Finding Our Niche by Philip A. Loring

Author:Philip A. Loring [Loring, Philip A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2020-10-14T12:09:11+00:00

Urbanity

Some ecosystem engineering is subtle, some overt; perhaps the most apparent examples imaginable are urban areas. When we think of urban areas, we picture towering skyscrapers — massive steel and concrete edifices that represent the pinnacle of human progress. Cities are landscapes that we have completely re-engineered into novel, human-centric ecosystems. In the last few centuries we have terraformed this planet on a scale never before seen in human history, at the expense of many plants, animals and waters that lived in these spaces before we excavated the earth to erect skyscrapers, subways and parking garages. Many people see cities like New York and Dubai as the antithesis of nature, the pinnacle of environmental destruction, but others still argue that cities are the future of humanity.

Cities have very unique ecologies, and many are relatively rich with biodiversity. Cities can be efficient, boasting extensive mass transit systems that keep cars off roads. Their vertical construction also makes housing and heating more efficient than rural areas and suburbs, where large, single-family dwellings abound. Cities are also cosmopolitan places — multicultural and rich in heritage. They are almost reef-like in their patterns of cultural diversity: complex places with countless unique niches in which all manner of different ethnic and cultural groups live and interact. They are cultural edges, like the rock walls of Fulford Harbour, where the many places and cultures of the world have come to overlap and intermingle through commerce, trade and the arts. As such, each is unique and, in some respects, greater than the sum of its parts. But on the other hand, cities are also inherently colonial, designed in a way that is unwelcoming at best, and outright violent at worst, to Indigenous peoples. They also rely on a great deal of resources to operate — very little food is grown in cities, and they need to draw virtually all their water from outside their borders. Some cities, like Perth, Singapore, and Dubai, go so far as to use energy-hungry infrastructure to desalinate water from the sea.

So, cities are a paradox, full of contradictions. Regardless of where one stands on their merits, the future of cities must be reckoned with in any discussion of sustainability. In 1900, only about 13 percent of the world’s then 1.6 billion people lived in cities. Today, more than half of the global population lives in cities. By 2050, this could increase to 6.3 billion — over 70 percent of humanity. In other words, the world’s urban population is growing faster than the global population. Cities, both small and large, are also growing rapidly to accommodate this growth, gobbling up more and more surrounding land and water.

Historian Joseph Tainter describes urbanization as a pattern in the long and ongoing process of human problem solving, a pattern whereby we have repeatedly addressed increasing societal demands with increasingly complex solutions.10 For Tainter, the challenge is that complexity in our societies and cities comes at a cost: with each additional level of complexity (e.g., how to

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