I'll let the abstracts do the talking for me.
Part 1:
One facet of City over the years has been a rather dark foreboding that the trajectory of urbanisation around the world is accumulating problems that refuse to be solved and that in the foreseeable future we will see some kind of apocalyptic collapse. In New Orleans we saw one version of this, in other cities there may be others yet to reveal themselves. This paper is one of a trilogy that focus on the 'sustainable development' of cities and that, by the end, spells out a rather specific scenario of collapse as a consequence of energy starvation that we will, in all likelihood, be seeing unfold over the coming decades. Here we take a distanced view of the whole 'sustainable development' and 'sustainable cities' discourse, concluding that it has become diffused and lost in a welter of fragmented analyses, hopes and small projects that, prima facie, is failing to address deteriorating environmental conditions. The point, however, is that the real source of unsustainability of our civilisation lies in its extreme and increasing reliance on fossil fuels which, in the coming decades will be declining in availability. This paper makes a preliminary assessment of the relationship between 'development' and its demand for energy, noting the consistent avoidance of any meaningful assessment of this or what should be done in an effective way to avoid an emerging crisis. This will surely reveal itself with the progressive difficulty, and thence impossibility, of satisfying our energy demands in a situation where the widely held belief in the imminent rapid growth of alternative sources of energy proves to be without foundation. The next paper in the trilogy looks at the reasons why our society is so blind to the tragedy ahead and the third sketches the probable trajectory of the collapse of our civilisation and the consequence of this for the future of cities both in the north and the south.
Part 2:
In the case of our civilisation we can see a number of ingredients that include an early adoption of individualistic thinking that tends to the belief that looking after one's self is better for society than trying to look after society as such (to preacutecis Adam Smith). The postmodern condition and the unalloyed pursuit of consumption in our age is, however, altogether more extravagant than any past civilisation and this paper goes into considerable detail on the way in which our passion for the automobile has come to possess our culture and is screening out any realistic sense of responsibility for what is now looking like a catastrophic collapse ahead. This paper is the centrepiece of a trilogy appearing in the pages of CITY.
Part 3:
It is not at all clear how fast and through what stages the collapse will unfold because there are many variables which will interact differentially and depend crucially on political decisions taken—and possibly major conflicts—along the way; however, we can be sure that in general the decline will be inexorable. By the latter decades of this century, a radically altered world will have emerged, with a greatly reduced population living surrounded by the defunct debris of modernity, comprised of fragmented and largely self-reliant political entities. Our complex, 'globalised' world of megastates and technological hubris will be but a fading memory. The impacts of global warming and other environmental legacies of our age will reduce the options for reconstruction, possibly fatally. The essay ends by surveying the attempts in the shadows of our current civilisation to envisage and even live 'alternatives' that might be seeds of the reconstruction of a civilisation viable within the resource and environmental constraints that can be expected to prevail.
(h/t CityStates)
No comments:
Post a Comment