A few months ago, I was having a lively discussion with some serious
and dedicated undergraduates at a university I was visiting. The fact that they were disappointed with
their training in sustainability came up -- They felt they weren't being told
how to practice sustainability. This
provided an opportunity for interesting engaged discussion, and helped me
clarify some of my own thoughts. Here's what came
up for me. I'll frame these thoughts in
the context of urban ecology, since that's where I usually think about
sustainability. In fact it is hard to
think about sustainability in any kind of ecosystem without including urban
connections.
There are two basic reasons for the difficulty. Sustainability is technically complex, and
sustainability, unlike traditional strategies of urban management, doesn't yet have
a recipe. Here I'm following a distinction between complicated and complex (Allen and Starr 1982).
Sustainability is Technically Complex
Sustainability was first introduced in the 1970s. But its most famous articulation is that of
the Bruntland Commission in 1987. This canonical definition emphasizes not only the need
to consider the effect of current decisions on future generations and on people
and places distant from the seat of decision making, but it also emphasizes
that three things must be considered jointly: environmental integrity, economic
vitality, and social equity.
Right off the bat, it is clear that sustainability is a
multifaceted pursuit. So it is likely to
be complex because there are many components of each facet, and the facets will
most likely interact. If one
acknowledges that sustainability tacitly assumes the subject to be a
"human ecosystem," the reason for the resulting complexity of
sustainability becomes clear. Human
ecosystems contain, at the minimum, biological components, physical
environmental components, constructed components, technology, social
structures, political processes, and economic resources. And this long list is only indicative. The interactions between and among components
guarantee that efforts to assess and guide sustainability must involve all the
components. Non-linearities, multiple
and scale-crossing feedbacks, and temporal lags would all lend considerable
complexity to sustainability.
The Classic Sanitary Approach to Cities Is, in Contrast, Complicated
Contrast the complexity of sustainability to the way that
cities have mostly been considered. Most
cities in areas that have experienced a history of industrialization can now be
called "sanitary cities" (Melosi 2000). The rise of the industrial city, especially
when powered by coal, was a polluted affair.
Acidic and particle-laden smoke from factories and home fires made the
air a "foul and pestilent congregation of vapours," to quote
Shakespeare (Hamlet Act II, Scene 2).
The concentration of so many people in new settlements hurriedly built
to house the new industrial workers who flocked from the countryside, led to
fecal pollution of streams and even in many cases well water. The industrial cities on Europe and North
America, although desirable to waves of new migrants due to economic
opportunity and intellectual and other freedoms, were clearly bad for people's
health. Bouts of mortality from waterborne
diseases characterized these cities, and as late as the 1950s, significant
mortality resulted from the "killer smogs" in some cities.
From the waste and disease of these industrial behemoths a
new model of the city emerged. Called by
Martin Melosi (2000) "the sanitary city," this city model involved
new ways of laying out cities and the development of infrastructure to provide
clean water and convey sewage away from the city, for example. In addition, the sanitary city model required
new forms of governance, new modes of financing infrastructure, and new zoning regulations
aimed at reducing hazards and promoting health.
In some cities, these structures began to emerge in the mid to late
1800s, while in other cities of the Global North, the physical and
institutional structures did not emerge until the early 20th century. In the United States, the efforts to clean up
both urban and non-urban environments continued through the passage of the
Clean Water Act in 1972, and the Clean Air Act in 1970.
Sanitary cities are governed through various departments charged
with generating and maintaining the key infrastructure, or managing the solid
and water-borne waste flows so that people were usually separated from the most
noxious threats. "Late"
Sanitary Era development changed the strategy from shunting wastes
"away" from the city, or at least away from districts inhabited by
the wealthy and empowered, to reducing and treating wastes. The ethical attention to populations and
locations downstream and downwind was an important development in the sanitary
city strategy, one that recognized the integration of urban areas with larger
regional, and in the case of air pollution, continental-scale areas.
Constraints of the Sanitary City
The sanitary city strategy can be considered a success. Sanitary cities are not the killers that the
smoke shrouded, sewage drenched killers that Charles Dickens novelized. But when compared with the more comprehensive
strategy of sustainability, the sanitary city has some real shortcomings. Some of these are in fact problematic
legacies that must be overcome. In the language of resilience theory, a sanitary city can harbor "rigidity traps" that hamper the transition to sustainability. Here are
some examples:
- Sanitary cities are governed from the top down, with resources provided by public funds. Shortfalls in city funding can impair the functioning and maintenance of the massive physical infrastructure required for sanitation. The sustainable city may benefit from alternative funding structures.
