Cities and Nature

Olpadwala and Goldsmith make a number of compelling points in their article "Sustainability of Privilege", especially on the systemic problems present in the social layer of Commoner's 'onion' (attempt at an illustration below). In Commoner's model, ideally, the importance of the natural world should be taken into account by each consecutive layer, thus sustaining the natural core. However, because the relationships are inverted in reality, the social and political layer is self-serving, leading us in the wrong direction with economic goals that create unsustainable technologies and degrade the ecosystem. Negative behaviours such as excess consumption are driven by social norms, which perpetuate environmental damage. The authors write, "no genuine attenuation of environmental damage is possible without corresponding social change", arguing that structural and systemic barriers must be removed in order for localised, grassroots change to take root. Historical precedent shows times when the problems of the present seemed insurmountable, such as the Urban Manure Problem predicted in 1894 or the fear of running out of coal. It’s hard not to see the problems of today as truly insurmountable compared to those of the past, though, considering that our social norm demands consumption at a scale never before seen. In addition to grassroots change in consumption patterns, it is also necessary to solve much larger, macro-level problems, especially concerning energy and emissions. The authors quote the idea that one way to deal with environmental degradation is to convince the rich that it is in their own self interest to change things. How depressing this sounds! I prefer economic approaches that influence human behavior, such as high gas prices and carbon taxes. This is an effective way for the social and political system to better orient the inner layers of Commoner's onion towards nature (though the political will required to implement such policies could itself be seen as an insurmountable problem of the present).

Urban space and culture

I really enjoyed Markusen and Schrock this week. For all the focus planners may place on getting a particular big business into town, it is easy to lose sight of how that business will impact on re-spending within a city, and thus growth, over the long term (for example, Walmart may employ local people, but they will have incentives to spend their income inside Walmart, which sends money outside the city). I live in a city that is replete with "Buy Local! It makes a difference" signs and the sheer volume of the signs, I have to admit, made me cynical - I will be happy to support local businesses if they sell products I want, but I do not want to feel obliged to spend locally to prop up businesses whose value lies only in their localness. This article made me rethink the idea that local-orientation is far more complex than the parochial exercise I had taken it for. The ideas about worker location as just as important (if not more so) than industrial location particularly resonates. I often wonder how a certain New York glass company will attract the best and the brightest young workers to a relatively remote upstate New York location in the long term, particularly considering that young  technology professionals - at least according to Florida's analysis - tend to concentrate in metro areas that rate highly as centers of diversity and creativity.

Political Agglomerations

Holston and Appadurai's article is dated. It's difficult to read a 1990 article from the perspective of immigration policy of the Western world as it stands in 2013 without a very large grain of salt! The distinction between "formal" and "substantive" citizenship (the former to mean a certificate and the latter a series of rights a person exercises on a daily basis), is interesting, but I think the authors are speaking far too generally and make no compelling argument linking cities and citizenship. It is not at all true to say that "legally resident noncitizens, and even legally resident ones, often possess virtually identical socio-economic and civil rights as citizens". I have been an immigrant in the UK, and now the US, since 2007, and in neither country have I had "virtually identical" rights as citizens. In the UK I had access to healthcare and I had the right to work (and occasionally even vote), but I had no recourse to public funds should I become unemployed, even though I was contributing taxes. In the US, I was not allowed to work at all when I first arrived as an H-4 dependent. Many people who are US residents, but not citizens, may have different rights to members of their own family. As visa systems crack down on even middle class skilled workers, citizenship is very highly sought after. The relationship the authors try to illustrate between citizenship and the city is awkward in this reading -at the same time the authors argue for a citizenship based on a more localized scale, their article is not anchored enough to make this argument compelling - referencing such disparate cities as London, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Paris, Bombay. The claim that the urban poor unite to fight for rights to the city contradicts Davis' argument in "Slums" that one of the major problems with the growth of informal settlements is the inability for urban fringe dwellers to coordinate collective action, in contrast to the urban center dwellers of previous eras.