Cities are a type of socio-ecological system with an expanding range of articulations with nature’s ecologies. Today, most of these articulations produce environmental damage. Can we begin to use these articulations to produce positive outcomes – outcomes that allow cities to contribute to environmental sustainability? Elsewhere (2009) I have argued that the complex systemic and multi-scalar capacities of cities are a massive potential for a broad range of positive articulations with nature’s ecologies. Here I ask whether confronting climate change in our large cities can a) mobilize the multiple capacities and strengths of cities, and b) in this process, contribute to more democratic distribution of risks and remedies, and to a distributive politics.

One feature of such an effort is the intensive use of particular forms of scientific knowledge that allow us to return to nature processes we have today replaced with man-made chemicals. This replacement in itself would have distributive effects and reduce the role and power of major corporate actors. A second feature is that greening our cities actually has a distributive effect insofar as all households, neighbourhoods and firms need to be part of the effort. The greening of our cities can become one mechanism for strengthening the distributive aspects of cities. Cities are complex systems and thus able to wire this distributive capacity into the urban fabric itself. This could function as a counterforce to the growth of inequality that got wired into the urban fabric with the types of economic growth that took off in the 1980s, Greening our cities,  the necessity of confronting the environmental catastrophe, can force growing participation by all and push towards the making of a new politics

Environmental inequalities
The possibility that greening might have distributive effects is critical given the sharp impact of environmental destruction on adding to the inequality between poor and rich. Low-income settlements absorb more of the environmental damage than wealthy settlements, even when the latter are far more destructive of the environment (Satterthwaite et al. 2007). The evidence shows that loss of healthy life years as a result of global environmental change (including climate change) is “predicted to be 500 times greater in poor African populations than in European populations.”(Costello et al. 2009: 1701).  There are several factors at work, from regional variations in the impact and types of climate change, to differences in existing levels of heat and food stress.

Further, this trend cuts across the high-income/low-income country divide. For instance, data on Los Angeles, California (USA), which is in many ways a rich city, shows a sharp climate gap (Morello-Frosch et al. 2009). Thus African Americans in Los Angeles are twice as likely as other LA residents to die during heat waves and families living below the poverty line are less likely to have access to air conditioning or cars to escape the heat;  five of the smoggiest cities in California have the highest concentrations of people of color and low-income residents; these communities are projected to have the largest increases in smog associated with climate change; low-income and minority families spend more of their income than most Americans on food, electricity and water – as much as 25 % of total family income.

This unequal distribution of the costs of environmental damage is also evident in studies about who will be the environmental refugees of the near future, with rising water levels and desertification. While estimates of the numbers of migrants and projections of future numbers vary, it is clear that there will be many and that mostly it is the poor who will have to flee for refuge. “The estimates range from 25 to 50 million by the year 2010 to almost 700 million by 2050. IOM takes the middle road with an estimate of 200 million environmentally-induced migrants by 2050. (http://www.ehs.unu.edu/file.php?id=621 p.2). A sea level rise of 1 meter could affect 23.5 million people and reduce agricultural lands by 1.5 million hectares in the Ganges, Mekong, and Nile River deltas; a sea level rise of 2 meters would impact an additional 10.8 million people and reduce agricultural lands by an additional 969,000 hectares.
These numbers point to a disturbing landscape of massive threats and sharp inequalities in the intensity of these threats for different areas and income groups.


Cities at the heart pf our environmental future
The massive processes of urbanization under way today are inevitably at the center of the environmental future. It is through cities and vast urban agglomerations that humankind is increasingly present in the planet and through which it mediates its relation to the various stocks and flows of environmental capital. The urban hinterland, once a mostly confined geographic zone, is today a global hinterland. With the expansion of the global economy we have raised our capacity to annex growing portions of the world to support a limited number of industries and places.
Major cities have become distinct socio-ecological systems with planetary reach, going well beyond urban space. The needs of cities, and the profit logics of agribusiness, have altered traditional rural economies and their long-standing cultural adaptation to biological diversity. Rural populations have become consumers of goods, including food, produced in the industrial economy, one much less sensitive to biological diversity. The rural condition has evolved into a new system of social relations, one that does not work with biodiversity. These developments all signal that the urban condition is a major factor in any environmental future. It all amounts to a radical transformation in the relation between humankind and the rest of the planet.

