Environmental Solutions and Urban Development

Environmental Solutions (ENVSCI 201)

  • The course focuses on understanding why environments are degraded and what can be done about it, considering how human activities influence water and issues of contamination, and touching on restoration and remediation.
  • Human activities significantly influence natural processes, and environmental science aims to determine what actions can be taken.

Urban Development

  • In 1910, the urban population was 170 million (10% of global). It has grown rapidly to 746 million in 1950 and 3.9 billion in 2014 (54% of the world population), according to UN 2014 data.
  • The urban population is now 4.5 billion (World Bank 2022).
  • Cities offer opportunities for economic development and expanding access to basic services like healthcare and education.
  • Providing transportation, housing, electricity, water, and sanitation for a densely settled urban population is typically cheaper and less environmentally damaging than providing similar services for rural populations.

Growth of Auckland

  • 1840-2000: Colonial settlers arrived.
  • 1870: Population stagnant, described as "filthy, dirty, and squalid" with overpowering smells. A City Council was established to provide services like streets, drainage, water supply, and policing.
  • 1914: Wastewater reticulation and the first water treatment plant were established.
  • 1920: The era of concreting began (population 65,000).
  • 1930: Residential roads were sealed.
  • 1945: Population reached 128,000 (half in Auckland City).
  • 1964: Population reached 500,000 (a quarter in Auckland City).
  • 1996: Population reached 1 million.
  • 2023: Population reached 1.7 million, with Auckland increasing in size by 49 people and 21 houses every day.

Long History of Urban Scholarship

  • Engels wrote about the condition of workers in Victorian England.
  • Howard initiated garden cities at the end of the 19th century.
  • Le Corbusier worked to provide better living conditions in crowded cities from the 1920s to the 1960s.
  • Lots of work focused on developing more sustainable cities.
  • More recently, the debate emerged out of multiple crises – economic and ecologic – of industrial capitalism (growth).
  • Particular emphasis on how these crises were perceived by Western nation-states in the late 1960s and 70s.
  • Part of a wider discourse about ‘the environment’ and attempts to find a proper relationship between people and the Earth.
  • What characterizes this modern conversation is the priority given to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to classify and solve the environmental crisis.

Modern Sustainable Cities

  • The Urban Challenge was a chapter in the Brundtland Report 1987, Our Common Future.
  • Urban research came into focus in the late 1990s/early 2000s with the application of ecological frameworks to dynamic urban landscapes.
  • Cities were reassessed as complex, adaptive, socio-ecological systems.
  • STEM dominates our institutions and their decision-making.
  • Meyerson et al. 2007: “The greatest human-environmental experiment of all time.”

Local Scale Response

  • Environmental science has focused on finding local-scale solutions to physically-based problems.
  • How might we deal with this increase in urban population?
  • Do we fully appreciate why people want to live in cities?
  • Should we promote settlement elsewhere (i.e., limit urban growth)?
  • Between 1980 and 2012, China's Urbanization increased from about 20% to 50% of population.
  • Overcrowding, air and water pollution, environmental degradation, contagious disease, and crime followed.
  • Severe labor shortage in its rural communities as men moved to cities and left behind women (47M more) and children (58M more).
  • “Eco-civilization” was proposed in the 2012 National People’s Congress.
  • China is investing heavily in city living – clean air and supply, safe neighborhoods, and city infrastructure.

Economics

  • Increased urbanization is welcomed by economists who assume it underpins economic growth and increases the wealth of nations.
  • There is no empirical evidence of a causal effect of the level of urban population share on the pace of economic growth.
  • Cities result in concentrated land, water, and air pollution.
  • Hopelessness, fear, social exclusion, and poor living conditions are hardly symbols of progress.

How do solutions work?

  • Sustainable/environmental solutions are usually understood as differently configured technical structures.
  • These can be more-or-less better designed in relation to an external definition of environmental standards.
  • Recently there has been a turn towards other ways of thinking about environments and the work of environmental scientists.

“Emerging recognition of two fundamental errors under-pinning past policies for natural resource issues heralds awareness of the need for a worldwide fundamental change in thinking and in practice of environmental management. The first error has been an implicit assumption that ecosystem responses to human use are linear, predictable, and controllable. The second has been an assumption that human and natural systems can be treated independently.” (Folke et al. 2002)

Managing environments

  • Interconnected and multidimensional – complex.
  • Complexity is a result of a large number and variety of interactions in socio-environments.
  • Ecosystems are complex (and our knowledge about them is [very] limited).
  • Human social systems are complex too.
  • Socio-Environmental problems and solutions link ecosystems and human social systems (making them doubly complex).

Assignment

  • Build on your understanding of urban freshwater habitat degradation and water pollution to evaluate the science of Water Sensitive Urban Design.
  • An example of a local-scale, scientific solution to the environmental problem (freshwater pollution) of urban development.
  • In a similar way to previous tutorials, you’ll download data and develop an infographic to communicate a scientific understanding of the problem/solution to a wide audience.
  • Reflect on and critique the doing of environmental science in this way i.e. making an attractive problem/ solution statement using STEM to put in front of STEM based decisions makers.

WSUD (sponge city/ Low impact design)

  • A new approach to urban water management. Introduces a range of Nature-Based Solutions to the city. Also an attempt to overcome the hegemony of science and engineering.
  • Depart from an understanding founded on a pre-defined conception of the environmental problem in which appropriate ends (sustainability) and means (technology) are assumed.
  • Consider the embodiment of different perceptions of what the environment, the city, and society are all about and the work that environmental science does.
  • Your aim should not be to “discredit environmental claims [solutions] but rather to understand how they are created, legitimated, and contested” (Hannigan 2014).