Author accepted manuscript
Citation:
Caprotti, F. (2014) Eco-urbanism and the eco-city, or denying the right to the city? Antipode 46(5), 1285-1303.
Eco-urbanism and the eco-city, or denying the right to the city?
Federico Caprotti
Contact details: Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. Email:
Eco-urbanism and the eco-city, or denying the right to the city?
Abstract
This paper critically analyses the construction of eco-cities as technological fixes to concerns over climate change, Peak Oil, and other scenarios in the transition towards ‘green capitalism’. It argues for a critical engagement with new-build eco-city projects, firstly by highlighting the inequalities which mean that eco-cities will not benefit those who will be most impacted by climate change: the citizens of the world’s least wealthy states. Secondly, the paper investigates the foundation of eco-city projects on notions of crisis and scarcity. Thirdly, there is a need to critically interrogate the mechanisms through which new eco-cities are built, including the land market, reclamation, dispossession and ‘green grabbing’. Lastly, a sustained focus is needed on the multiplication of workers’ geographies in and around these ‘emerald cities’, especially the ordinary urban spaces and lives of the temporary settlements housing the millions of workers who move from one new project to another.
Keywords: eco-city, sustainable city, transition, climate change, China, political ecology
Eco-urbanism and the eco-city, or denying the right to the city?
Experimental cities, climate change and Peak Oil: eco-cities as ‘technological fixes’
In recent years, there has been an increased level of awareness, anxiety and public debate around rapid urbanisation. Much of the focus has been on the link between urbanisation and continuing, or worsening, environmental despoliation. At a macro scale, there have been attendant, broad systemic fears about transnational and diffuse risks such as climate changeand Peak Oil scenarios, and questions around what these hazards will mean for the world’s urban future (Newman et al 2009). The focus on cities as sites where climate change and dwindling oil resources will take their biggest human toll is presented as stark reality. And yet, it can also be argued that ‘[t]he work of these doomsday predictions is to generate a climate of fear that enables a shift in what is deemed of value, and authorizes methods of social control to protect these new concerns’ (May 2011:119). Green capitalism, green neoliberalism, market environmentalism and a host of urban and economic interventions (from the UK’s new strategy for kick-starting a ‘green economy’ to the Obama administration’s ‘green stimulus plan’ to lift the US out of the 2008 financial crisis) (Bailey and Caprotti 2014) have been forcefully proposed and justified through recourse to fears of crisis and change:
‘As issues of energy security and energy scarcity join climate change on the list of energy predicaments facing society in the coming century, a range of unlikely bedfellows – from the Chinese government to the Transition Towns movement in the UK – are calling for alow carbon transition: a fundamental change in the way we provide energy services’ (Bulkeley et al2011:24).
A key feature of recent research on urban responses to climate change and concerns around the hydrocarbon economy has been a sustained focus on identifying specific urban ‘experiments’ in enabling the mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change (Bulkeley 2013; Bulkeley and Castán Broto 2012; Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013; Evans 2011). Some of these experimental projects take place at relatively small scales, as is the case with eco-neighbourhoods or even individual eco-buildings. Some are operationalized across more geographically diffuse networks of actors, from the government, municipal, corporate and other spheres.
The focus on cities as experimental locations in which to trial new technologies, architectures, and environmental-economic reforms, is in large part linked to a quasi-utopian approach to the city as laboratory, as an empty and bounded container. This approach renders the physical environment of the city as a single site of intervention, and conceptualises the urban as a vessel of constrained socio-economic, environmental, and technological relations. When viewed as an experiment, the city can thus be reduced to a tabula rasa on which new technologies, transitional strategies, and other approaches can be tried and tested, and subsequently rolled out across wider scales. This is reflected in scholarship on socio-technical transitions which highlights the role of specific ‘sites’ (such as cities) where successful ‘experiments’ gain momentum and can then be expanded across the wider societal landscape (Scrase and Smith 2009; Shove and Walker 2007):
‘As a field site, the city exhibits a specific reality that is found, and that possesses an incontestable, singular truth by virtue of its lived materiality. In contrast, the city as lab becomes the cipher for any city, interchangeable and controllable through the manipulation of variables, possessing a truth borne of replicability’ (Evans 2011:226).
In turn, much of the recent focus on the search for urban ‘solutions’ to climate change has been placed on the engineering of new urban environments, often along ecologically modernising and technocratic lines. This is reflected in the burgeoning number of eco-cities being proposed, planned and built across the globe. While many of these projects exist only in marketing documents and blueprints, several are under construction. These include eco-island developments in San Francisco Bay (Joss 2011; Joss, Tomozeiu and Cowley 2011), solar-powered eco-cities such as Masdar, Abu Dhabi (Caprotti and Romanowicz 2013; Cugurullo 2013), ‘smart cities’ such as Songdo, South Korea (Kim 2010; Shwayri 2013), ‘sustainable city’ projects such as Lavasa, India (Datta 2012), and over 100 eco-city projects throughout China (Wu 2012). Eco-cities are often conceived as experimental urban places, and as sites of experimentation not only with technologies and ways of organising the built environment so as to make it more adaptable to climate change, but as key nodes where economic-environmental reforms can be trialled so as to experiment with urban and peri-urban economic bases which make the city the centre of transition towards a ‘low carbon’ economy.
