Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges

From Local to Global and Back

Peter J. Marcotullio, Gordon McGranahan, Peter J Marcotullio, Gordon McGranahan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136557767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

Think globally, act locally emphasizes the importance of scale in dealing with environmental challenges, but not how to factor it in. This major new book focuses on the spatial dimensions of urban environmental burdens, showing how important it is to take these into account when pursuing environmental justice and good governance - whether in the context of the sanitary risks of slum living, the pollution of uncontrolled industrialization and motorization, or the enormous ecological footprints of affluent urban lifestyles.

Written by leading experts in the fields of urban development and environmental planning, the book reviews the urban environmental shifts that have shaped todays challenges, and examines conditions and problems in the urban centres of low-, middle- and high-income countries. Case studies address such economically diverse cities as Accra, New Delhi, Mexico City and Manchester, while thematic chapters explore issues including water, sanitation and transportation. The book concludes by exploring and analysing different scales of governance. The editors argue that we should not rely solely on local governance to address local burdens like poor sanitation, nor depend only on global governance for global challenges such as greenhouse gas emissions, but that scale is crucial in both understanding the problems and devising successful responses.

Published with UNU-IAS and IIED.

1

Scaling the Urban Environmental Challenge

Peter J. Marcotullio and Gordon McGranahan

Introduction

Urbanization and economic growth are the two quantifiable trends of recent world history most closely associated with conventional ‘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 (Champion and Hugo, 2004). Both the measures and meanings of economic growth are also being increasingly challenged. Yet, poorly understood and quantified though they may be, urbanization 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. Moreover, both trends are intimately linked to radical changes in governance. Shifts in governance are even less amenable to quantification, but equally central to the challenges we now face.

Over the course of the 20th century, the world’s urban population increased 13-fold, expanding from about 13 per cent of the total population in 1900 to almost half by 2000 (UN, 1980, 2004). Over the same period, economic production grew 19-fold, with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita increasing from about US$1300 (1990 prices) to US$6100 (IMF, 2000; Van den Berg, 2002). These two trends were interdependent. The economic growth characteristic of the industrial revolution was heavily dependent on urbanization, and vice versa.

Both urbanization and economic growth have been experienced unevenly. Urbanization 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 20th century, almost half of the world’s population was still living on less than US$2 per day (Chen and Ravallion, 2004) – roughly half of average earnings in 1900. And while the economic growth of the last two centuries has been concentrated in urban centres, both urbanization and economic growth have been concentrated in certain regions and countries.

Alongside the challenge of inequality, some of the greatest challenges posed by urbanization and economic growth have been environmental. These challenges range in scale from the local environmental health problems that result in the deaths of millions of people every year, to the global climate change that threatens to disrupt our life-support systems in the coming decades.

The combination of urbanization and economic growth is often associated with the classical city-scale environmental problems of urban smog, polluted urban waterways and peri-urban resource degradation, which have arisen partly in response to the location of populations and economic production in urban centres. From this perspective, it might seem that the environmental impact of urbanization has been to concentrate environmental impacts spatially.

The dominant trend in recent decades, however, has been a globalization of the environmental burdens, particularly for societies with the highest levels of urbanization and economic output per capita. The effects of these global environmental burdens are delayed, but they are beginning to make themselves felt. Just in the past year, for example, new evidence has been found on climate change, and its impacts on the physical climate, the hydrological cycle and the functioning of ecosystems (Levin and Pershing, 2006). A disproportionate share of the fuel combustion driving greenhouse gas emissions takes place in affluent urban settlements. An even greater share of the final consumption of the goods that greenhouse gas-emitting processes produce is located in these same settlements.

At least superficially going against this globalizing trend, the impacts of many of the most life-threatening urban environmental burdens have actually become increasingly localized over the past two centuries. Urban middle classes and élites in the industrializing cities once lived in fear of epidemics – or what many believed to be gaseous miasmas – rising out of the overcrowded and unsanitary slums. These epidemics also spread from city to city, and country to country. Now, most sanitation-related diseases are endemic to deprived settlements and neighbourhoods. In many urban settlements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, a third or more of the population still live in overcrowded and unsanitary slums. However, their diseases are rarely a serious threat to affluent residents within the affected urban settlements, let alone to urban residents in other cities and countries.

Urbanization has undoubtedly contributed to many of the environmental problems we now face, but it also brings many environmental opportunities. From a population perspective, fertility rates are more inclined to fall in urban settlements. From the perspective of living and working environments, urban settlements provide returns to scale in the provision of piped water and sewerage networks and the distribution of clean fuels. By concentrating polluters and resource users, urban settlement makes them easier to manage and regulate effectively and equitably. From the perspective of global environmental burdens, compact urban settlement has many advantages over rural or suburban sprawl.

