GEOG 526 FINAL

UPE

LECTURE SLIDES

Issues are present in the Global South

Pollution, plastic litter

Comes from cities, but also impacts quality of life in cities

Global North and Global South

Both experiencing rapid growth

Political decisions about housing

Partially worked because of housing crisis, but has not necessarily impacted affordability

Freiburg

Did it right

Planned well into the future

Provided an example of how to implement in other cities

Black Forest

Tram on grass

Parc Martin-Luther King - Paris

Clichy-batignolles 

Old industrial area

Invited architects to build interesting buildings

Post modern look

Social housing

Average person could live in central Paris

Stockholm, Sweden

Small port, could not house larger modern ships

Own heat and energy through biogas

Burning waste for energy

Collection ponds

Hammarby ecocycle model

Barcelona

Park Guell

10 years ago they decided to charge admission

Destroyed how people use it

Vienna

Inclusive to all because there is a lot of social, city owned housing

Done so for over 100 years

Hanoi, Vietnam

Themes and contrast

Medieval footprint of Chinese city, with French colonial influence

Administrative buildings were based on 19th century

New structures built after bombing - long narrow structures allows for a lot of space

Hong Kong

Densest, expensive

Mass migration post WW11, rapid urbanization, fleeing from communism

Unstable islands and mainland with mountainous terrain

urban renewal

Santorini

Top 5 tourist destinations

Massive environmental problem bc of the volcano

Desalinization - diesel

Enormous footprint

Maasai - Kenya and Tanzania

Threatened with eviction from the crater

Need enough space for the animals

Have been there for centuries

Removed for tourism

2024 protests

Political ecology***

Politics and economy influences environment and how environment influences people**

How political institutions, political environments and economic systems influence each other

Political ecology (alt.)

Addresses the conditions and cages of social environmental systems with considerations for the relations of power and how the power takes place in that environment

Poltical ecology - cockburn

a useful way of describing the intentions of radical movements in the United States, in Western Europe and in other advanced industrial countries...

Poltical ecology - Blaikie

combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy. Together this encompasses the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself

Poltical ecology - Greenberg

A synthesis of "political economy, with its insistence on the need to link the distribution of power with productive activity and ecological analysis, with its broader vision of bio-environmental relationships

Poltical ecology - Peet

a confluence between ecologically rooted social science and the principles of political economy

PE - Forsyth

the politics of ecology as a scientific legitimization environmental policy

PE - Heynen

formulating political projects that are radically democratic in terms of the organization of the processes through which the environments that we (humans and non-humans) inhabit become produced

PE - Bridge

An environmental research field marked by a set of "common commitments" to "critical social theory", to "in-depth, direct observation involving qualitative methods", and a "normative political commitment to social justice and structural political change

Apolitical ecology

environmental problems as technical or demographic rather than a result of power dynamics and politics

Paul Ehrlich

Neo-Malthusian

Population Bomb - predicted diminished resources would result in an environmental catastrophe

Julian Simon

Infinite resources and can always engineer our way out of the problem

No physical limits to growth

Unlikely to be true

Bjorn Lomberg

Environmental issues are overemphasized

The theorists from the 90s did not considered climate change

Green Revolution

Nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into lakes and oceans

Dead lakes

Creates plant growth that extracts oxygen out of the water

Dead zones

Environment, ecology, poltics **

Environmental change and ecological conditions are the product of political processes

(Political implications in terms of the altered power of actors in relation to other actors)

UPE 3 fundamental linked assumptions

1. Costs and benefits are distributed unequally

• Those with more power can affect environment more than the average person

2. Reinforces or reproduces existing inequalities (More beautiful places often go to the rich)

3. Political Implications - altered power of actors in the relation to other actors

Southern Thailand

pocket beaches

Inundated by tourists

Multiple tsunami event

Destroyed the area

Tin mining issue

Ban Nam Khem -

greatest loss of life

19th cent

Science tries to separate humans from the environment

Idea that there is a natural order with humans at the top

Debunked in political ecology

Cybernetic theory

man-machine biological system

True to a certain extent

Forester -

first person so explain that there are limits to growth within the system of the environment

Environmental determinism

certain groups are disadvantaged because they had worse environments and because they didn’t evolve as much as Europeans

Elseworth Huntington

particular climates are better for human evolution and race

inferior races live in marginal areas that struggle with agriculture

Kropotkin -

cooperation was necessary for survival

First political ecologist

State and capital crush popular genius

Alexander von Humboldt

Conservationist

What humans are doing to the world is destroying vast ecosystem before we know about them

Maintain the regions before they were destroyed

Alfred wallace

Considered the co-founder of evolution

The original bio-geographer

Looked at the range of ecology of species and biomes

Wallace Line / wallacea

separates asian and australian animals

techtonic plates

Wallace - social justice and conservation

Elite controlled land tenure, made money on rent

Advocated for nationalization of land

 Mary Summerville

Humans as a mechanism of climate change and alteration of biomes

Predated science by over a century

National parks

Marsh

modifying world through human actions

Secondary impacts

Ecosystem is connected, not running independently

critique - draining swamps

Alice Hamilton and Florence Kelly

- sewer socialism

Connections between cleanliness and health

Gilbert white

One of the first hazards researchers

Political economy of floodplain investment

how ppl are pushed into degraded areas

Cultural Ecology

Earlier than political ecology

Less environmental concern

Ecosystemic approach

Universal and generalizable rules about human interaction

critiques - irrational agents and environmental determinism

Carl sauer

Long term accounts of how places came to look the way they did

Historical and archeological lens

inverting determinism - humans control landscapes

Early political ecologists

Came from both scientific and political backgrounds

Marx Engels

Environmental Process

industrial revolution and degradation of environment is a fundamental feature of capitalism

