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Meadow to mega city
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MEADOW TO MEGACITY: MEETING FUTURE NEEDS IN AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT Abstract: There has been considerable interest in determining whether urbanisation is enhancing or degrading the earth’s environmental capacity when separated from economic growth and population growth. The environmental sustainability of cities in the developing world is contrasted against cities in the developed world. Results show that sustainability is improved by urbanisation when economic and population growth is constant. Keywords: Urbanisation; environmental sustainability. Introduction The twentieth century has seen extraordinary increases in the number of people inhabiting urban areas. In 1900, approximately 160 million people, or 10% of the world's population was urbanised. A century later urban-dwellers constituted 47% of the world population or 2,850 million people (United Nations 2001). The influential Limits to growth (Meadows et al. 1972) demonstrated that a growing population, growing consumption and growing waste production was not sustainable. Furthermore Limits to growth argued that no 'technological fix' could ever enable this growth to be sustainable. Herman Daly (1999) argues that economic growth is similarly unsustainable. Since the release of the Bruntland report (WCED 1990), vigorous debate has ensued about how to achieve sustainable development, development that enables the human population to meet their needs indefinitely. In biophysical terms humans draw materials and energy from planetary sources and return wastes and heat to the earth. There are limits to the rate at which the human population can draw from planetary sources and limits to the rate at which planetary sinks can absorb the wastes and pollution created by us. Sustainability involves staying within these limits on a local, regional and global scale (Meadows 1996). The predominant forces causing changing patterns of human distribution and resource use are not examined in detail in this paper. It is enough to know that a combination of social, cultural, political, technological, geographical and historical forces operate within the framework of economics to cause the trends we are seeing today. These forces express themselves on a household scale by changing patterns of consumption and production of water, food, energy and goods. On a local scale they are expressed by urban density and patterns. On a national level they determine population distribution among cities. Once established, growth in urban areas acquires a self-perpetuating nature by combining the cumulative location advantage of good road, rail, sea and air links, high capacity communication lines, adequate housing, consumption and education for the labour force and the opportunity that a concentrated population base brings. (Heilig 1999) It is useful to group cities based on whether they are in an economically developed nation or a developing nation. The pattern of environmental impact in cities at the early stages of economic development is quite distinct from the environmental impacts of cities that are in well-developed countries.
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