Product Description

At the end of the 20th century, humanity is involved in an unprecedented experiment: we are turning ourselves into an urban species. Large cities, not villages and towns, are becoming our main habitat. The cities of the 21st century are where human destiny will be played out, and where the future of the biosphere will be determined. There will be no sustainable world without sustainable cities. Can we make a world of cities viable in the long term-environmentally, socially as well as economically?

It is unlikely that the planet can accommodate an urbanised humanity which routinely draws resources from ever more distant hinterlands, or routinely uses the biosphere, the oceans and the atmosphere as a sink for its wastes. Can cities transform themselves into self-regulating, sustainable systems-not only in their internal functioning, but also in their relationships to the outside world? An answer to this question may be critical to the future well-being of the planet, as well as of humanity.

Human destiny is closely linked to the success or failure of the places where we live-cities, towns or villages. The history of human settlements is full of magnificent achievement as well as misery and despair. Many towns and cities have existed continuously for hundreds, even thousands of years, passing on the baton of urban stewardship from generation to generation. Others have dissolved into heaps of dust surrounded by desert. They imploded after devastating the local environments from which they drew their resources, or following social cataclysms and war. At a time when the majority of humanity is becoming urbanised, it is crucial to learn the lessons of history and to make sure that our settlements are socially just, participatory and economically viable whilst being environmentally sustainable.

For simplicity's sake I shall use the word city to encompass all human settlements, unless otherwise indicated. The definition of the word city varies greatly from country to country, depending on how much of the surrounding countryside is included. "For instance, the current population of most of the world's largest areas including London, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Beijing, Jakarta, Dhaka and Bombay can vary by many millions of inhabitants in any year, depending on which boundaries are used to define their populations."

According to our own criteria, some 80 per cent of Europeans actually live in urban areas. Figures for North and South America and Australia are much the same. Africa and Asia still have a more even population distribution between city and country, though economic growth is rapidly changing the situation there too.

Global economic growth is closely associated with urbanisation. We are used to thinking of cities as places where most economic activity occurs and where great wealth is generated as a result. "The steady increase in the level or urbanisation since 1950 reflects the fact that the size of the world's economy has grown many times since then . . . " It is clear that urban and economic growth are intimately linked. Not surprisingly, impacts on the natural world have increased vastly over the last decades. By my calculation, cities, built on only two per cent of the world's land surface, use some 75 per cent of the world's resources and discharge similar amounts of waste. This reflects the role of cities as engines of economic power whose commercial power depends on the exploitation and conversion of natural resources into consumer products.

In recent years the urban social agenda has dominated urban discussions: cities are uniquely human places and much effort has gone into addressing the problems of deprivation, alienation and crime and the welling up of social discontent. Cities as cultural centres have also received much attention. Great urban centres such as London, New York and Paris are widely celebrated as the epitome of cultural development. Environmental problems within cities in developing countries have been widely publicised, particularly those resulting from air pollution, inadequate sanitation and waste management, and poor working and housing conditions. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid and TB, well known in northern cities such as London 150 years ago, are now occurring in many developing cities, with epidemics threatening particularly the poorest communities.

However, an issue which has received much less thought is the huge resource use of modern cities and the resulting urban wastes. World-wide, urban development is closely associated with increased resource consumption. Compared with rural dwellers, city people in developing countries have much higher levels of consumption, with massively increased throughput of fossil fuels, metals, timber, meat and manufactured products. Yet cities could change. They could make efficient use of resources. How can we assure that appropriate policies and popular initiatives to achieve this potential will be implemented?

Historically, most cities grew and prospered by assuring supplies of food and forest products from the surrounding countryside, harnessing the fertility of their local hinterland. This is true of medieval European cities with their concentric rings of market gardens, forests, orchards, farm and grazing land, as well as of many cities in Asia, where this practice continues even in the face of rapid modernisation.3 Future cities can learn a great deal from this model even if we cannot simply transplant traditional practices into the 21st century unchanged.

Modern cities function very differently from the way cities did in the past. Low transport costs based on the ubiquitous use of fossil fuels have rendered distances irrelevant, plugging cities into an increasingly global hinterland. The process is often facilitated by substantial government subsidies on transport infrastructure.4 The actual location of settlements is becoming less important as global trade treaties come to determine the fate of national and local economies. Many traditional villages no longer use the fertility of surrounding farmland and forests as their main economic base. All over the western world they are increasingly becoming dormitories for people who commute to work elsewhere or who use telecommunications as their main medium for income generation. Moving people and goods around long distance is becoming the norm.

Today we don't really live in a civilisation, but in a mobilisation-of natural resources, people and products. Cities are the nodes from which mobility emanates: along roads, railway networks, aircraft routes and telephone lines. Cities also sprawl ever outwards along urban motorways and railway lines to their suburbs and shopping malls and beyond whilst their centre is often devoid of life outside business hours. They are both the origin and the destination of this mobilisation which has come to define human existence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83713 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 77 pages

Synopsis
How can we put the pulsing heart of conviviality back into our cities? How can we make sure of creating cities of diversity for the 21st century - places of cultural vigour and physical beauty that are also sustainable in economic and environmental terms? This text aims to show the way forward. Modern cities make a huge impact on their environments, but would still prosper if they were to dramatically reduce their consumption of resources and energy. Waste recycling can massively reduce urban use of resources whilst creating many new jobs; new materials and architectural designs can greatly improve the environmental performance of urban buildings. Cities can also adopt imaginative new approaches to transport planning and management, and the use of urban space. We can dramatically improve the experience of urban life by the creation of new urban villages, reducing the peoples' desire to escape from the pressures of city life.

From the Author
This short book is meant to make a positive contribution to the quest for sustainable development. The new millennium gives us a special opportunity to focus our minds on how the age of the city can also become an age of sustainability. I wish to contribute to this discussion in order to make some constructive suggestions, whilst I am also aware that the sustainable city is still a singularly elusive creature. The following text speaks for itself.

About the Author
Herbert Girardet is a UN Global 500 Award recipient, and the author of the acclaimed The Gaia Atlas of Cities and co-author of Making Cities Work, published by Earthscan for Habitat II. His documentary on London's metabolism, Metropolis, was shown on Channel 4, London, in 1994. His report Getting London in Shape for 2000 was commissioned by London First. He also co-authored the report Creating a Sustainable London. He is visiting Professor for Environmental Planning at Middlesex University, London.

Customer Reviews

A non-exhausting and innovative read!
Herbert Girardet's 'Creating Sustainable Cities' carries on his work from 'The Gaia Atlas on Cities' and 'Making Cities Work' but this time concentrates more specifically to large cities and their ecologigal problems. Girardet uses a consistent writing style with brilliant examples in form of case studies and manages to give a sound perspective on sustainable development in less than a hundred pages. An essential read for anyone interested in sustainability.