Urban Sustainability: A Global Perspective

Foreword

■ HARM DE BLIJ FOREWORD When historians of the distant future reflect on momentous transformations in the geographic fabric of the world, a milestone being passed in this early stage of the twenty-first century will surely draw their attention: for the first time in human history, the majority of planet Earth’s human inhabitants reside in urban settings. Given the dimensions of the twentieth century’s population explosion, coupled with the long-term ascendancy of the industrial revolution, it is noteworthy that this urbanizing threshold was not crossed earlier. Today the rush to the cities accelerates from China, where it constitutes the greatest short-term migration of its kind in human history, and India, also urbanizing, although at a still-slower pace, to other parts of the global periphery, including sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Optimistic demographic projections suggest that this sustained urbanization will be accompanied by spatially uneven but globally significant declines in the rate of natural increase, leading some analysts to predict that the world’s population will stabilize at approximately 10 billion by the end of the present century. Such extrapolations are risky, but even if they turn out to be prescient, the implications are that the planet will have to accommodate some 3 billion additional inhabitants, that the overwhelming majority of this population will swell the numbers of the global periphery, and that most will dwell in burgeoning megacities. This book addresses the key questions arising from these prospects in the contexts of the sustainability of the process (how economic and social stability can be preserved and ecological impacts constrained) and the pursuit of equity (securing long-term participatory fairness and social justice). These concepts are not new—sustainable development and issues of equity have been debated for decades in academic and other venues—but they are taking on greater urgency in an era of economic, cultural, and political globalization and associated neoliberal policies. Some early forecasts of urbanization’s impacts, based on the European experience, included assumptions that XII ■ FOREWORD were mistaken—for example, the notion that urban agglomeration would reduce population pressures in rural areas resulting in ecological benefits for urban hinterlands. In reality, the demands of urban dwellers, ranging from shelter to diets, are far greater per capita than those of rural residents, so that consumption of construction materials and meat products grows exponentially as urbanization proceeds. In rural areas, logging and pastures are but two of the visible impacts of the city on the ecology of the countryside. These and other influences reflect the power of cities in this era of rapid urbanization. Although farm lobbies still exert significant influence in some national governments, decisions affecting rural ecologies tend to be made in urban settings, and few edicts made in the countryside have any effect on cities (although China’s villagers currently are staging thousands of public protests annually to denounce the often ruthless exploitation of their land by powerful, city-based capitalists). And in this era of globalization, city-hinterland linkages are losing their relevance in the search for sustainability and equity: the demands of urban consumers in the United States or Japan now affect ecologies (terrestrial as well as marine) from Nigeria’s Niger Delta to Antarctic waters off New Zealand. Even the cities of the poorer global periphery, whose per-capita consumer demands are less intense and more local, nevertheless generate environmental and biological impacts on large populations over wide areas, ranging from atmospheric pollution and sewage discharge to water contamination and associated health hazards. Looming over the entire combination of issues addressed in this book are the gigantic dimensions of the problem, the huge numbers of the populations of the megacities in the global core today and in the periphery tomorrow. Tokyo may constitute the largest conurbation in the former, but São Paulo and Mexico City are not far behind, and the future is evident from Jabotabek (centered on Jakarta, Indonesia, approaching 30 million), Mumbai, India (22 million), and Lagos, Nigeria (16 million). Urban regions covering hundreds of square miles and accommodating 40 or 50 million people or more will require a reconsideration of the city as we have conceived of it, lending new urgency to the issues this book addresses. Although the current wave of globalization is not the first manifestation of a phenomenon that has had religious, colonial, and other acquisitive and control-driven motivations in the past, its current neoliberal expression reflects the...