The enormously distinctive presence that is urbanization is directly and indirectly changing a growing range of nature’s ecologies, from the climate to species diversity and ocean purity. And it is leading to the formation of new environmental conditions -- heat islands, ozone holes, desertification, and water pollution. Urbanization and industrialization have made humankind the major consumer of all significant ecosystems. There is now a set of global ecological conditions never seen before.

But are these global ecological conditions the result of urban agglomeration and density or are they the result of the specific types of urban systems we have developed to handle transport, waste disposal, building, heating and cooling, food provision, and the industrial process through which we extract, grow, make, package, distribute, and dispose of all the foods, services and materials we use?

It is, doubtless, the latter – the specific urban systems we have made. One of the outstanding features across a range of major cities today is their sharp differences in environmental sustainability. 1)  These differences result from diverse government policies, economic bases, cultures of daily life, and so on. European cities are generally far more engaged with environmental sustainability than US cities, and the poor megacities of both the poor and rich world have a particularly big challenge.

Delegating to nature
Beyond the differences of cities are a few foundational elements that dominate our way of doing things and which are at the heart of what we need to address. One of these is the rupture in the energy and material flux through the human economy –what we use and need returns in altered form as pollution and waste to the ecosphere. We rupture nature’s continuous flow; we should facilitate that flow, as we do, on a very small scale, when we recycle. We have inserted ruptures in just about all economic sectors, from urban to rural. But it is in cities where such ruptures  take on their most complex interactions and cumulative effects. This makes cities a source of most of the environmental damage, and some of the most intractable conditions feeding the damage. And yet, it is also the complexity of cities that is part of the solution. Much is being done in some cities to minimize ruptures and to maximize the flow-through –with waste recycling the most familiar case.2)

Another foundational element is that we have replaced far too many of nature’s balancing processes with man-made chemicals, thereby further disrupting nature’s cycles. Delegating back to nature would move us a long distance towards ecologically sound practices.A familiar case that illustrates this dynamic is bio-diversity in agriculture – crop rotation is one way of achieving what we now do through destructive chemical fertilizers and pest-killing poisons.

There are multiple such possibilities to use nature for what we now do through destructive industrial goods. But it has taken science to reconnect us to this knowledge. Our industrialized societies burried these practices and thereby the knowledge. For instance, we now know that certain bacteria that can live in cement can neutralize the CO2 emissions of buildings – extremely important since buildings account for well over half of all such emissions worldwide. One dramatic technology being developed is self-healing bacterial concrete. In this technology bacteria residing within concrete structures seals cracks and reduces the permeability of concrete surfaces by depositing dense layers of calcium carbonate and other minerals. Several groups have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach.3) This technology is still under development but promises to reduce energy and material expenditures needed to maintain human infrastructures. Buildings would thus more closely model the self-sustaining homeostatic physical structures found in nature.

Another instance is that of certain types of algae that can be used to clean up chemically contaminated water and ground.  The problems of concentrated contaminants are a major issue in cities due to extremely high population densities. Landfill waste generated by human activity becomes a dangerous pollutant, a source of greenhouse emissions, and a terminal break in many natural cycles. The development of landfill bioreactors is one way of using nature for the clean-up. Landfill bioreactors accelerate waste decomposition by improving conditions for aerobic or anaerobic biological processes. This is paired with the capture of byproducts released in these processes, such as carbon dioxide and methane, which are used as a fuel known as “landfill gas” (LFG).4) This both reduces the uncontrolled diffusion of greenhouse gases and provides a concentrated source of fuel; it also makes possible the  use of carbon dioxide for carbon sequestration and fuel generation. These are just two examples. There are many more. 5) 
But there is a second vector for action: fighting the power and profit logics that have organized our environmentally destructive economies and societies.

The complexity and global projection of cities
The question of urban sustainability cannot be reduced to modest interventions that leave the major economic systems untouched –systems that range form the financial to the mining and agricultural systems in our current capitalist economies. While in some environmental domains (e.g. protecting the habitat of an endangered species) we can make considerable advances by acting simply on scientific knowledge, this is not the case when dealing with cities, with multinationals, or with society at large. Non-scientific elements are a crucial part of the picture: questions of power, poverty and inequality, ideology and cultural preferences, are need to be addressed. Policy and proactive engagement are critical dimensions for environmental sustainability, whether they involve asking people to recycle garbage or demanding accountability from major global corporations known to have environmentally damaging production processes.

