'One Planet' Cities

Sustaining Humanity within Planetary Limits

David Thorpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429872525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book addresses the crucial question of how the essential needs of the growing human population can be met without breaking the Earth's already-stretched life-support system.

With four out of five people predicted to be urban dwellers by 2080, 'One Planet' Cities proposes a pathway to genuine sustainability for cities and neighbourhoods, using an approach based on contraction and convergence. Utilising interviews with key players, including the Global Footprint Network, World Future Council, WWF, mayors and government officials, and case studies from across the globe, including Europe, North and South America, Australia, South Africa, China and India, David Thorpe examines all aspects of modern society from food provision to neighbourhood design, via industry, the circular economy, energy and transport through the critical lens of the ecological footprint and relevant supporting international standards and indicators. Recommendations on managing supply chains and impacts, how the transition to a world within limits might be financed, and a deep examination of the Welsh Government's pioneering efforts follow. It concludes with an imagined vision of what a genuinely sustainable future might be like, and an appeal for 'one planeteers' everywhere to step up to the challenge.

This book will be of great interest to practitioners and policymakers involved in governance, administration, urban environments and sustainability, alongside students of the built environment, urban planning, environmental policy and energy.

1

DO THE STORIES WE TELL INFLUENCE THE FUTURE WE WILL LIVE IN?

Imagining the future is the first stage in the task of creating it. Unless we can picture in realistic detail the kind of future that we want, we don’t have a chance of working towards it. This scene-setting chapter wonders about the effect of negative visions of the future, why we are so poor at imagining positive futures, and what can be done about this.

I know from my own introspection that fear is a massive motivator for behaviour … but what kind of behaviour? Fear of being a victim of crime, for example, is a prominent reason given in Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine for the huge disparity between homicide rates in Canada and the USA, many other factors being equal. What fuels this fear? According to Moore it is the daily dosage of crime reportage meted out to the American public in the media. This drives a perception that crime rates are much worse than they really are, and a consequent perceived need to arm oneself and shoot first. Gun ownership thrives, along with an obsession with security.

In other words, he says, the moral, social and political fabric of American society is being skewed by the distorted picture of the world being drip fed into the American psyche. In this negative feedback loop, each random mass shooting and each deliberate homicide reinforces a feeling of threat and the conviction that possession of loaded firearms is the best form of personal security, a feeling that is precisely opposite to the reality. For, as Moore’s documentary portrays, in Canada, where levels of gun ownership are approximately equal and the population is also racially mixed, many people do not even bother to lock their doors and murder rates are extremely low. News media and politicians there do not fuel the inevitability of violence as a means of solving problems, instead focusing on the need for mediation, negotiation and compromise.

Similarly, how else can we explain the fact that it’s only really in the USA that climate scepticism reaches epic, violent proportions – where political polarity fuelled by literally fake news, paid for by fossil fuel companies,¹ convinces scientifically illiterate people that they know better than 97 per cent of the world’s top climate scientists?

The conclusion I draw from this is that the stories we are told about the world out there define the way we prepare ourselves to face it. And, as Dan Bloom² has it, fiction has the power to reach parts of the human psyche inaccessible to politicians and scientists. We writers like to believe we can change minds.

But are we just speaking to the converted? Let’s look at it from the writer’s point of view. Many of us are thinking: what kind of world do we want to live in? What kind of future will our children inhabit? What is the best future we can imagine?

But others aren’t. From Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times, through George Orwell’s 1949 book Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Lucas’s 1971 film THX 1138, Mega-City One from Judge Dredd, conceived in 1977, to Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, they have all set the template for many other stories and films such that in the popular imagination the sprawling mega-cities of the future will largely be over-populated, polluted, broken places, featuring dark towers, high levels of surveillance and crime, their citizens treated little better than battery-reared animals, with no room for nature. The Netflix series Altered Carbon is the latest to succumb to this cliché.

If that’s the popular image, does this make a dystopic metropolis into a self-fulfilling prophecy, subconsciously, if not consciously, reinforcing the mindsets of planners and architects? Does it soften up the public, preparing them to acquiesce in the face of grim and unimaginative design, polluted air, poor policing and service levels, corrupt or inefficient governance, long commute times, constant noise, high levels of personal danger?

