Creating Regenerative Cities

Herbert Girardet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317654094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Large, modern cities have effectively declared their independence from nature. But while they take up only three percent of the world's land surface, their ecological footprints actually cover the entire globe. Humanity is building an urban future, yet urban resource use is threatening the future of humanity and the natural world. To meet the aspirations of city people in both developing and developed countries, bold new initiatives are needed.

Modern cities are an astonishing human achievement. As centres of innovation they are humanity's cultural playgrounds. Their communication and transport systems have developed a global reach. They are attractive to investors because they can offer a vast variety of services at comparatively low per-capita costs. But are they viable as ecological systems?

The planning of new cities, as well as the retrofit of existing cities, needs to undergo a profound paradigm shift. Mere 'sustainable development' is not enough. To be compatible with natural systems, cities need to move away from linear systems of resource use and learn to operate as closed-loop, circular systems. To ensure their long-term future, they need to develop an environmentally enhancing, restorative relationship between themselves and the natural systems on which they still depend.

Creating Regenerative Cities is a concise, solution-oriented manual for creating regenerative urbanisation. A wide range of technical, management and policy solutions already exist, but implementation has been too slow and too little, in large part because the kinds of holistic approaches needed are still unfamiliar to fragmented and process-driven urban policy making and governance. Herbert Girardet's 30 years' experience as an ecologist, thinker, film maker and consultant working around the world has created this unique combination of tried and tested best practices and policies, which outlines the fundamental shifts needed in the way we think about our cities.

Chapter 1
Introduction

If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable

Murray Bookchin

Introduction

In confusing and stressful times, some people anticipate disaster and even collapse while others try to make plausible proposals for a safer world. This book belongs to the latter category, though recognising the urgent need for new approaches to dealing with the systemic environmental, economic and social challenges facing an urbanising world.

This book is about developing and implementing the concept of regenerative urban development, first outlined in my 2010 World Future Council report ‘Regenerative Cities’.ⁱ It proposes that in a world in which the majority of people live in cities, we need to find ways of initiating:

■ an environmentally enhancing, restorative relationship between cities and the natural systems they depend on;

■ the mainstreaming of efficient, renewable energy systems for human settlements across the world; and

■ new lifestyle choices and economic opportunities which will encourage people to participate in this transformation process.

We all rely on a steady supply of natural resources from across the planet and are often oblivious of the environmental consequences. Yet there is growing evidence that our resource use is gravely damaging the life support systems on whose integrity our cities ultimately depend.ⁱⁱ

In an urbanising world we must learn to take pleasure in protecting the integrity of nature. The term ‘regenerative’ encapsulates the actions that can help to continuously renew and restore the ecosystems that underpin the existence of our urban systems.

The central contradiction we currently face is this: humanity is building an urban future, yet urbanisation in its current form is threatening the very future of humanity and the natural world. With ever larger numbers of people living in ever more resource-hungry cities, we are risking the long-term chances of human well-being and even survival. What positive initiatives can we take to address such fundamental systemic problems?

The concept of regenerative urbanisation is intended to find answers to this question. It is not just about greening the urban environment and protecting nature from physical urban expansion – however important such initiatives are – but about city people taking positive steps to create regenerative urban systems of production, consumption, transportation and construction.

Across the world, a wide range of technical, management and policy solutions towards this end are already available, aiming to generate tangible environmental, social and economic benefits.

Cities are both living organisms and technical systems. As living organisms, or even superorganisms, they are the buzzing hubs of human reproduction and creativity. They are the stage for intense human interaction with the Earth’s living systems. They grow and transform over decades and centuries, reflecting the cultural choices adopted by each successive generation.

As technical systems they are the largest and most complex structures ever created by humanity. Their buildings and infrastructure systems are unprecedented. They develop according to capital investment priorities, technology options and as centres of economic innovation.

Villages become towns, and towns turn into cities, and sometimes, megacities. Compact towns built of brick and stone grow into sprawling cities made of tarmac, concrete, steel and glass.

