Cities of Flows and the Spectre
of the Sustainable City
A think piece for the ESPAS 2016 conference by Erik Swyngedouw, Professor, University of Manchester; author of ‘The Post-Political city?’ and ‘The Globalized City’
It is vitally important to recognise that planetary urbanisation is one of the main drivers of the ecological predicament the world is in. Indeed, the ‘sustainability’ of contemporary urban life — understood as the expanded reproduction of its socio-physical form and functioning — accounts for 80% of the world’s resource use, of global ecological degradation, and of the world’s waste. What I wish to foreground in this contribution is that these urban roots that structure global socioecological flows and the feeble techno-managerial attempts to produce more ‘sustainable’ forms of urban living actually are customarily ignored by both researchers and policy-makers, while it is precisely these socio-metabolic flows that continue to sharpen the combined and uneven socio-ecological patterning that marks contemporary urbanisation dynamics.
The ‘sustainability’ of contemporary urban life — understood as the expanded reproduction of its sociophysical form and functioning — accounts for 80% of the world’s resource use, of global ecological degradation, and of the world’s waste.
I see urbanisation as a socio-ecological metabolic process whose functioning is predicated upon increasingly longer, often globally structured, metabolic flows that fuse together materials, natures, and peoples in socially, ecologically and technologically articulated, but uneven, manners. I am concerned, therefore, with the question of the urbanisation OF nature, that is the process through which all manner of natures, from a wide range of localised ecologies, are socially mobilised, economically incorporated, bio-chemically metabolised and technologically transformed in order to support the global urbanisation process. Consider, for example, how the everyday functioning of urban IT-networks, social media, smart infrastructural networks and eco-architecture, informatics, and the like are predicated upon mobilising minerals like Coltan from some of the socio-ecologically most vulnerable places on earth, upon global production chains that are shaped by deepening uneven socio-ecological conditions, and upon a ‘re-cycling’ process that returns much of the e-waste to the socio-ecologically dystopian geographies of Mumbai’s or Dhaka’s suburban informal wastelands.
Therefore, there is an urgent research and policy agenda opening up that should focus on exploring and considering the geographically uneven constellations associated with globally constituted smart technological networks, connectivities, and transformations through which the metabolic circulations of matter, people and natures are organised, and to recognise the pivotal role of urbanisation therein.