Where would you rather live: utopia or dystopia?

William Gibson, in his 1984 cyberpunk thriller Neuromancer, describes Night City, a fictional city located between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the west coast of the USA, as being “like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button”. Dystopian par excellence, it has inspired a roleplay game, Cyberpunk 2020, and a detailed guide book – not bad for a fictional city. Night City is an arcology – a portmanteau of ‘architecture’ and ‘ecology’ – a design concept for very densely populated habitats, coined and popularised by architect Paolo Soleri. But it turns out that he and other architects have conceived highly sustainable and desirable arcologies. Soleri’s concept appears as early as 1969 in his Arcology: City in the Image of Man. ³ Attempts have even been made to build them.

Soleri intended his Babel IIB arcology as “an anti-consumptive force and a city form that is the only choice compared to pathological sprawl and environmental destruction”. It was designed for a population of 520,000, at a height of 1,050 metres. Besides residential spaces it includes gardens and waste-processing plants, everything you need: parks, food factories, etc.

How funny that Gibson took the idea and then reverted it to pathological sprawl and environmental destruction. It just goes to show that the devil gets the best tunes. Which, I submit, is part of our problem, as we collectively, culturally, try to imagine the future.

It’s revealing that the world’s most sustainable cities often also feature in lists of the most popular ones, according to polls. That’s because differing architectural designs and urban place-making can generate quite contrasting lifestyles and therefore social experiences, not to mention differing scenarios for greenery, wildlife, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Psychologically, there are many aspects to people’s reluctance to engage with the profound implications of climate change and sustainability in a way that’s appropriate and proportionate. George Marshall’s brilliant research in Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change ⁴ documents some of these. It’s not just the jargon, it’s peer pressure, culture, near-sightedness, fear, lack of awareness, vested interests, to name a few. It entails huge leaps of imagination to envision what life will be like for different people in the scenarios, and the responses that will be required or demanded.

Yet stories are fundamentally how humans understand and spread wisdom, as well as entertain themselves. Because of this I think there is some responsibility not to paint self-fulfilling, disempowering dystopic futures or preach about environmentalism to the converted, but to dare to imagine inspiring and realistic future visions, as settings for potentially popular fictional narratives, that demonstrate how humanity might successfully meet climate change’s challenges and make a better world/solve multiple challenges. Not a tall order, is it? Creators have the power to empower and give hope. And that includes architects and designers.

Lateral thinking, through transposing stories from one’s personal experience, or from other sources, into one’s professional life, can help. That’s something many professionals working in city design or administration too often fail to do. It’s box mentality. To create a better world we need means that we must really evoke them to make it easy for people to imagine living there – a better way of life in many ways. We also need to imagine how to negotiate the pitfalls that potentially may divert or frustrate us along the way …

… and move beyond dystopias and utopias. Reality is more complex; all possible pasts, presents and futures have positive and problematic aspects, due to trade-offs and unintended consequences. At the end of this book you will find a story that explores this, set towards the end of this century, in a world that successfully sustains 11 billion people, most living in mega-city conurbation strings, based on some of the examples explored in these pages. Perhaps by then you will be able to think up your own scenarios, especially involving your own neighbourhood. To navigate the future successfully, we need to craft the right stories.

This book sets out a menu, exploring aspects of climate-friendly and equitable, regenerative cities already happening somewhere on Earth. If all of these were all happening together, in the same city, it would be the ultimate city, “the best city and a good enough city for any world”, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler. I sometimes call this future hyperworld ‘2084’, to invert the pessimism of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. For a while, it was a working title for this book. Herbert Girardet calls it Ecopolis.

This menu, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, will challenge existing practice, especially in policy, planning and land use, amongst city professionals everywhere. Many of these examples are rarely reported in mass media. I am aware of the limits of the conditions under which these solutions can thrive. And I know that ‘what gets measured gets saved’, so I’m big on using metrics to determine what is truly sustainable, which is why Chapters 3 and 4 cover standards, measurement and verification.