This highlights the role of the eco-city as a ‘technological fix’ based on an assemblage of discourses around the a.) desirability of a transition to green capitalism, and b.) the need to rework the city so that it becomes adaptable to the environmental externalities caused by earlier (industrial, fossil fuel-based) iterations of capitalism (Pow and Neo 2013).At the same time, it highlights a hollowed-out vision of the city-nature nexus, as the urban becomes devoid of human and political potential while being elevated to the role of stage on which the interplay oftechnology and green capitalism can be unleashed in a time of constructed crisis. As Swyngedouw (2009:602) has argued:
‘This is a politics that ‘legitimizes itself by means of a direct reference to the scientific status of its knowledge’ (Žižek, 2006c: 188)...it is a politics reduced to the administration and management of processes whose parameters are defined by consensual socio-scientific knowledges. This reduction of the political to the policing of environmental change...evacuates if not forecloses the properly political and becomes part and parcel of the consolidation of a postpolitical and postdemocratic polity.’
This paper highlights key issues connected with the emergence of experimental eco-city projects. These issues are: a.) the intensification of environmental and economic inequalities in the geographies of eco-urbanism; b.) the deployment of discursive strategies of crisis which construct eco-cities and new, decarbonised iterations of capitalism as the only hope of our collective urban future; c.) the use and marketing of eco-cities as a foil for economic strategies enabling the reproduction of neoliberal economies in the guise of transitions towards ‘green capitalism’ and the ‘green economy’; d.) the need to consider the mechanisms through which eco-cities are built and governed: theseinclude practices of reclamation and dispossession, although there is also an urgent necessity for engagement with the geographies of the ‘new urban poor’, the tens of thousands of mobile and dispersed workers on whose (cheap) labour eco-cities are built; and e.) the need for considering grounded radical alternatives to current iterations of eco-urbanism. These issues are discussed in turn in the rest of the paper.
Inequalities and the geographies of eco-urbanism
Many of the oft-strident debates on urbanization, climate change and Peak Oil have focused on emerging economies.This is presented as appropriate for a variety of reasons, not limited to the fact that while countries in the Global North have been through industrial revolutions and post-industrial transitions, the production of environmental externalities through emissions and contamination are increasing rapidly and are seemingly unstoppable. The fact that the increasingly environmentally polluting role of emerging economies is intimately and directly tied to increasing levels of consumption in the ‘clean’ and ecologically modernising countries of the North is not often explicitly stated. As a result, leading emerging economies are highlighted as the new culprits of human-induced climate change.
China is a case in point: the country’s meteoric economic development – linked in no small part to the opening-up of its labour reserves to international industry in the reform era – is often identified as the future cause of global environmental despoliation.As Kim and Turner (2007:np) have argued, ‘China built its economic success on a foundation of ecological destruction.’Highly visible examples of the effects of environmental degradation in the country are frequently pointed out, from the particulate-laden ‘Beijing smog’, to the ‘rivers of blood’ (Davidson 2013) which flowed through Shanghai in March 2013 as 16,000 pig carcasses infected with porcine circovirus floated past the gleaming skyscrapers of the Lujiazui international financial centre, symbol of China’s economic rise.
This is in no small part due to the magnitude of the country’s rural-urban migratory flows, and because of the breakneck pace of its rate of urbanization (Liu and Diamond 2005). Indeed, by 2012, for the first time in history, the country’s urban population became larger than its rural population, as the largest rural-urban migration the world has ever known reshapes China’s geography. From the ‘hollowed villages’ left in the wake of migrant departures (Liu et al 2013), to the new and unstable geographies of rural-urban migrant class and gender (Chang 2009), to the generation of new and exclusive gated communities (Pow 2007; Wu 2005) in China’s entrepreneurial cities (Wu 2012), the processes of rapid urbanization have become a key socio-environmental concern.
However, while a significant amount of interest in the city-environment nexus in an age of climate change – an anthropocenic era, as some have called it (Hodson and Marvin 2010) – has focused on China (Dhakal 2013), there is a correspondingly wide body of scholarship on the potential impacts of climate change and energy insecurity on cities in Western Europe (Coutard and Rutherford 2013), North America and Oceania, much of it focused on the complexities of governing ‘the economy’ at a time of climatic transition (While et al 2010). What is also apparent is a parallel lack of research on the socio-technical and economic-environmental shape of the urban future in the rest of the world, particularly in the least wealthy parts of the globe. To be sure, there is some research on sustainable urban transitions in the least developed cities and states (Ahmed 2003; Laul 2003). However, much research on urban futures has focused on emerged and emerging economies.
