Cities, energy and the uncertain future of urban civilization

Abstract

I will begin by summarizing what I am going to say as a primer for what is to come. I argue that modern cities could not have developed at all without fossil fuels and that today’s urban civilization will find it difficult to persist without fossil fuels. Of course, there is a catch. Fossil fuels are the principal enablers of ‘ecological overshoot’ and its many symptoms, including climate change. Mainstream efforts to address climate change will not only not fix climate change but will also worsen overshoot. Unfortunately, overshoot is a fatal condition. Unless we address overshoot directly, the remaining life of modern urban civilization may well be nasty, brutish and short. Current thinking about urbanization ignores overshoot and is taking us precisely down this Hobbesian pathway. This may seem like a sweeping overstatement, but it does describe humanity’s current trajectory. A dramatic transformation in thinking is essential for urban sustainability. Now to elaborate, most governments and mainstream international agencies think that climate change is the major ‘environmental’ issue and that we can halt climate change. People in highincome countries generally seem to believe that the future will unfold as a technology-enhanced extension of the relatively recent past. We project urban populations to increase to 6.7 billion by 2050. There are supposedly going to be 43 mega cities with more than 10 million inhabitants by 2030 etc. I argue that all such conventional projections are simplistically reductionist. The mainstream prognosis ignores energy and resource constraints, deteriorating geopolitics and the accelerating degradation of the ecosphere. Most urban sustainability efforts are single-focused on mitigating climate change or on so-called ‘smart-city’ initiatives. There is virtually no consideration of the concept of ecological carrying capacity or the need for high-income city dwellers in particular to achieve material standards that are consistent with living on a single planet (i.e. we must reduce consumption to be compatible with ‘one-planet living’). Even those cities that are focusing on reversing climate change are generally falling short in reducing their carbon dioxide emissions. Urbanists commit another major perceptual error. We frequently read that ‘urbanized land constitutes only ~3% of the total land area’ (excluding Antarctica and Greenland), as if Earth were empty and urbanization is not a major factor in global change. But this is, again, static simplicity. Cities are not just dots on a map but also dynamic living systems. An urban ecosystem is globally dispersed far beyond the city proper. A city’s true ecological footprint (EF) is the total area of productive ecosystems that its population requires, on a continuous basis, to produce the bio resources that it consumes and to assimilate its carbon and other wastes wherever on earth those ecosystems may be located. Typically, the eco-footprint of a large modern city is a hundred to a thousand times larger than the geographic or built-up area of that city. A city’s EF is the actual functional area of productive land/water on Earth occupied ecologically by that city’s population. Let us take a typical case, Tokyo, to illustrate ecological reality (it is not quite typical as Tokyo is the world’s largest city). With a population of 38 million – which, by the way, is roughly the population of Canada – and a per capita EF of 4.5 global average hectares (gha), Tokyo’s de facto