Sustainability and the City … and Our Common Future (original) (raw)

Back to the Future Forty years ago, the original publication of Limits to Growth 1 (LTG) caused quite a stir in both the general media and academic circles because of its disturbing findings that in the two (of three) future scenarios that Donnella Meadows and her co-authors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) investigated, there was an "overshoot and collapse" of the global system by the mid to latter part of the 21st century. In addition to this "doomsday prophecy" controversy (as labeled by some), there was the issue that the authors were then using a new quantitative modeling approach of large very complex systems with many simplifications and assumptions. In other words, their critics were raising questions about both their results and their methods. Some of those who were critical were not only industry leaders, economists and political figures, but also established academics in their fields from highly respected universities (even from their own at MIT). The late American Prof Julian Simon, who Wired Magazine called "The Doomslayer" 2 , countered that "the material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely". A Yale economics professor said that technology could solve all the problems the authors identified, but only if growth continued apace; and that, if growth must end, a natural end was preferable to intervention. By the time the 30-year update was published 3 , some 1,600 of the world's leading scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates at the time had organised themselves as the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and released in 1992 the "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity", imploring the urgent need for fundamental changes "to avoid the collision our present course will bring about". This year marks 40 years of LTG. In 2008, my CSIRO colleague Dr Graham Turner published a peer-reviewed paper entitled "A Comparison of 'The Limits to Growth' with Thirty Years of Reality" 4 , where he showed that changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book's predictions of economic and societal collapse in the 21st century. In 2011, Italian Prof. Ugu Bardi 5 published a comprehensive assessment of LTG's historical importance, and its continuing relevance in the present and into the future. What will the scientists, industry leaders and policymakers in another 40 or 60 years say at that time? Back to the City What the UCS called the collision of human activities and the natural world is most intense in centres of human population and consumption-our cities. Brunner et al. 6 estimated that the material throughput of a modern city is about an order of magnitude larger than that in an ancient city of the same size. Australia, being one of the most urbanised countries in the world, has been estimated to have an Ecological Footprint of 7.7 global hectares (gha) per person, which is about four times the level of what the planet can regenerate on an annual basis (if requirements are averaged worldwide) 7. Sydney's Ecological Footprint (i.e. its notional hinterland) is said to be 150 times greater than the actual land area of Sydney itself 8. In 1950, around 30 percent of the world's population lived in urban areas. The balance tipped just in the last two years, when for the first time in human history, more than half of the world's population lived in cities. By 2050 this will have increased to 70 percent 9. "Urban areas are hot spots that drive environmental change at multiple scales … Cities themselves present both the problems and solutions to sustainability challenges of an increasingly urbanised world" 10. Thus, it is easy to understand why many say that, "sustainability will be lost or won in our cities". The many-and usually popularly reported-global rating of the world's cities always give our five largest Australian cities favourable ranking (with usually one or two cities in the top ten) but the scoring criteria and processes vary widely, in addition to being based mostly on very simple and limited surveys of perceptions and without any considerations of any sustainability matters.