Interwoven Cities by Liam Magee

Author:Liam Magee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137546173
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2016-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

3.3Weaving sustainable urban futures

Returning to the analytic fabric, from the perspective of what Taylor terms the ‘egological’ perspective of the city itself, each of these four relations corresponds to a broad connective strand, reaching out through space or over time, that is itself a myriad of threads that compose the city’s interwovenness. Summarising the previous sections, these strands include:

The interior, metropolitan relations the city has to itself

The outwardly-radiating ecopolitan relations the city has to its surrounding natural and social habitat

The interlinked cosmopolitan relations the city has to other cities

The continuing temporal relations the city has towards its history and future

The interconnections and dependencies between these strands suggest questions of urban sustainability cannot be thought simply as the maintaining of a given spatial area over a linear period of time. It must instead be imagined as multiplicitous, suspended across different sets of relations, tying in with different groups of actors operating with assorted goals and stretched out along different spatial and temporal horizons. It is no longer adequate to see cities simply as self-contained entities, ignoring the increasingly critical ways in which they are embedded in ecological and cosmopolitan relations. The traditional separation of urban studies from disciplines that employ alternate framings of nations, international relations, globalism, demography and environments risks, in Taylor’s words, ‘reifying’ the city, undertaking a form of methodological individualism that ignores the ways in which the urban object is affected, intersected and becomes multiple. The success or failure of the city comes to be viewed as the success or failure of its powerful elite, its business culture, or more often, its errant inhabitants. The city of Detroit is all too easily critiqued for its shortsightedness in not predicting the collapse of its car manufacturing industries (Martelle, 2012). Conversely, the local government of Parramatta is praised for its enterprising leadership guiding the city forward. Both Taylor’s emphasis on networks and Harvey’s considerations of relationality point to the limits of this separation. Against such simplistic judgements, Detroit and Parramatta are both clearly subject to demographic shifts, political dependencies and the ravages of an unpredictable world economy – manufacturing relocating to East Asia, with a corresponding mining boom in Australia – as well as a range of other causal forces. Opening out the frames of reference for thinking about cities encourages more pluralistic explanations and explorations.

To introduce other qualitative dimensions into this analytic of interwoven cities, in the remainder of this chapter I summarise an approach termed Circles of Sustainability. First articulated by Paul James and Andy Scerri (2011) and later developed by those authors, myself and others (James, 2015; Magee, Scerri & James, 2012; Magee et al., 2013), the approach is coordinated within a broader program of what, following Clifford (1983), we have termed ‘engaged theory’ (James, 2006): theory as a instrument for change as well as a system of categories for interpretation.

The case for Circles of Sustainability begins with a critique of the well-known Triple Bottom Line (Elkington, 1998), a widely used accounting model that adds social and

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