Governing and regulating urban environmental burdens has, however, been anything but simple. The model of sanitary reform developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is clearly outdated, but most contemporary approaches also have their problems. Conventional forms of resource and pollution management developed since the 1950s, consisting of commandand-control techniques and regulations, have not achieved what was hoped for (Speth, 1992; Holling and Meffe, 1996; Davies and Mazurek, 1999; Folke et al, 2005). A recent assessment of global ecosystems warns of further environmental deterioration with greater impacts on human well-being and ecosystems if new methods for protecting the environment are not found (Hassan et al, 2005). Clearly, addressing the increasing complexity of environmental condition and trends requires an appreciation of the interaction between the scales of impact and governance systems.

This volume considers the full range of urban environmental burdens, from the local environmental health burdens typically associated with urban poverty, to the urban-regional pollution and resource depletion burdens typically associated with motorization and industrialization, to the global ecological footprints (EFs) typically associated with urban affluence. For the purposes of 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 also explore a range of other spatial aspects to urban environmental burdens and how they relate to economic status, and political influence. Three recurrent questions, addressed from several different perspectives in different chapters of the book, are:

1. How are the spatial characteristics of urban environmental burdens changing?
2. What are the socio-economic and political causes and consequences of these changes?
3. 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 urban 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 (McGranahan et al, 2001). This volume challenges the more economistic interpretations of this transition, and elaborates its political and social aspects. There is general support in this book for the thesis that understanding environmental transitions requires an integrated analysis of biophysical trends and socio-economic development and governance systems (see, for example, Holling, 2001). None of the authors presents the transitions as inevitable, however, or treats the transition model as a sound basis for predicting the future. Rather, the urban environmental transition becomes a conceptual tool to be used critically, often in challenging the prevailing environmental agendas.

This introduction is divided into three further sections. The following section considers the physical and spatial aspects of urban environmental transitions, and how these are addressed in the individual chapters. Following the structure of the book, this section looks first at environmental health agendas in the urban centres of comparatively poor countries, then at motorization and urban environmental agendas in middle-income countries, and finally the pursuit of sustainable urban development in more affluent countries. The next section turns to the changing spatial characteristics of governance and politics, and how these relate to the urban environmental challenges. The final section considers what this all implies for our understanding of urban environmental transitions, and the challenge of addressing the multi-scaled urban environmental burdens.

Urban Environmental Transitions

For many years there has been controversy over the relationship between economic growth and environmental burdens. At one extreme are those who portray economic growth as inherently destructive of the environment, and at the other those who portray it as environmentally beneficial (or, in more sophisticated versions, initially destructive but eventually beneficial). In Chapter 2, this relationship is examined from a spatial perspective, the author arguing that urban affluence has been associated with more extensive environmental burdens, and that economic growth can be made to look more or less environmentally destructive depending upon which scale of burden the focus is on. By picking local environmental health problems, such as bad household sanitation, economic growth can be made to look good (at least if a significant share of the economic benefits reach those facing the environmental health problems). Alternatively, by picking global sustainability burdens such as greenhouse gas emissions, it can be made to look bad. The relationship also looks different depending on whether urban environmental burdens are assessed in terms of health impacts, economic costs or ecological footprints. Overall, partly because of the spatial shifts, the environmental burdens of affluence tend to amplify economic inequalities.

The patterns we see nowadays, however, are quite different than those experienced in the past. In Chapter 3, the author argues that the urban environmental transitions currently underway in Asia have been affected by what he terms time–space telescoping, with the result that their environmental challenges occur at lower levels of income, rise faster and overlap more than were the experience in most Western cities.

Environmental Health Agendas and Urban Poverty

While the ‘sanitary revolution’ is often linked to 19th century Europe, even official figures for 2000 put the number of urban dwellers without access to improved sanitation at over 400 million (WHO and UNICEF, 2000), and this is a conservative estimate (UN-Habitat, 2003). Inadequate sanitation often goes along with insufficient water, crowding and a range of other health-threatening environmental burdens, which affect a large share of the population in most urban centres in low- or middle-income countries. These urban centres are often also plagued by ambient air pollution and industrial water pollution, and in almost every city there is a wealthy élite whose lifestyles impose a large ‘ecological footprint’. At least for those who live in the more deprived neighbourhoods, however, it is the environmental health burdens that tend to be the most immediate and the most severe.

