Consuming Cities: The Urban Environment in the Global Economy After the Rio Declaration
Edited by Nicholas Low, Brendan Bleeson, Ingemar Elander, and Rolf Lidskog (2000)
London: Routledge
315 pages, $19.99 paperback
ISBN 0-415-18769-9
Consuming Cities places the world's rapid, resource-intensive Growth in an alarming ecological context. The focus in on the status of urban-environmental policies implemented after the 1992 Earth Summit's Rio Declaration. In the end, the book's editors express concern about the inability of capitalism to deal effectively with mounting environmental problems at local, regional and global levels. The editors suggest that the gross magnitude of environmental problems that are thrown up in the wake of capitalism's global growth machine may overwhelm any prospect of achieving sustainable development. But they don't go as far to say that sustainable capitalism is impossible. They place some faith in the power of a mobilized, urban-based, global citizenry to harness capital mobility for the common good. How exactly this will take place is not so clear. Somehow city-regions of the world will find ways to share information equitably and create a world-wide network of regulation.
In the preface, first two chapters, and conclusion, the editors of Consuming Cities do a fine job weaving together critical insights from political economy, world systems theory, economic geography, ecological modernization theory, urban sociology and policy analysis. The task of these chapters is to set the tone of the book and provide the reader with an interpretative conceptual framework. In part, they succeed. The book does a good job drawing attention to urbanization as an environmental process. They expose the false dichotomy between the so-called built environment and natural environment (p. 23). Although they don't mention his work, William Cronon captures the same point in a book he wrote about Chicago titled Nature's Metropolis. The title "Consuming Cities" comes close to this by deliberately evoking the image of cities as nodal points ("engines") in the world economy's dramatically rising level of material and energy throughput (resources in, waste out). The authors note how world consumption expenditures have risen six times between 1950 and 1988 (p. 1). To come to grips with this dramatic growth in consumption, most of it urban-based, calls for innovative approaches to urban-environmental planning. Many of the chapters cite best practices along these lines. Citing the 1996 City Summit's (Habitat II) report, the book emphasize the argument that: "The need for planning becomes ever more necessary in the light of the increased social, economic, and environmental impacts of urbanization, growing consumption levels and renewed concerns for sustainable development since the adoption of Agenda 21" (p. 7). At the same time, however, the authors caution us that the call for planning is not an uncontested one. They sketch out a struggle between two fundamentally opposed discourses, or what they refer to as Trope A (raw capitalism) and Trope B (environmental governance) (p. 282). Trope A has the upper hand right now with the global ascendancy of neo-liberalism, privatization, and structural adjustment policies.
Overall, the book contains both the strengths and weaknesses of an edited collection. It's strength derives from its broad coverage of countries and topics by a wide-range of experienced contributors. The individual chapters examine three categories of countries, including the world's core economies; the giant states of China and India; and a number of smaller economies including Sweden, Poland, Australia and Indonesia. This kind of broad comparative coverage is hard to come by in one text. I am thus inclined to use the book in an undergraduate course I teach on cities and the environment in the global economy. The book's weakness stems, in part, from the difficulty of eliminating redundancy in a collection of essays (e.g., chapter 2 repeats some of what was said in chapter 1). Another weakness has to do with the difficulty of building a coherent analytic framework across so many chapters. In the end, one finishes reading this collection without a clear sense for orders of magnitude with respect to identifying progressive agency. In other words, a clear picture does not emerge across the cases that sheds light on the relative power and respective roles of industry, government, NGOs, academics and scientists, social movements, etc., when it comes to the challenge of promoting/implementing sustainable urban development. The juxtaposition of raw capitalism and environmental governance (Tropes A and B) is too sweeping and reductionist to help one think strategically about building the kind of mutually reinforcing relations necessary to enable diverse stakeholders to collaborate. A more nuanced view is necessary to understand the political, institutional, technological, economic, and ecological conditions that have coalesced in the era of globalization to favor a more environmentally proactive response among transnational corporations, governments and community-based organizations.
Consuming Cities has a threefold objective. It aims: "1. to bring the urban 'consumption' dimension of ecological sustainable development into sharper focus; 2. to evaluate critically the success of the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21 as a means of bringing about proper regulation (in the urban domain) of the global environment for a sustainable society; [and] 3. to consider the wider question of global governance for the ecological regulation of cities, and what further development of global institutions might be needed" (xii). In my estimation, the book has the most to offer on the second aim, and less to offer on aims one and three. For instance, with respect to evaluating the success of the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21, chapter three ("A rough road out of Rio") provides a decent overview of political culture in the U.S. Likewise, chapter four ("Contradictions at the local scale") gives the reader a thoughtful categorization and content analysis of local Agenda 21 programs. Other chapters (5-13) covering Great Britain, Germany, Japan, China, India, Sweden, Poland, Australia and Indonesia provide a useful comparative perspective showing mixed results. This is really the heart of the book, a strong focus on policy.
As far as aim 1 is concerned (bringing the urban 'consumption' dimension of ecological sustainable development into sharper focus), the reader doesn't get much beyond broad observations from secondary sources. Some references are made to "ecological footprints" but there is little in the way of original analysis. Perhaps the least developed or satisfying is the coverage of aim 3 (the wider question of global governance for the ecological regulation of cities). While the book does a good job giving us an integrated systems view (i.e., spelling out the interrelations linking economy-ecology, production-consumption, north-south, etc.), there is a reductionist theme that avoids detection. It has to do with the implicit conceptualization of civil society as a progressive force in history making. This may well be the case; indeed I think it is for the most part. But one always has to be careful not to depict any class of social, political or economic actor in monolithic terms. There is a tacit assumption throughout the book that if only the masses of society were equally empowered, barriers to social injustice and inequity--and then, barriers to sustainability could be removed. Where is the reactionary NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) scenario in this view? Where is the negative form of social capital (gangs, drug cartels) in this view? Where is the culture of mass consumerism (some of which makes us our own worst enemies)?
Finally, the book is thin on references to some very insightful theory-building that economic geographers are devoting to the so-called "new regionalism" (a dynamic that is changing the competitive landscape of the world economy). In a paper titled GLOBAL CITY-REGIONS (by Allen J. Scott, John Agnew, Edward W. Soja, and Michael Storper), the authors stress the importance of city-regions as fundamental spatial units of the global economy and as political actors on the world stage: "city-regions are becoming increasingly central to modern economic and social life. In a parallel set of developments, many global city-regions and the territories that surround them are beginning to consolidate politically in response to the search by counties, metropolitan areas, municipalities, etc. for region-wide coalitions as a means of dealing with the threats and the opportunities of globalization" (see http://www.sppsr.ucla.edu/globalcityregions/Overview/intro.html). This is a theme that resonates with the argument the editors make in the conclusion of Consuming Cities. To realize the kind of progressive global city-region federation the editors call for demands deeper insight into this new regionalism and the way it works itself out in the context of uneven development around the world.
Keith Pezzoli, Ph.D.
University of California, San Diego
[1,369 words]