Since the 1950s, in many parts of the world new cities of unprecedented size have sprung up on the locations of villages and small towns, yet few questions are being raised about whether this is inevitable and how it affects both the inhabitants and the global environment. Can a predominantly urban world be a pleasant, resilient home for humanity? Can we curtail our appetite for resources to create urban systems that are compatible with the living planet?

Figure 1.1: The making of the urban age. Under current trends, urban populations will grow nearly tenfold in a hundred years, making up two thirds to three quarters of the human population. Source: UN Department of Economic & Social Affairs, Population Division.

Modern cities of millions of people are an astonishing human achievement. As centres of innovation they are humanity’s cultural playgrounds. Their communication and transport systems have developed a global reach. They are attractive to investors because they can offer a vast variety of services at comparatively low per-capita costs.

But the aggregated environmental impacts of an urbanising humanity are a great cause for concern. Our demands now substantially exceed the Earth’s capacity to sustain us. In 2012, we used more natural resources in eight months than the Earth can produce in a year. For the remaining four months we lived not by drawing on nature’s income but by running down its stocks of capital.ⁱⁱⁱ Under current trends we will need two Earths to supply us with biological resources by 2030.^iv

Resource use in an urbanising world

We live in astonishing times. From 1900 to 2013, the global human population increased 4.5-fold, from 1.5 to 7 billion. During that time the global urban population expanded 16-fold, from 225 million to 3.6 billion, or to about 52 per cent of the world population. In 2011 the more developed nations were about 78 per cent urbanised, while the figure for developing countries was about 47 per cent. By 2030, 60 per cent of the world population, or 4.9 billion people, are expected to live in urban areas, over three times more than the world’s entire population in 1900. Nearly all the world’s population growth is occurring in cities, and mostly in developing countries.^v

But regarding human impacts, other figures could be even more important. The twentieth century was the age of the ‘great acceleration’ – of ever increasing resource use on a finite planet: world economic output grew 40 times, fossil fuel use 16-fold, fish catches grew by a factor of 35, and human water use nine-fold.^vi

In this age of the anthropocene, planet Earth is being transformed by the presence, the technologies and the actions of humanity. This is also the age of the city: urban areas are the world’s economic powerhouses, in which 80 per cent of global GDP is being produced.^vii Urban resource demands and waste outputs define human impacts on our home planet more than any other factor.^viii Global urbanisation is thus a primary manifestation of the anthropocene.

Urban growth is a seemingly unstoppable worldwide process. In recent years much has been written about this historic trend and how it could further accelerate in the coming decades. A fossil fuel-powered urban revolution, amplified by neo-liberal globalisation, is sweeping the planet and is transforming the lives and behaviour patterns of billions of people.^ix In developing countries, cities offer easier access to resources and job opportunities than rural areas, as well as cultural, education and health benefits. As centres of economic power and social interaction, and of both production and consumption, they have a magnetic attraction.

Figure 1.2: Energy and technology from 1950 to 2000. Fossil fuels have been the energy source of the modern world. Will renewable energy transform the picture? Reproduced with permission from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

In the rich countries, the consumption patterns of urban and rural people of comparable levels of affluence appear to be very similar. In fact, rural living in these countries is often less resource efficient than urban living: in particular, people use more energy in transport, and in heating or cooling detached houses. Concentration of people in cities is therefore sometimes claimed to be more sustainable than rural living. One author, David Dodman, suggests that ‘well-designed and well-governed cities can combine high living standards with much lower greenhouse gas emissions’. Public transport and denser housing help urbanites to have lower carbon footprints, though the design of cities significantly affects their residents’ emissions.^x Similar points are also made by Edward Glaeser in his 2010 book, The Triumph of the City.^xi

But what about rapidly urbanising developing countries? Studies from China and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 - Introduction
• Chapter 2 - Agropolis, the city in its local landscape
• Chapter 3 - Living in Petropolis
• Chapter 4 - Petropolis goes global
• Chapter 5 - The urban metabolism
• Chapter 6 - Ecopolis, the regenerative city
• Chapter 7 - Case studies, part 1
• Chapter 8 - Case studies, part 2
• Bibliography
• Index