In Chapter 4, the environmental health problems that so often afflict the urban poor are assessed. Improving environmental health conditions in deprived urban settlements is among the stated priorities of local governments, national governments and international agencies, but sustained commitments and progress have been disappointing at every level. In the international arena, a concern about ‘urban bias’ has shifted efforts at poverty alleviation to rural settings, although in practice the bias does not extend to deprived urban communities. Indeed, there is often a local bias against improving conditions in deprived urban neighbourhoods, justified by the claim that improvements will attract rural migrants, undermining the improvements and adding to urban problems.

While data on urban environmental health conditions are often lacking, there is more than enough evidence to demonstrate that the burden they impose on the more deprived residents is very high and that there is much that can be done to reduce it. Chapter 4 also examines how to go about strengthening the capacity of local governments, and of the urban poor groups who need to work with them, or call them to account.

Water, sanitation and hygiene deficiencies are at the centre of the environmental health problems experienced by deprived urban communities. In affluent cities, where the sanitary revolution is associated with the 19th century, it is all too easy to think water, sanitation and hygiene deficiencies are simple problems, whose solutions are known but not always implemented, for reasons of poverty, incompetence or corruption. The situation presented in Chapter 5 is a rather different one. While our understanding of water-related diseases has improved over the years, the diseases involve a range of different pathogens, and a wide variety of different routes of transmission. There are still a number of common misconceptions about these diseases, and a tendency to focus too narrowly on water quality, to the neglect of the many other pathways through which these diseases spread.

A number of the challenges to improving water, sanitation and hygiene have a strong spatial dimension. Particularly where infrastructure is deficient, there are what the authors refer to as ‘boundary problems’, ranging from conventional economic externalities to administrative boundaries that are poorly aligned with the limits of physical systems. There are also serious challenges in translating large-scale improvements (e.g. better river water quality) into improvements at the household scale, and important distinctions between the public and domestic domains of disease. Recent epidemiology stresses the need to create the right conditions for households to manage the domestic domain, while spatial focus of water and sanitation engineers tends to be elsewhere.

The importance of domestic environments, including water, sanitation and hygiene in Accra, Ghana, is examined in detail in Chapter 6. Ghana is considered a low-income country, and by international standards average incomes in Accra are low. There are, however, appreciable intra-urban differentials in domestic environmental conditions. Whether in terms of indoor air pollution, water, sanitation, pests or solid waste, environmental hazards are more evident the poorer the household. Moreover, the burdens fall differently within the households: women are more exposed to domestic hazards than men because of their roles within the home, while children and infants are especially vulnerable.

Chapter 7 explores the dynamics of growth and environmental change in Delhi, and the extent to which there has been a shifting of environmental burdens from the core to the periphery, for political as much as physical reasons. The author identifies a process of socio-economic segmentation, and an unequal sharing of environmental costs at the micro-level.

Motorization and Urban Environmental Agendas in Middle-Income Countries

When sanitary reforms began in the 19th century, motorization was not an issue: urban air pollution was largely from industrial emissions and domestic fuel combustion. Now motor vehicles pollute the air in even the poorest urban areas, and are among the persistent polluters in affluent cities. Moreover, as described in Chapter 8, for the middle-income Asian countries now experiencing rapid growth, motorization is extremely rapid and reflects what has been described as a ‘compressed and telescoped transition’ (Marcotullio and Lee, 2003). Globally, the number of motor vehicles has been growing at a rate of about 5 per cent a year – more than twice ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Contributors
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• 1. Scaling the Urban Environmental Challenge
• 2. Urban Transitions and the Spatial Displacement of Environmental Burdens
• 3. Variations of Urban Environmental Transitions: The Experiences of Rapidly Developing Asia-Pacific Cities
• 4. In Pursuit of a Healthy Urban Environment in Low- and Middle-income Nations
• 5. Improving Urban Water and Sanitation Services: Health, Access and Boundaries
• 6. Poverty and the Environmental Health Agenda in a Low-income City: The Case of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), Ghana
• 7. Dynamics of Growth and Process of Degenerated Peripheralization in Delhi: An Analysis of Socio-economic Segmentation and Differentiation in Micro-environments
• 8. Motorization in Rapidly Developing Cities
• 9. A Comparative Perspective on Urban Transport and Emerging Environmental Problems in Middle-income Cities
• 10. Fixing Environmental Agendas in Mexico
• 11. In Pursuit of the Sustainable City
• 12. The Metabolism of Urban Affluence: Notes from the Greater Manchester City-region
• 13. Locating the ‘Local Agenda’: Preserving Public Interest in the Evolving Urban World
• Index