Abstract
Since the 1990s, a recurrent trope of the ‘global sustainable city’ has emerged in popular and professional discussions of globalization, sustainable development and urban innovation. Published in commercial publications and grey literature on policy, design and global trends, the trope is also articulated in a genre of trade books by urban consultants and in public showcases that project the city as a socially, economically and environmentally beneficial entity – a sustainable complex system that is even promoted to be humanity’s best hope for solving the global ecological problems of the twenty-first century. This article traces how urbanist Jane Jacobs’s notion of urban complexity becomes an allusive reference in examples of popular global sustainability discourse that present the city as an evolutionary self-organizing entity of systemic networks and physical flows. It examines urban economist Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, and Greener (2011), urbanist Leo Hollis’s Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis (2013) and urban strategist Jeb Brugmann’s Welcome to the Urban Revolution (2009), as well as the smart building showcase of engineering multinational conglomerate Siemens, The Crystal. The article demonstrates how the trope of urban complexity is mobilized to project the city as a generic scalable entity of creativity and energy efficiency. It becomes the basis of an infrastructural imaginary of neoliberal innovation that supports entrepreneurial and ‘smart-eco’ agendas of urban design and governance that promise – but have yet to deliver – planetary ecological amelioration.
Highlights
Produced and circulated by an international research–industrial complex that includes urban designers, architects and planners, urban policy think tanks, international press, multinational conglomerates, United Nations agencies and urban consultants, the trope of the ‘global sustainable city’ has been promoted in various contemporary professional and trade publications and platforms since the 1990s
The trope of the ‘global sustainable city’ comes across as a neoliberal imaginary of ‘the city’ as an innovative solution which extends the economic dynamics of global capitalism to addressing planetary ecological problems
Examples of ‘global sustainable city’ discourse allude and refer to urbanist Jane Jacobs’s notion of ‘bottom-up urbanism’ from The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) in putting forward arguments about vibrant entrepreneurial and creative social community networks, as well as about the transformative advantages of compact urbanism and high urban density. Her analogy of the city to a biological or ecological entity is more generally evoked and juxtaposed with ideas of metabolic urban complexity, such as the metabolic theory of cities from theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, who describes his research on cities as ‘finding a way to “scientifically confirm” [Jacobs’s] conjectures’
Summary
Produced and circulated by an international research–industrial complex that includes urban designers, architects and planners, urban policy think tanks, international press, multinational conglomerates, United Nations agencies and urban consultants, the trope of the ‘global sustainable city’ has been promoted in various contemporary professional and trade publications and platforms since the 1990s. In Welcome to the Urban Revolution, Jeb Brugmann notes that ‘the scale of the global City’s mundane forces is so great that it has revolutionized Earth’s ecology’,11 and argues that the application of urban strategy would enable the city to develop into a more politically, economically and ecologically stable system that would transform cities into sites of solutions for global problems.12 Behind these overarching triumphal claims for the city’s capacities are summarized arguments of ‘hyper-urbanization’, advocated by urban experts who see urban density, technological innovation, energy efficiencies and economies of scale as environmental advantages of urban living.. They explain how these urban dynamics bring about environmental resource efficiency. The index compares and ranks 120 capital cities and business centres around the world over eight categories, such as energy consumption and air quality, by utilizing the extrapolation of partial and national data when city data are not available, and statistical methods to create commensurability between the data of cities of different regions and developmental profiles – especially those of developing cities which have ‘limited comparability’.48
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