For a long time, my motto has been: with imagination we can change the world. Let’s ask what’s rarely asked: what is it that prevents rational solutions from being (properly) implemented and what drives the adoption of what is implemented? How much can we change the future? After reading this book, I hope you’ll have developed your own ideas.

Notes

1    Mulvey, K., Shulman, S., et al., The Climate Deception Dossiers, Union of Concerned Scientists, 2015. See: https://bit.ly/2qMUkNc

2    Journalist who coined the term ‘cli-fi’, meaning fiction about climate change.

3    Soleri, P., Arcology: City in the Image of Man, MIT Press, 1969.

4    Marshall, G., Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, Bloomsbury, 2014.

2

THE ULTIMATE PROBLEM

Humanity’s limits to growth

Here is something that not many people really consider. It is, perhaps, the biggest elephant in the global room. The world’s population is now 7.5 billion and is predicted to peak at 11.2 billion by 2100.¹ But the ability of our lovely planet Earth to support life depends on us staying within a number of ‘planetary boundaries’ that are essentially limits to growth. At the same time more and more people are aspiring to a more comfortable lifestyle, and the United Nations (UN) is campaigning for its 2030 Sustainable Development Goals to be met to ensure that every person alive has their human rights protected and a decent standard of living. These goals are not, on the whole, linked to planetary boundaries, adding more pressure on the world’s environment.

How to resolve this complex problem is the most important question facing humanity.

Planetary boundaries

What are these planetary boundaries? The environmental non-governmental organisation WWF, assisted by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, identifies nine of them in its biennial comprehensive survey, the Living Planet Report:² extinction rate and loss of biosystem services; biogeochemical flows – e.g. pollution from nitrogen and phosphorous fertilisers; stratospheric ozone depletion; ocean acidification; atmospheric aerosol loading; and ‘novel entities’ – polluting substances such as plastics and toxins that have potentially irreversible effects on living organisms and the physical environment.

The last edition, published in 2018, stated:

Current analysis suggests that people have already pushed at least four of these systems beyond the limit of a safe operating space. Attributable global impacts and associated risks to humans are already evident for climate change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows and land-system change. Other assessments indicate that freshwater use has also passed beyond a safe threshold.

I’ll go into more detail about these boundaries below, but whichever way you consider it, humanity as a whole is presently not doing very well in terms of taking care of its planet and its future. As measured by a related metric, ecological footprinting (which the report goes on to discuss), humanity now needs the regenerative capacity of 1.7 Earths to provide the goods and services it collectively uses. The next chapter talks more about this topic.

The point I want to emphasise here is that the ecological footprint of high-income nations dwarfs low- and middle-income countries. In other words, the more people spend, the greater their environmental impacts. This is a real, objective correlation, because supplying all of those goods and services that people buy has an effect on the Earth’s resources and ecosystems.

Many people aspire to the standard of living led by citizens of North America, Scandinavia and Australia. But WWF’s reports show that it’s simply not possible for 11.2 billion people to achieve it without destroying the living systems that support life on Earth.

One thing is abundantly clea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Abbreviations
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Herbert Girardet
• Introduction: It’s time to end humanity’s war on nature
• 1. Do the stories we tell influence the future we will live in?
• 2. The ultimate problem: Humanity’s limits to growth
• 3. Ecological footprinting and other standards
• 4. Choosing which standards to use
• 5. Feeding cities while saving the planet
• 6. Regenerative cities
• 7. Zero carbon cities
• 8. Transforming industry
• 9. Managing water in the age of change
• 10. ‘One planet’ neighbourhoods
• 11. Buildings in a ‘one planet’ city
• 12. Mobility in a ‘one planet’ city
• 13. How smart is a ‘smart city’?
• 14. Financing the way to a ‘one planet’ future
• 15. A menu of case studies
• 16. Wales and ‘one planet’ development
• 17. Six steps to a ‘one planet’ city
• 18. One day in a ‘one planet’ city A short story
• Index of people
• Index of places
• Index of topics