With case studies on 30 cities in five continents and a selection of infographics illustrating these dynamic cities, this edited volume is an essential resource for planners and students of urbanisation and urban change.
This chapter explores to paint a picture of what a future low carbon world might look like and in particular describe the role and fate of cities in such a world. Along with innovation and human capital, infrastructure is seen as a key component of the OECD's framework for urban green growth, leading to green jobs, green supply and consumption, and urban attractiveness. The OECD has estimated future costs in other infrastructure sectors, which turn out to be quite important due to their financial and technological interactions with the sectors covered by the IEA. The IEA describes and costs out a possible scenario for the energy-related infrastructure that going forward would be required to limit global climate change to 2 Centigrade degrees. Many organizations have recognized the key role of cities in reducing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but this chapter first wants to go beyond discussing low carbon cities and consider a low carbon planet.
There is ample precedent for realizing the signicance of urban group form and social connectivity in the utopian discourse of the First Industrial Revolution. The 19th century witnessed a technological revolution that spawned a new scale of urbanization around industrial technique and production that was unprecedented at the time. Especially in this formative period, the concept of “intentional social infrastructure” evolved as a critical component of discourse around urbanization. In certain ways today, we are witnessing a period of urbanization and revolution in technology that appears to share certain immediacy with this earlier precedent, including the question of social infrastructure. Included among the most relevant historical examples are the Fourierist constructs originating in France (Charles Fourier, 1772-1837), related to novel modes of micro-scale social organization (“Association”) linked to production, positing that “harmony” in nature could be applied to new possibilities for society.1 Fourier’s design for a phalanstere not only posited a new micro-social alternative to the urbanization norms of the period (Figure 15.1), it was considered a foil to normative urban social organization and combined both industrial and agricultural production. The Fourierist concept appeared in diverse applications in Europe and the United States. One of the best known was constructed by Jean Baptiste Godin (1817-1888) at Guise in France. There were also parallel initiatives, including those of Robert Owen (1771-1858) originating in the UK, with ten “Owenite” communities founded by 1866 in diverse locations including the United States.2
This chapter considers CO2 emissions and the depletion of fossil fuels have led to a growing interest in electric vehicles as an alternative for urban mobility. In 2009 the Spanish government launched a plan for the deployment of electric mobility, managed and coordinated by Institute for Energy Diversification (IDAE) and saving and the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism. In 2013, sales of electric vehicles in the European Union were 0.4 per cent of total sales, with about 50,000 units sold, thus constituting 25 per cent of the global market for such vehicles. Madrid is a fairly successful case study for analyzing the impacts of the MOVELE project. The case of MOVELE can be regarded as an example of how fruitful cooperation between utilities, car manufacturers, central government and local government may be a key factor in unlocking the full potential of electric mobility.
Satellite images have lately been used for the identification and delineation of major urban agglomerations. Such is the case of the images offered by the National Geophysical Data Center (NDGC) at the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The metropolitan area of Buenos Aires increased in brightness in the two outer rings, while the central circle showed identical maximum brightness in 1992 and 2012. If one takes for example the areas of Buenos Aires and Lima, It describes that the two metropolises have had relatively similar growth patterns over the past two decades. Occupied areas, which emit a minimum level of light, have therefore increased by 40.4 percent, and as in the case of Buenos Aires, have extended more than 25 km from the city center. Again, population growth corroborates these results, increasing by 48.4 percent from 6.4 to 9.5 million in the Lima Metropolitan Area between 1992 and 2012.
__Cities in the 21st Century__ provides an overview of contemporary urban development. Written by more than thirty major academic specialists from different countries, it provides information on and analysis of the global network of cities, changes in urban form, environmental problems, the role of technologies and knowledge, socioeconomic developments, and finally, the challenge of urban governance.
This chapter explains the strange trajectory of how the relationship between cities and environments has been scripted over the past century. It argues that new metabolized socio-ecological relations that could operate within emerging different political-economic frameworks. The chapter considers the discourses of the more radical voices such as those of the environmental political movements or the various indignados' that over the past few years have been demanding a new constituent democratic process. It explores three perspectives that have galvanized more politicized thinking and practice around the urban environmental question, namely urban sustainability, urban environmental justice, and urban political ecology. Urban Environmental Justice (UEJ) perspectives have been much more sensitive to the inherently conflicting and power-laden processes of urbanizing natures and the creation of unjust urban socio-environmental conditions through elite-based techno-managerial fixes. Urban political ecology (UPE) shifts attention to the socio-ecological inequalities embodied in and shaped by the reproduction of capitalist urbanization itself.
