Degrowth Group Assembly Process
Your profile picture

Initial Thoughts and Facilitation

Hi All,

My name is Ali and I will be facilitating the GAP process for this group on Urban Transformation.

I just thought I would start some discussion after reading the stirring papers - please feel free to take these into separate discussion posts if it makes it easier and of course start your own discussions!

1. Can cities ever really be "sustainable"?

Whilst there are arguments in favour of cities in terms of more efficient use of resources - some might argue that cities are inherently unsustainable as they always rely on the extraction of resources from other (rural) areas. This might link to the stirring paper on infrastructures, when it asks "Is it a valid aim of degrowth
supporters to always try and enable society to do things less damagingly, or is there a threshold of unacceptability, where less bad is simply not good enough?"

2. Actually existing alternatives

The same stirring paper suggests that people (or at least individuals) have little ability "to create infrastructure or infrastructure for themselves; they just make use of the existing infrastructures which are in place. People also have very little control over where certain activities take place – schools, shops, workplaces, sports and entertainment opportunities all have to fit into the landscape".

To me this is being challenged now by practices or movements such as squatting and social centres, which leads me to ask: what other already existing alternatives exist in terms of infrastructure (or urban transformation more broadly)?

3. Conflicts and alliances with agriculture

Aisde from rooftops mentioned in the stirring paper - space could be a major issue for urban agriculture. From speaking to different groups in Cape Town - there is a potential for both conflict and cooperation between different groups - for example housing activists and small scale farming movements. Are there ways we can try to facilitate more cooperation between potentially conflicting groups when it comes to urban land use?

And finally - at present it will only be me that is facilitating this GAP group - but it is recommended (and I would certainly appreciate :) ) there being a co-moderator. So if anyone would like to volunteer to help facilitate just let me know and I can send you the handbook explaining the process.

Thanks, and I'm looking forward to taking part in this exciting process.

Ali

  • 819 reads

Comments

Your profile picture

Apropos of "some might argue that cities are inherently unsustainable as they always rely on the extraction of resources from other (rural) areas": this is reminiscent of an argument that all eating is morally wrong, since it involves exploiting and killing living organisms. I.e., it's too absolutist. Alberto Magnaghi's group at the Università di Firenze frame the issue differently when they speak of a "pact" between city and countryside (see esp. their work « Patto Città Campagna : un progetto di bioregione urbana per la Toscana centrale » (Alinea 2009)). In part this involves allowing the two types of use to interpenetrate each other; it may also involve dismantling or fragmenting some hyperurbanized areas. This might be hard to do with Manhattan (even assuming the political will were there to do so), but it might at least be physically feasible for some regional cities in Japan, for example, as well as in Italy. 

A question here, though -- which also relates to your question about relative vs. absolute improvements -- might be, is it OK to target regional cities for a de-growth approach before doing something about major metropolitan centers that continue to suck up resources and people like a black hole ...

Your profile picture

Hi all from Jeremy,

I view cities as being part of a whole, with the whole needing to be sustainable, not necessarily parts. How much countryside does a 'city' need to have access to (and where) to enable a sustainable symbiotic 'pact' between the two? For me, acceptibility comes with efficiency factors and other benefits outweighing inefficiency factors from each type of infrastructure.

Urban farming (if not rooftops) does have the issue of space requirements and competition with housing, for example, yes. However, the benefits of having well-placed small-scale plots (allotments etc) far outweigh a maximising of living density in my opinion.

I also think it is OK to target regional cities in order to be able to get more easily achievable success stories before tackling more difficult targets, yes.

Your profile picture

Hi all again,

Thanks for the replies so far, it's good to get the discussions started already.

Andrew - whilst I see what you're saying about it being absolutist, I think a better analogy would be between the sustainability of different diets - say vegan or meat eater - though then I would say it depends how the food is produced: e.g. a hunter gather eating meat is very different from factory farming. So with human settlements it's not a case of should we live somewhere or not but how: in cities, in villages, in nomadic ways, or something else? It probably comes down to "how" within those categories again, but cities historically have probably been a big cause of growth and resource exploitation. One last point - although I'll just point out that I asked this question more as a conversation starter, rather than something we should discuss in Leipzig - I think there's a strong bias to say that cities should exist and be made sustainable (perhaps because so many people already live in them) - not a scientific test by any means but when I google "can cities be sustainable" - the results are all about how to make cities sustainable, and it's only when I searched can cities really be sustainable then is that question answered...

Jeremy - interesting point about the whole having to be sustainable. Should efficiency really be the measure when coming to decide though - that fits very well with a growth society? (What about other sources of degrowth - well being, justice, democracy and so on). And who should decide - what if rural people - be it peasant farmers or indigenous communities don't want to move and be displaced by the needs of a resource hungry city?

Your profile picture

Yes, I wrote efficiency factors and other benefits, but I do mean within the scope of efficiency simply allowing more people to benefit from whatever sustainable source is being drawn upon in the future. Decision-making and 'democracy' problems are not going to be solved as such by improving infrastructure efficiency, but it will lessen the volume of conflict over resources - and we can work towards tipping over into having more sustainable supplies than demand.

Just to clarify - I mean more of A than B. I don't consider anything can be more sustainable until it actually manages to be sustainable at all. The correct expression for what we are attempting at the moment is to become less unsustainable.

If you take the example of a river which no longer reaches the sea because so much water is extracted from it, then the crucial elements of this natural infrastructure being shortened are the number of people along it and their efficiency. The rebound effect also doesn't help people downstream if a more efficient city attracts more people to it, and cities should take care not to crush their symbiotic partners.

Your profile picture

Thanks to you both for your replies. Jeremy, I certainly agree with you about regional cities, as may have been evident from the way I framed the question. Alistair, I take your analogy, though when I wrote I was focused more on the tendency of emotionally-charged words like "extraction" and "exploitation" sometimes to obscure the nature of an event or situation, rather than reveal it. As for how we should live, I hope this can be approached  as more than a question of engineering or governance. In particular, culture and place should also play a role. E.g., it would probably be easier to decompose a 21st Century medium-sized city into local villages than to send the population packing off to the the prairies (assuming any were nearby) as nomads, both physically and in terms of continuity with the inhabitants' culture.

Complicating matters is that well-being, justice and democracy might not be adequate safeguards for sustainability, even assuming those conditions are clearly identifiable and attainable. For example, many people who lost their houses and family members in the March 2011 tsunami in Japan were living on land reclaimed from the sea, or on land closer to the sea than limit markers erected by their grandparents and great-grandparents following a devastating early 20th Century tsunami. Yet many of them want to re-build on the same land; and some local governments are spending the equivalent of hundreds of millions of Euros to erect new sea walls and gates so that they can. That solution might reflect some democratic consensus, respect family property rights and at least a couple of generations of tradition, and be a source of subjective well-being to the local residents. Do those factors make the solution sustainable? (A rhetorical question, obviously.)