75
A second contribution from Andrews in the Handbook examines municipal solid
waste management through the combined lens of IE and political economy. Andrews
( 2002b ) notes that methods of IE have been used by US waste management policy
analysts since the 1970s for mass fl ow analysis and since the 1980s for life cycle
assessment. The perspective of political economy is required to address issues
beyond IE – such as trans-boundary transport, deregulation and environmental justice. Andrews provides integrative analysis of the predominant actors at each stage
of the product life cycle. This leads to an examination of the basis for government
intervention and a summary of lessons from implementation.
A further collection of papers on IE edited by Dominique Bourg and Suren
Erkman (2003) includes one urban fl avoured chapter, out of 28, this being on Urban
Transportation and IE by Tom Graedel and Michael Jensen ( 2003 ). The short paper
reviews the costs and benefi ts of automotive transportation and considers three different approaches to optimizing the net benefi ts. An urban system is proposed comprising trams, high-speed networks and feeder lines, with automobile restricted to
low- density suburbs and new ways of handling personal cargo developed.
This review of formative literature on IE shows relatively sparing attention to
urban systems, but it would be wrong to conclude that the early protagonists of IE
failed to understand the signifi cance of cities in environmental challenges. For
example, both Andrews and Graedel were attendees of the Snowmass 1992 summit
and were (and remain) infl uential within IE. Andrews was coeditor of the Snowmass
proceedings and went on to become a Chair of Planning at Rutgers University,
where he published several papers pertaining to IE and cities (some discussed below
here). Graedel, the fi rst Professor of Industrial Ecology, and the fi rst President of the
International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE), examines metal stocks and
fl ows in cities within his wider work at other scales. Another who worked on cities
was Jesse Ausubel, coeditor of a National Academy of Engineering book on Cities
and Their Vital Systems (Ausubel and Herman 1988 ). Like Andrews and Graedel, he
attended the formative meeting of the ISIE in 2000 and also coedited the proceeding
of a National Academy of Engineering meeting on Energy and Environment
(Ausubel and Sladovich 1989 ). A further attendee at the Snowmass meeting – and
early infl uence in IE – was Arnulf Grübler – who had a profound understanding of
the role of cities on global environmental change. In his text Technology and Global
Change (Grübler 1998 ) – which arguably should be the fi rst textbook read by students of IE – Grübler clearly describes how the phenomena of urbanization result
from improvements in agricultural productivity.
3 Into the Twenty-First Century
Moving into the twenty-fi rst century, there is the emergence of an academic research
literature specifi cally concerned with applications of IE to cities. This can be examined through use of the search function on Scopus, although many caveats are
required. A fi rst set of search results, shown in Fig. 4.1 , is for papers that explicitly
4 Industrial Ecology and Cities
A second contribution from Andrews in the Handbook examines municipal solid
waste management through the combined lens of IE and political economy. Andrews
( 2002b ) notes that methods of IE have been used by US waste management policy
analysts since the 1970s for mass fl ow analysis and since the 1980s for life cycle
assessment. The perspective of political economy is required to address issues
beyond IE – such as trans-boundary transport, deregulation and environmental justice. Andrews provides integrative analysis of the predominant actors at each stage
of the product life cycle. This leads to an examination of the basis for government
intervention and a summary of lessons from implementation.
A further collection of papers on IE edited by Dominique Bourg and Suren
Erkman (2003) includes one urban fl avoured chapter, out of 28, this being on Urban
Transportation and IE by Tom Graedel and Michael Jensen ( 2003 ). The short paper
reviews the costs and benefi ts of automotive transportation and considers three different approaches to optimizing the net benefi ts. An urban system is proposed comprising trams, high-speed networks and feeder lines, with automobile restricted to
low- density suburbs and new ways of handling personal cargo developed.
This review of formative literature on IE shows relatively sparing attention to
urban systems, but it would be wrong to conclude that the early protagonists of IE
failed to understand the signifi cance of cities in environmental challenges. For
example, both Andrews and Graedel were attendees of the Snowmass 1992 summit
and were (and remain) infl uential within IE. Andrews was coeditor of the Snowmass
proceedings and went on to become a Chair of Planning at Rutgers University,
where he published several papers pertaining to IE and cities (some discussed below
here). Graedel, the fi rst Professor of Industrial Ecology, and the fi rst President of the
International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE), examines metal stocks and
fl ows in cities within his wider work at other scales. Another who worked on cities
was Jesse Ausubel, coeditor of a National Academy of Engineering book on Cities
and Their Vital Systems (Ausubel and Herman 1988 ). Like Andrews and Graedel, he
attended the formative meeting of the ISIE in 2000 and also coedited the proceeding
of a National Academy of Engineering meeting on Energy and Environment
(Ausubel and Sladovich 1989 ). A further attendee at the Snowmass meeting – and
early infl uence in IE – was Arnulf Grübler – who had a profound understanding of
the role of cities on global environmental change. In his text Technology and Global
Change (Grübler 1998 ) – which arguably should be the fi rst textbook read by students of IE – Grübler clearly describes how the phenomena of urbanization result
from improvements in agricultural productivity.
3 Into the Twenty-First Century
Moving into the twenty-fi rst century, there is the emergence of an academic research
literature specifi cally concerned with applications of IE to cities. This can be examined through use of the search function on Scopus, although many caveats are
required. A fi rst set of search results, shown in Fig. 4.1 , is for papers that explicitly
4 Industrial Ecology and Cities