Capital - Book

How capital degrades environment and fuels process of taking from population and environment

Marx - 2 assertions

1. Social and cultural systems are based in historical material conditions and relations

2. Capitalist production is specific and recent, requites extraction of surprises from labour and nature

UPE 5 main principals

1. Urban Metabolism - flows of different goods

2. Hybrid - nature is affected by us

3. Justice and Power - unequal access, impact

4. Extended urbanization - rural and nature

5. Situated knowledge - whose countes

Joel Tarr

since the 1970s, urban environmental history is "primarily the story of how man-built or anthropogenic structures

William Cronon

Just as ecological science has influenced the study of environmental history in general, urban ecology can more deeply influence the study of the city

David Harvey

Economic geography

Social cultural geography

City as a manmade resource system that involves structuring and differentiation of space through capital developments

Spencer w. Havlick

City as a functioning living thing

Inputs going into the city

Needed hinterland for a viable large city

Manuel castells

city and regional planning perspective

city as a living system

Not independent, transformed by people living in the ecosystem

Detwyler and Marcus

city as "a relatively new kind of ecosystem on the face of the earth.

Their new ecosystem has limits, however. It is an "open system” not self-contained, not functioning independently or in isolation from the rest of the world.

Robert Park

Father of human ecology

competition, dominance, succession, invasion

gradient of sustainability

Burgess

chicago

concentric circles

commercial, business, light manufacturer, working / middle class, commuter / suburban

conservative and deterministic

Allen Scott

cities competing for economic dominance

Urban growth patterns dictated by transnational powerful corporations

Horizontal integration

companions absorb and consolidate and move to more advantageous locations

Vertical disintegration

divert from production and award suppliers through competitive bidding

4 themes of PE

1. Urban dev is by human decisions by those that control wealth and resources

2. Urban social arrangements reflect conflicts between rich and poor

3. Government plays a key role in shaping urban life by allocating resources, mediating conflicts, and regulating economy

4. Economic restricting in a global economy has altered urban form

Ecological Footprint

Wackernagel and Rees

The area of land required to produce the resources consumed by a given population

ecological cost and carrying capacity

Environmental conflict thesis

scarcities produced through resource enclosure or appropriation by

• state authorities

• private firms

• social elites

all lead to conflict bw groups

legal system

can be tool for control and violence

Stuttgart 21

Protest railway station that cut down green space

Black Thursday - 100+ injured, 2 were severely injured

READINGS

Melosi

Very little theoretical frameworks surrounding the environment of cities and how they morph over time

Examines how humans go out of their way to separate themselves from the environment

Melosi - Environment

Anthropogenic biomes is more realistic than nature biomes

There is no pristine natural environment free and separate from human influence

Melosi - Definition

The physical features and resources of urban sites (and regions) influence and are shaped by natural forces, growth, spatial change and development, and human action

Melosi - 3 elemental weaknesses

1. Don’t really define Urban Environment in environmental history

2. Urban environmental history has brought empirical knowledge but lacks grounding in theory

3. Internalist, ie How cities function rather than how they grow

   
   

Bridging Divide - Mcdonald and Patterson

drew from humanities vs bio-physical sciences

Only a few urban planners saw city as an environment

Human Exemptionalism Paradigm (HEP) -

humans will always find a way to overcome environmental problems

Climate change, health of people / environments prove this is not the case

New Ecological Paradigm (NEP)

Cities depend on biophysical environment

What we have done to the ecosystem and how it evolves over time

Water issues, food issues, natural disasters

HEP - 4 main ideas

1. No scarcity of resources or constraints in environment

2. Humans are unique among animal species bc of our culture

3. Socio cultural factors can change more rapidly compared to biophysical factors

4. Human differences are cultural rather than biological, and can therefore be changed as needed

NEP - 4 main ideas

1. Humans - interdependently involved in the global ecosystem

2. Human affairs are determent by complex cause, effect, and feedback linkages

3. Finite resources means there are physical and biological constraints

4. Ecological laws cannot be revoked, despite human ingenuity

NEP - theorists

Marx - earliest

Geddes - availability of materials imposed strict constraints on modern industrial activity

Urban metabolism

the city as an organism, utilizing the metaphor of biological metabolism

Limitations of NEP

Biological and metabolic processes differ from those of urban settings

Social variables influence urban ecosystem

environmental / biological determinism

Methodological pluralism

Would be the best way to see how a city develops and evolves, what the problems are, economic growth etc

HEP and NEP independently and in open dialogue

Botkin & Beveridge: Cities as Environments

Cities should be understood as environments that can support both human well-being and biological conservation

Antiurban bias:

The tendency to view cities as bad for nature and wilderness as inherently good.

Three lessons from city-planning history:

1. Cities are centres of innovation and creativity.

2. Pleasant urban environments support human well-being and creativity.

3. Vegetation is essential to making cities pleasant.

Four environmental goals for cities:

1. Reduce energy use

2. Reduce and remove pollutants.

3. Create pleasant places to live

4. Support biological conservation.

Urban heat island effect

Cities are warmer than surrounding areas because buildings and pavement absorb and release heat,

Frederick Olmsted

Designed central park

parks

mental / physical health, recreation, social interaction

Los Angeles Case Study

Urban vegetation should reflect local climate, water availability, ecological history, and community needs

Combine modern environmental science with traditional landscape planning