Similarly, it is evident when considering eco-cities, urban environmental retro-fitting and brownfield eco-urban projects that the focus of many of these efforts to re-engineer the city are deeply tied in with spatial and socio-economic contexts where capital flows can actually be materialised. For example, a recent survey uncovered the fact that while urban climate change experiments are not confined to any one region of the world, 52% were located in the Global North, while 46% were situated in emerging economies. Only 2% were located in the world’s least developed states (Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013). This opens up real and pressing questions about the spatial inequalities which are starting to be constructed in an age of climate change: when 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty (World Bank 2010), and when it has long been recognised that the world’s poorest will suffer disproportionately as a result of the impacts of climate change (OECD 2003), it is staggering to realise that 98% of the world’s urban climate change experiments are aimed squarely away from the globe’s poorest citizens. Thus, in light of climate change’s inequitable impacts on the global urban population, there exists a need for sustained engagement with the question of how to engage with the least wealthy urban agglomerations so as to generate fairer socio-environmental conditions. This does not constitute a call to disengage with broader debates around green capitalism and eco-urbanism, but a recognition that steps can be taken to engage with already existing urban conditions in the Global South.
Environmental crisis and the market
If unequally distributed eco-cities are being constructed around the globe and marketed as ‘solutions’ to diffuse yet pressing systemic problems of climate change, Peak Oil and energy security, a key question is the need for critical investigation of the discursive justification of eco-city projects, and of urban climate change experiments more broadly, through recourse to constructed notions of crisis. In many ways, this is not a new concern. Indeed, the deployment of concepts of environmental ‘crisis’ to justify specific environmental and political projects and interventions has been a common feature of critical research on the nature-society nexus (Fitzsimmons 1989; Guthman 1997; Leff 1996). Much of this research has delved deep into the mobilization of ideas of crisis, and associated notions such as scarcity, to critically interrogate urban projects (Davis 1998; Kaika 2005; Swyngedouw 2004).As Yeh (2009) has shown in the case of Western China, discourses of crisis often go hand-in-hand with ecologically modernising governmental initiatives aimed at enacting specific visions of ‘sustainable development’. Nonetheless, what is interesting in recent efforts to conceptualise cities as climate change experiments, and in material efforts to construct eco-city projects in a variety of settings, is an attempt to link cities directly with crisis, and to propose new urban areas as repositories of (economic, technological, architectural) solutions to selected crises.
An example of the construction of a crisis-based rationale for an eco-city project is that of Masdar eco-city, in Abu Dhabi. Planned by Foster + Partners and other members of the transnational architectural and planning elite, and funded by oil wealth from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, the eco-city is projected as a walled compound of (eventually) 50,000 residents:‘A pattern starts to emerge within which particular coalitions of social interests – consultancies, architects and engineers sometimes with elements of the green movement – are collaborating with particular place-based interests in the development of new infrastructural fixes’ (Hodson and Marvin 2010:303). Indeed, Masdar is planned as a container of innovative green technologies and R&D, through the establishment of the new Masdar Institute of Science and Technology (MIST) and the application of a range of high-tech ‘green’ solutions in the urban area.
At its heart, however, Masdar is based on the idea that the eco-city can become a fulcrum for transition away from Abu Dhabi’s oil economy, by kick-starting the development of a green R&D cluster. This means that the city is conceptualised as sustainable in a primarily economic way, and that its economic role lies within the foil of sustainability. Thus, Masdar can be seen as a ‘sandcastle’ (Cugurullo 2013:34), ‘bereft of an organic society’ (Ibid:35), with its urban identity deeply tied to market environmentalism and the linking of the city to Peak Oil and economic transition. Furthermore, the city can be seen as an example of conspicuous eco-urbanism. As Harvey has argued, urbanization projects ‘have emerged in the Middle East in places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi as a way of mopping up the capital surpluses arising from oil wealth in the most conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful ways possible’ (Harvey 2012:12). Although Harvey was referring to projects such as the building of an indoor ski slope in Dubai, eco-cities such as Masdar can similarly be interpreted as an example of a conspicuous urbanism which is not only aimed at absorbing some of the city’s oil wealth, but at turning oil capital into a way of constructing new ‘green’ markets and positioning the emirate at a strategic juncture at which it will be able to take advantage of the world’s increasing need for environmental technologies.
Thus, the city-nature nexus becomes, in the eco-city, a site where the problematic of industrialisation and environmental degradation can be reconciled with the imperative for sustained and rapid economic growth. With their promise of economic and industrial incentives and reforms, eco-cities have become the focus of economic and governance discourses which posit the city at once as the site of environmental problems, and as the urban area where new technological fixes can be applied to both real and constructed notions of climate crisis and climate change. As Chen has argued in the case of Chinese eco-cities, these new, ‘green’ urban projects are part and parcel of ‘interventions into global market-based solutions to climate change as integral problems of Chinese national development and modernization’ (Chen 2013:102). The link between eco-urbanism and the market, and the justification of eco-city projects through recourse to techno-socially rationalised crisis discourses is thus a crucial topic for critical analysis, and is closely linked to the deployment of ideas of crisis in justifications of green capitalism.