verdant, their global ecological footprints may
actually be increasing. While the work of Cronon
(1991) is helpful in revealing the ways in which
Chicago's early development was based upon the
exploitation of its surrounding environmental
hinterland, it appears that within the Anthropo-
cene the hinterlands upon which cities depend are
becoming increasingly global in nature.
remain dependent on the competitive exploitation
of non-renewable resources, they will be unable to
contribute to enhanced forms of environmental
sustainability. To put things another way, while
cities remain locked into the competitive drive
to capture non-renewable energy - in order to
produce more goods and services than their
competitors and to open up more land for
suburban commercialization - they will always be
ecologically short sighted and stupid!
In reality of course, the situation is more
complicated than either the urban pessimists or
optimists appear to suggest. Different types of
city, be they old industrial, low-rise suburban,
megacities or global financial centres, have very
different types of environmental relations (see
While et al, 2004). As
Table 6.1
illustrates,
the political and economic nature of different
cities means that they are able to support some
environmental priorities, but tend to resist others.
Consequently, while global financial centres may
find it relatively easy to support carbon-reduction
strategies in the high-tech workplace, they may be
less inclined to oppose the airport expansions
their forms of urban development appear to
require. Likewise, property-based urban develop-
ment strategies may find it beneficial to promote
urban greening and the improvement of urban air
quality, but they find it more difficult to promote
less car use and reduce associated levels of carbon
dioxide emissions.
A final, and perhaps, most worrying inter-
pretation of the connections that exist between
cities and the environment in the Anthropocene
is offered in the work of Hodson and Marvin
(2009). Hodson and Marvin argue that in the
context of shortages in the availability of non-
renewable resources, and the threats of climate
change, we may be entering a new period in the
history of urbanization. This new form of
urbanization goes by the name of
urban ecological
security.
According to Hodson and Marvin, this
new period of urban ecological security is seeing
powerful cities such as London, New York and
Paris utilizing emerging environmental threats as
6.4.2 Interpretations of cities in the
Anthropocene
The complex nature of urban-environment
relations depicted in the Kuznets' Curve is actually
symptomatic of debates concerning the impacts of
urbanization on human environmental affairs.
At one end of the spectrum are a group we could
describe as the urban optimists. This group is
composed of a series of prominent urban thinkers
and commentators such as Peter Hall (2003) and
Herbert Girardet (2006) who argue that cities
offer a basis for developing a more sustainable
environmental future. The urban environmental
optimists argue that the high concentrations of
people and infrastructure that characterize cities
mean that they provide an ideal spatial template
for developing a low-energy context for human
activity. It is consequently claimed that if urbaniza-
tion is properly planned, cities offer unique
opportunities to spatially coordinate the places
where people live, work, go to school, recreate
and shop (see Hall, 2003). These processes of
urban planning are often described as
smart
or
new urbanism
and involve combining mix-used
planning with investment in clean modes of public
transport in order to produce a form of low-
energy urbanism (Krueger and Gibbs, 2008).
At the other end of the spectrum are the urban
environmental pessimists. These urban environ-
mental pessimists, such as the environmental
economist Joan Martinez-Alier (2003), are critical
of the capacity of cities to provide well-ordered
environmentally benign patterns of development.
According to Martinez-Alier, so long as cities