ENVSCI 201: Lecture 13 - Context to Environmental Solutions

Urban Development Globally

Urbanisation has quickly increased, especially in recent years. This is mainly due to the benefits urban cities offer:

• Better opportunities for economic development

• Better access to infrastructure & healthcare

• More convenient

• And so on

These beenfits and amenities also tends to be cheaper compared to services of the same level in rural areas.

• However, a lot of this assumes that every one wants to live that sort of urbanised lifestyle

Urban Development in Auckland

Similarly, urbanisation has also increased rapidly after several developments.

• It started picking up steam mainly after the development of wastewater treatment plants, which made the city cleaner and safer to live in

Recent statistics say that Auckland’s population increased by 49 people and 21 houses every day.

“Sustainable” Cities

Recent efforts are focused on developing more “sustainable” cities. These efforts started a while back in Victorian England, where people noticed how hard it was to live in and the poorliving conditions of cities.

• So, more efforts were put into making it more efficient and accessible for people. For example, Le Corbusier worked to provide better living conditiosn in crowded cities by making services, amenities, and so on much more accessible (in the same general area basically).

These efforts arose also due to the economic and ecological crises that arose with industrial capitalisation (this mostly focuses on urban growth in the West)

Impacts of Urbanisation on the Environment & Economy

Obviously, urban populations and environments put a lot of stress on the environment with its higher demands for resources, energy, and so on. They also tend to concentrate a lot of land, water, and air pollution.

One less obvious impact is how urbanisation tends to drive economic disparity, especially between rural and urban areas and even between populations in urban areas. This tends to be paired with rising class issues, poor living conditions, more fear, crimes, and other social issues.

“Grand Challenge” of Urban Development

Also referred to as the “greatest human-environmental experiment of all time” basically because of how we are constantly interact and changing the environment and how it’s doing the same to us.

This places cities as complex, adaptive, socioecological systems that aren’t independent from the environment, but also within it.

• This arose due to more research coming into focus by applying ecological frameworks onto dynamic urban landscapes with STEM dominating most fo the analyses, monitoring, decision-making, and so on.

Environmental science tends to focus on finding local-scale solutions for more physically based smaller scale problems. However, urban environments are gigantic, having a much larger scale and more complex issues.

• So, it tends to be harder to tackle urban socioecological issues due to their larger scale, lack of resources, and lack of motivation/push.

Urbanisation in Chine

Similar to other places, urbanisation in China increased rapidly with the urban population rising from 20% to 50% from 1980 and 2012. This led to eventual problems such as overcrowding, excessive air & water pollution, more disease spread, more crime, and overall environmental degradation.

• There were also observeable economical disparities, especially in the rural areas as men left for the cities, leaving chidren and women behind, creating labour shortages

Recently, China has invested more heavily in city living by trying to address these issues by focusing on reducing emissions for cleaner air, building better infrastructure, more policing for safer neighbourhoods, and so on.

• But, as we can see, these solutions tend to be very huamn-centred

Environmental Problems

Tend to be very interconnected and multidimensional (very complicated)

However, some errors when it comes to defining and addressing these issues are:

• There are clear, predictable, controllable, and linear relationships to how we use and interact with the environment

• Human systems and environmental systems (ecosystems) are treated as seperate independent systems

However, the two above, are not true at all. Ecosystems and human social systems are both very complex. This makes socio-environmental problems even more complex.

• And this is just when we look at it through an “objective” STEM point-of-view, but there are many other considerations such as the social aspects, morality, and thigns we can’t answer with just science alone.

Evironmental Solutions

Most solutions focus on tackling issues with an objective strategy, mainly using STEM to inform analyses, planning, and decision making. THese solutions also tend to focus on the past with restoring things to the way things were before.

But, environmental issues aren’t objective, they’re complex, non-linear, and sometimes unpredictable. Instead of looking at the environment as just numbers and data, we need to see it as interconnected systems that we can shape and shapes us.

To better address problems, environmental solutions should:

• Expect non-linearity and randomness

• Incorporate STEM sciences alongside with social sciences

• Connect communities and rely on each other to inform one another

• Treating the ecosystem and human system as one