Reconceptualising urbanism, ecology and networked infrastructures

Abstract

There is increasing consensus that the existing system of production and consumption is ecologically unsustainable and inequitable. The global economy depends on the use of 60 billion tons of material resources and 500 exajoules of energy annually. It is these flows that are responsible for resource depletion, negative environmental impacts and social injustice in many developing countries where these resources are extracted. However, the bulk of these resources are used, consumed and disposed of as wastes within cities. More specifically, the way urban infrastructures are configured determines how these resource flows are conducted through cities. It follows that these flows could be reconfigured if existing urban infrastructures were retrofitted or new ones designed to ensure the more sustainable use of these resources in cities. The result would be a shift from unsustainable urbanism to a more sustainable urbanism. Inclusive and splintered urbanism are reviewed as dominant forms of unsustainable urbanism as a result of the way urban infrastructures are configured, while green urbanism and slum urbanism are reviewed as possible alternatives. A conception of ‘liveable urbanism’ is proposed as a way of thinking about urban development that restores ecosystems and promotes sufficiency.

Keywords:

• sustainability
• urban infrastructure
• resource flows
• urbanism

Notes

1. For a more detailed elaboration of this conceptual framework as well as an empirical application of this framework to the City of Cape Town, see Swilling and Annecke forthcoming.

2. Hence the significance of studies that have refused to assume that just because these cities fall off the edge of the information highway, they somehow cease to exist – instead they are also dependent on local, regional and global flows of information that structure very different modes of value to those that flow through the formalised global economy (Simone 2004a; see also Swilling et al. 2003).

3. Although not specifically defined, we presume this means ‘water and sanitation’ infrastructure because the one without the other does not make much technical sense.

4. This is our reading of the argument developed by Pile and Thrift (1996), but also an interpretation of our earlier work on African cities with AbdouMaliq Simone (Swilling et al. 2003) and Simone's other writings (see Simone 2004a, 2004b). See also recent work on Cape Town that explores these ideas (Swilling 2010b).

5. Birkeland, for example, has suggested that 90% of extracted materials remained fixed in use as buildings and infrastructures (2008, p. 26).

6. This is our interpretation, using slightly different language, of the argument that Guy and Marvin (2001) have developed.

7. The first two, inclusive and splintered urbanism, have been thoroughly described and analysed in the pathbreaking book by Graham and Marvin (2001). The notion of green urbanism was coined by Beatley in his classic review of Western European cities which experimented with sustainability (Beatley 2000). And the concept of slum urbanism is substantially drawn from Davis (2005), but qualified by the work of Pieterse (2008), Bayat (2000) and Swilling et al. (2003), who do not share the foreboding sense of an absence of agency that pervades Davis' work (for a critical review see Satterthwaite 2006).

8. For a personal insider account of how this was managed in practice by ruthless private contractors across many developing countries, see Perkins 2004.

9. See www.sdinet.org.

10. We have borrowed the term ‘green urbanism’ from the title of a seminal text by Beatley (see Beatley 2000).

11. See http://www.c40cities.org.

12. A similar eclectic mix of discourses is what Keil and Boudreau have identified in the make‐up of what they call ‘urban ecological modernization’ (2006) with reference to their reading of the environmental politics of Toronto.

13. See http://www.iclei.org/.

14. Although even China now has its ‘quiet encroachments’ – see Liu and Vlaskamp 2010.