2.2.2 Idea II: Building Adaptable, Resilient, Livable Cities,
and Urban Regions
What are the realities and ideas that should drive the policy responses to this global
dilemma? Of prime importance is the need to create an understanding of the
relationship between the urbanization process and the environmental change.
There are three major features of the nexus between urbanization, economic, environmental, and societal change:
1. the fact that a substantial proportion of global GHGs output is produced in urban
regions
2. the impact of urbanization upon the ecosystems of which these urban regions are
part and
3. the demands that urban regions place on resources sourced locally, nationally,
and globally that have deleterious impacts on biotic and physical resources such
as water, energy, and food. It is now widely accepted that the greatest threat to
global sustainability stems from the demands of urban growth in all these three
areas and that there is a need for a powerful policy thrust that aims to mitigate this
urban impact.
The nineteenth-century idea of cities as linear resource-extracting machines that
underlay the idea of industrial urbanism has persisted in a mind-set that continued
into the twentieth century. The end product of this global demand for resources
during the industrial era created “such strain on the natural functions of the Earth that
the ability of the planet’s ecosystem to sustain future generations can be no longer
taken for granted” (Millennium Assessment MA 2005). Much of the analysis that
feeds into this kind of conclusion is produced at three levels:
1. global level, carried out by global agencies such as the Intergovernmental Panel
on Global Change and various UN Agencies
2. national level that includes both national data and scaled up data from other levels
of government such as provinces or states and
3. local level (county, city), where data are used to thicken up data assembled at the
national or global level. They provide the “meat” of national and global statistics
that reinforce the urgency of action.
It is important to emphasize that these three levels of analysis have largely
ignored one of the most important features of the twenty-first century: the emergence
of large urban regions that are expanding outward into previously rural areas. While
these extended urban spaces have already become an important feature of the
developed world, their numbers will increase rapidly in the developing countries
and particularly in Asia, broadly defined as the geographic area stretching from
Pakistan and the countries of Central Asia to Japan and from China and the two
Koreas to Indonesia. It is estimated that the level of urbanization in Asia was 36% in
2007, one of the lowest of any large geographical region in the world, which means
that the growth of urban population in Asia could exceed more than 2 billion in the
2 The Management of Urbanization, Development, and Environmental Change in. . .
23
and Urban Regions
What are the realities and ideas that should drive the policy responses to this global
dilemma? Of prime importance is the need to create an understanding of the
relationship between the urbanization process and the environmental change.
There are three major features of the nexus between urbanization, economic, environmental, and societal change:
1. the fact that a substantial proportion of global GHGs output is produced in urban
regions
2. the impact of urbanization upon the ecosystems of which these urban regions are
part and
3. the demands that urban regions place on resources sourced locally, nationally,
and globally that have deleterious impacts on biotic and physical resources such
as water, energy, and food. It is now widely accepted that the greatest threat to
global sustainability stems from the demands of urban growth in all these three
areas and that there is a need for a powerful policy thrust that aims to mitigate this
urban impact.
The nineteenth-century idea of cities as linear resource-extracting machines that
underlay the idea of industrial urbanism has persisted in a mind-set that continued
into the twentieth century. The end product of this global demand for resources
during the industrial era created “such strain on the natural functions of the Earth that
the ability of the planet’s ecosystem to sustain future generations can be no longer
taken for granted” (Millennium Assessment MA 2005). Much of the analysis that
feeds into this kind of conclusion is produced at three levels:
1. global level, carried out by global agencies such as the Intergovernmental Panel
on Global Change and various UN Agencies
2. national level that includes both national data and scaled up data from other levels
of government such as provinces or states and
3. local level (county, city), where data are used to thicken up data assembled at the
national or global level. They provide the “meat” of national and global statistics
that reinforce the urgency of action.
It is important to emphasize that these three levels of analysis have largely
ignored one of the most important features of the twenty-first century: the emergence
of large urban regions that are expanding outward into previously rural areas. While
these extended urban spaces have already become an important feature of the
developed world, their numbers will increase rapidly in the developing countries
and particularly in Asia, broadly defined as the geographic area stretching from
Pakistan and the countries of Central Asia to Japan and from China and the two
Koreas to Indonesia. It is estimated that the level of urbanization in Asia was 36% in
2007, one of the lowest of any large geographical region in the world, which means
that the growth of urban population in Asia could exceed more than 2 billion in the
2 The Management of Urbanization, Development, and Environmental Change in. . .
23