- Sanitary cities are managed by licensed specialists who are responsible to specific, issue oriented departments. For example, drinking water, sewage, planning, justice, finance, housing, may each be managed by different departments or bureaus. The sustainable city requires that all structures and functions in an urban place be thought of and managed as a system, not a series of loosely connected administrative units.
- The sanitary city may be seen as a tool to preserve the health and productivity of an industrial work force. The sustainable city must adopt a stance of environmental and social equity, rather than be driven by the economic interests of a wealthy elite.
Other contrasts can be drawn between the sanitary city and
the sustainable city models (Grove 2010; Pickett et al 2013).
However, this short list points out that there are key differences between
the two.
New Recipes for Sustainable Urban Transformation
To return to the question of why it is hard to learn the
sustainable city, much less actually promote sustainable trajectories in real
cities, another point must be made.
Urbanists, politicians, planners, designers, management professions, and
even residents of cities, have had something on the order of 150 years to visualize,
develop, and improve the sanitary city model.
Authors such as Graham and Marvin (2001) and Gandy (2003) have explained
in depth the complicated nature of the sanitary city, and the long time it took
to develop and deploy the physical, political, and social structures needed to
build and operate it. Yet, for many of
us "urban/suburban fish" in the Global North, the sanitary city is
the "water we swim in." It
hardly elicits a second thought. We
don't have to be taught what it means to run it. We may be troubled by environmental
injustices within it, or its growing susceptibility to climate change, or the
buffeting by shifting global economic investment. But we fundamentally understand what kind of
thing and experience a sanitary city is.
Not so the sustainable city. Those who are committed to the future of
cities are in the process of creating a new model -- a new recipe -- for
cities. The recipe for sustainability
must facilitate the internal environmental integrity, the regional effects, the
social livabilities and equitability, and of course the hoped for economic
productivity of urban places. And this recipe
hasn't had long to mature. The fact that
sustainability requires input from a diversity of residents, citizens, and
officials makes the initial visioning process difficult, yet crucial. The fact that sustainability governance in
many cases has to be built on top of existing legal structures, and indeed, to compensate
for the fragmented management of what should be dealt with as an integrated
system, adds its own kind of complexity.
But, from an ecological perspective, perhaps the biggest hurdle facing
urban sustainability is beginning to see cities as hybrid systems -- having
inextricably linked biological and social-economic features. The recipe can't just deal with ingredients
as independent parts.
It is no wonder that learning and practicing sustainability
is so difficult. But the students who
today are struggling mightily with what sustainability is, how to apply that
thinking to the hobbled sanitary urban systems they may have inherited, and how
to make trajectories toward sustainability in and outside of cities the norm,
are the folks who will ultimately be able to say: "This is the new
post-sanitary model of urban systems, this is how the sustainable city works,
this is how you apply the model to cities that are brand new or the large
number of cities in the Global South and East that haven't even had an
industrial and sanitary phase, and this is how you structure governance
networks to operate it." One day,
the sooner the better, the Sustainable City models will be off the shelf
recipes with high altitude and tropical variants, and suggestions for
culturally different flavors.
Bon appetit!
Steward T.A. Pickett
Background Publications.
Allen, T.F.H. and T.B. Starr. 1982. Hierarchy: Perspectives for Ecological Complexity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Cadenasso, M. L., S. T. A. Pickett, and J. M. Grove. 2006. Dimensions
of ecosystem complexity: Heterogeneity, connectivity, and history. Ecological
Complexity 3:1–12.
Childers, D. L., M. L. Cadenasso, J. M. Grove, V. Marshall, B.
McGrath, and S. T. A. Pickett. 2015. An Ecology for Cities: A Transformational
Nexus of Design and Ecology to Advance Climate Change Resilience and Urban
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Gandy, M. 2003. Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City.
MIT Press, Cambridge.
Graham, S., and S. Marvin. 2001. Splintering urbanism: networked
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Grove, J.M. 2010. Cities: Managing Densely Settled Social–Ecological Systems. Pp 281-294 In F. Stuart Chapin, III, Gary P. Kofinas and Carl Folke (eds.) Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship Resilience-Based Natural Resource Management in a Changing World. Springer, New York.
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