The UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 defines sustainable cities as those dedicated to achieving green sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. In the essay What is a Green City?, author Paul James outlines the origins of the ‘Green City’ concept and the urgent need for cities around the globe to embrace positive sustainability measures.
Paul James is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. He is author or editor of over 30 books, including Globalization Matters: Engaging the Global in Unsettled Times (with Manfred Steger, Cambridge University Press). James is academic advisor to the use platform.
City of Berlin, © Paul James
Over the next ten years, all cities across the globe will need to become green cities. We share a common and difficult future. Whether or not a city has in the past been environmentally conscious or not, over the next couple of decades all cities will face environmental challenges to which they will need to respond. These issues range from water and food insecurity to uncomfortable urban warming and intensified destructive weather events. A recent risk-analysis report based on millions of computer simulations has suggested that, even below the 1.5 degrees rise set by the Paris Agreement, and certainly within the higher limit of 2 degrees, disastrous domino-effects are now likely. As well as tipping points, such as the loss of Greenland’s continental ice sheets or basic changes to oceanic circulation patterns, we now face tipping cascades. In other words, these many changes will rebound upon each other, compounding the problems for cities globally.
In this context, the key question will become ‘What kind of green city?’
In one sense to maintain basic liveability, cities will be required to become reactive green cities. They will be increasingly concerned to mitigate those challenges. ‘Reactive’ is used here is the sense of reacting to negative events or processes. This will mean developing infrastructure and community plans that emphasise resilience and adaptation.
However, in another sense, cities could also become positive green cities. They could use the many frameworks developed over the past few years from broad aspirational documents such as United Nations Development Goals and the New Leipzig Charter to more detailed guidelines such as the Principles for Better Cities. This framework is used by Metropolis to think about what makes cities more sustainable and better places to live for all. All of these charters and guidelines suggest a broadening and deepening of the concept of ‘green city’, which even just a few decades ago was still emphasising trees, parks and gardens. Before outlining possible pathways to building positive green cities further, we need go back a little in history.
New York City, © Paul James
How did the concept of a ‘green city’ enter the global imagination?
The concept of a ‘green city’ is a relative recent one, and it took a long time to catch on. First, it required a shift from the idea that nature existed outside cities in rural areas. The notion of the Green Revolution, for example, was used to describe a rural agricultural technology-transfer process to the Global South. It was not urban and it was not projected as ecologically sustainable. It may be surprising for us looking back, but until the latter part of the twentieth century, environmentalists did not use the term ‘green’ to refer to environmental sustainability. Rather, across the twentieth century, the emphasis was on greening cities or bringing the countryside to the city. The Garden City movement, with its roots in the writings of Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928), for example, was a town-planning greening movement, not a green movement in the sense we understand today. It was urban-based without being global.
Second, the emergence of the concept of ‘green city’ ironically required a decentring of our own cities as focussed entities in themselves. It depended upon developing a global sense of us all being in this together, strengthened across the middle of the twentieth century by reports and writings on the fragility of our planet. This idea of Planet Earth as vulnerable was reinforced by an ontological jolt that hit the world’ s populations in 1968 as photographs of the Earth taken from outer space circulated around the globe. These photos showed a small, vulnerable blue planet floating in a vast sea of black, with the moon in the foreground providing a destabilizing horizon of reference. Fifteen months later, the first Earth Day was celebrated. And in 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts took photographs of an unshadowed globe floating in the blackness of space. The ‘Blue Marble Shot’ revealed to the human eye the full panorama of our vulnerable terrestrial home, without political boundaries and taken from too far away to see particular cities.
London Mile End view, © Paul James
Part of the shift from ‘greening’ to ‘green’ involved the formation in the 1970s of the first environmental parties in Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Germany, formalizing with the name ‘Green’ in the 1980s. However, the most significant shift to seeing cities as key sites for sustainability was signaled by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the Earth Summit. Convened in 1992 ‘to consider pressing global environmental and development issues and to adopt an action plan for dealing with them’. The principal product of UNCED was Agenda 21. It still used the term ‘greening’ to describe reafforestation and planting, but the task for cities was becoming much broader.
What then is a green city in the most positive sense of this concept?
As this shift from greening to green consolidated, the concerns of ecological sustainability were integrated into urban planning in many cities. Books began to be published from Roger Johnson’s The Green City (1979) to David Nicholson-Lord’s The Greening of Cities (1987), which linked architecture, urban planning, landscaping, bicycling, walking, and bringing ‘nature’ into the city. Terms such as ‘eco-city’, ‘sustainable city’, and ‘urban footprint’ were added to our language. Across the following decades into the 2000s, however, as we became more and more aware of the extent of the ecological global crisis we all face, we began to put most of our emphasis on measuring bad things like carbon emissions—and their possible mitigation. While this was a necessary adjustment, and mitigation remains essential, urban adaptation became too much caught up in resilience — that is, bouncing back after disasters.
Buenos Aires, © Paul James
This is when the concept of ‘positive sustainability’ came to the fore: that is, building a city working with the precautionary principle across all domains of social life—ecology, economics, politics and culture.
Here the precautionary principle also took on a more positive aspect: both acting with the aim of responding to possible negative ecological impacts before they intensify, and positively seeking to build better cities—just, ecologically generative, and caring—beyond the trappings of wealth and high mass consumption. The ‘build back better’ slogan has been used (and misused) as part of this turn to positive sustainability.
Embracing positive sustainability has many virtues. At the most obvious level, incorporating more complex living ecosystems and what is now called ‘green infrastructure’ into our cities is one way of managing urban heat effects. It is more effective than even changing spatial configurations. Positive sustainability is also good for our sense of wellbeing. Again, in the obvious sense, proximity to parks and elements of nature enables higher levels of physical exercise and public engagement.
However, more than that, a positive green city is best understood as a city that integrates ecological thinking and practices into every aspect of social life. This is the only way in which we will survive the tipping cascades that loom in our future.
Case studies focussing on environmental sustainability, biodiversity conservation, clean energy and climate action on the use platform:
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A program that contributes to the mitigation and adaptation of climate change, risk management and the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services in Mexico City. The Metropolis of Lyon is collaborating with more than 130 partners to act more sustainably on a metropolitan scale through the Climate, Air and Energy Territorial Plan. The City of Shiraz is increasing green space and limiting unbridled development through reforestation. Sydney Green Square is Australia’s largest urban renewal project. Public spaces, public transport initiatives and built forms are being redeveloped following the city's objectives for a green, global and connected city. The City of Wuhan has revitalized one of the most polluted areas of the city into an ecological space for citizens.
For more programs and policies related to Green Cities search the use data base. |