Abstract
Obstacles to developing sustainable cities: the real estate rigidity trap
Highlights
Urban sprawl—low density and fragmented, separate land use, car-centric development (Hayden 2004)—has been a persistent environmental problem in many Western, developed nations and similar patterns of development are emerging globally (Leichenko and Solecki 2005)
In this article I examine the role of developers as private sector, de facto land managers in urban social-ecological systems to understand the persistence of conventional sprawl development and the failure of sustainable alternatives to penetrate conventional markets
Forest fire suppression in the American Southwest is a land management system that was designed to reduce the threat of wildfire by mitigating fires; it neglected the ecological function of fires in forest systems leading to the accumulation of fire-fuelling biomass and catastrophic fires
Summary
Urban sprawl—low density and fragmented, separate land use, car-centric development (Hayden 2004)—has been a persistent environmental problem in many Western, developed nations and similar patterns of development are emerging globally (Leichenko and Solecki 2005). Control over the urbanization processes has shifted, to large and sometimes national or international real estate development firms (Weiss 1987, Seto et al 2010), which are party to markets that sustainable alternatives have failed to substantially penetrate (Fuerst and McAllister 2009, Miller et al 2008) Common explanations for this failure include the high cost of development and prohibitive land-use regulations. In this article I examine the role of developers as private sector, de facto land managers in urban social-ecological systems to understand the persistence of conventional sprawl development and the failure of sustainable alternatives to penetrate conventional markets. Two main types of traps, poverty and rigidity, have been deployed in the resilience literature and though both describe systems that are unable to change, the characteristics of social-ecological systems that lead to each are distinct (Carpenter and Brock 2008; Table 1)
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