Better Living Through Extensity

Abstract

A reduction of material production and consumption rates—and a related desire to challenge the economic growth paradigm—have once again become core values for radical urbanists concerned with pressing environmental matters including natural resource depletion and loss of biodiversity. Underlying these values is a critique that any hope of achieving an appropriate response vis-a-vis ‘sustainability’ is an exercise in futility: a game of cat-and-mouse lacking conceptual clarity and hopelessly devoted to a metaphysical state of harmonious balance. As a moving target, the ‘zero horizon’ (if even achievable) would either be surpassed or vacated the instant it was attained, owing to the dynamism of the phenomena involved. From a spatial perspective, these criticisms often turn their sights on the notion of ‘sustainable development’, which has been plagued for years with an unwavering devotion to the city as both a unit of study and a geographical space. The notion of ‘sustainable development’ was originally put forth by the UN through its publication Our Common Future (1987)—often referred to as the ‘Brundtland Commission Report’. Its core ethos was that society can remain committed to an economic growth model (‘development’), as long as we do so through the establishment of limits. Enforced through regulatory legislation, ‘limits’ quickly became spatialized as the ‘compact city’. Equally problematic is the persistent claim that an urban system’s ‘ecological footprint’ offers a definitive metric for performance, in turn recommending the ‘compact city’ as the ideal type-form for an environmentally responsible society. However, in both ideas- sustainable development and the compact city—the city is really no more than a red herring.