The spaces where damage is produced often differ from the sites where responsibility for the damage lies (such as the headquarters of mining corporations) and where accountability should be demanded.  A crucial issue is the massive investment around the world promoting large projects that damage the environment. Deforestation, mining, and construction of large dams are perhaps among the best known cases. The scale and the increasingly global and private character of these investments suggest that citizens, governments, NGOs, all lack the power to alter these investment patterns. But there are tactics that can be used, most notably in global cities: these cities can function as structural platforms for acting and contesting these powerful corporate actors (Sassen 2005).  A firm may have hundreds of mines across the world, but its headquarters are likely to be in one or a few major cities. 

The geography of economic globalization is strategic rather than all-encompassing and this is especially so when it comes to the managing, coordinating, servicing and financing of global economic operations. About 75 cities worldwide contain just about all the headquarters of globally operating firms. The fact that it is strategic is significant for regulating and governing the global economy. There are sites – the network of global cities – in this strategic geography where the density of economic transactions and top-level management functions come together and constitute a concentrated geography of global decision-making.

We can see this also as a strategic geography for demanding accountability from major corporate headquarters about the environmental damage they have produced. The global economic system is characterized by enormous concentration of power in global financial markets  and in a limited number of large multinational corporations (ca. 300,000 MNCs out of a total of millions and millions of other firms). This can be seen, then, as generating  a concentrated geography for demanding changes in the production and investment habits of these global firms. Engaging the headquarters is actually easier than engaging the thousands of mines and factories in often remote and militarized sites, and the millions of service outlets around the world of such global firms. Direct engagement with the headquarters of global firms is today facilitated by the recognition, among consumers, politicians and the media, of an environmental crisis. The fact that the global economy needs a growing number of global cities, not just one perfect imperial capital,  means that these cities are a key space for countries around the world to engage global firms. But the common though erroneous idea that cities compete with each other has kept urban leaderships from collaborating in contesting the claims of powerful global firms –afraid that they would lose the jobs. But the fact is that global firms need many global cities, not just one. Thus urban leaderships have more room tomaneuever and demand social and environmental accountability from global firms.

Specific networks of cities are natural platforms for cross-border city-alliances that can confront the demands of global firms. For sure, dealing with the headquarters of large firms leaves out millions of independent small local firms responsible for much environmental damage, but these are more likely to be controllable through national regulations and local activisms. Fighting the headquarters requires a global approach.

Concluding, much of the work addressing the environmental challenge in large and complex cities consists in spreading a range of interventions  to as many households, neighbourhoods, enterprises, buildings, as possible. The more, the better the overall outcome for everybody, whether rich or poor. This is an interesting dynamic, especially for cities with their extreme inequalities. It  signals that addressing our environmental challenge might turn out to be one of the most effective means to strengthen democratic and distributive dynamics. Not addressing these challenges is the most powerful way of strengthening inequality and the maldistribution of resources.

1) That it is not urbanization per se which is damaging but the mode of urbanization is also  shown by the fact that rural areas have adopted environmentally harmful production processes. Until fifty years ago, or 100 years in some regions, rural areas generally had mostly environmentally sustainable economic practices, such as crop rotation, and did not use chemicals to fertilize and control insects. Further, our extreme capitalism has made the rural poor, especially in the Global South, so poor that for the first time many now are also engaging in environmentally destructive practices, notably practices leading to desertification.

2) While human intervention in natural cycles is geared towards amplification of nature’s capacities, wastes are often allowed to diffuse into other natural systems and become difficult to recycle, or the actors lose track of the polluted flows. This can happen even when adequate recycling technologies are available. The already acute problem of uneven spatial distribution of damage is aggravated by the unbalanced distribution of human activity over the surface of the earth, which can lead to dangerous concentrations and redistributions of pollutants.

3) Hen M Jonkers “Self Healing Concrete: A Biological Approach” in Self Healing Materials: An

4) Hen M Jonkers “Self Healing Concrete: A Biological Approach” in Self Healing Materials: An Alternative Approach to 20 Centuries of Materials Science Springer 2007 pp.195-204
  Yolo County, Planning and Public Works Dept. Full Scale Bioreactor Landfill for Carbon Sequestration and Greenhouse Emission Control March 2006.

5) See Sassen, 2009, “Delegating back to Nature.” In preparation (On File with Author).

Aus der Ausgabe 12-2009