Download Bioregions and Ecocities

Bioregions and Ecocities
Imagining the Regenerative City?
Molly Scott Cato
Professor of Strategy and Sustainability
Roehampton Business School
Where are we going?
• A few nasty
shocks
• A little bit of
theory does you
good
• Visions of the
future
The Vulnerability of Complexity
• A system of energy
intensity
• Extended supply
chains reduce
resilience
• Weakening of
community bonds
The Insecurity of Lengthy Supply
Chains
• 99% of UK food imports
depend: unsurprisingly
they are at sea-level.
• In 2007 the IPCC
predicted a 0.35m rise in
sea levels by the end of
the 21st century.
• In 2009 scientists
declared that sea-level
rise was occurring at
twice the rate they had
estimated just two years
earlier
Where are the world’s ports?
Plans for London?
• Thames Barrier closed 34 times in the 1990s to
protect London from flooding and 80 times in the
2000s
• Current standard of protection will last until 2030
• There are over £200 billion of capital assets in the
Thames tidal floodplain, including 500,000
properties, nearly 100 tube/train stations, City
airport, 400 schools, 16 hospitals and 8 power
stations
• 1.25 million people live or work below the
Thames average high tide.
London is Relatively Safe
• Top ten global cities
in terms of exposed
population: Mumbai,
Guangzhou,
Shanghai, Miami, Ho
Chi Minh City,
Kolkata, Greater New
York, Osaka-Kobe,
Alexandria and New
Orleans
Diseconomies of Scale
• Leopold Kohr: Modern cities as destructive
and inefficient
– Power commodities: ‘tanks, bombs or the increase
in government services required to administer
increased power’
– Density commodities: ‘rendered necessary as a
result of population increases, such as traffic
lights, first-aid equipment, tube services, or
replacement goods for losses which would never
have occurred in less harassed smaller societies’
• ‘the greatest sum of wellbeing can be obtained
when a variety of
agricultural, industrial
• Plato: 40,000 people
and intellectual pursuits
• Dunbar number: 150 people are combined in each
community; and that man
shows his best when he is
in a position to apply his
usually varied capacities
to several pursuits in the
farm, the workshop, the
factory, the study or the
studio, instead of being
riveted for life to one of
these pursuits only.’
• (Kropotkin, 1899: 18).
Optimal scale?
Localisation not Localism
• Localism is essentially hierarchical: we are
left to pick up the pieces
• Need to raise the question of political
economy and the destructive nature of the
WTO
• Allowing local variation in business rates, or
allowing local authorities to introduce taxes
on land?
• Localisation reacts to globalisation to
rebuild local systems of provisioning
Market town or city-state?
• A post-colonial approach to provisioning
• The importance of hinterland
• ‘Knowing place for the urban-dweller, then,
means learning the details of the trade and
resource-dependency between city and
country and the population limits
appropriate to the region’s carrying capacity.
It also suggests exploring the natural
potential of the land on which the city rests’
• People lived
where the
resources
were
• Colonial
system broke
this
connection
• Current
provisioning
relies on
exploitation
Domesday map
Oil Cities
Polanyi’s ‘great transformation’
• Stage I: Displacement and
Enclosure
• Stage II: Loss of connection
between people and land:
concern for population
• Stage III: Dependence on
‘rented’ land and labour
overseas: the ‘fictitious
commodities’
• How can we reverse these
processes?
Herbie Girardet’s vision of Petropolis
Ecopolis: the regnerative city
UK Self-Sufficiency of Rates in
Different Historical Periods
Time -period
%of food produced domestically
Pre-1750
C. 100
1750-1830s
90-100b
1870s
c. 60
1914
c. 40
1930s
30-40
1950s
40-50
1980s
60-70
What is a bioregion?
• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than
political) boundaries’
• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘lifeplace’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and
ecological character capable of supporting unique
human and non-human living communities. Bioregions
can be variously defined by the geography of
watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and
related identifiable landforms and by the unique
human cultures that grow from natural limits and
potentials of the region
An economic bioregion
• A bioregional economy would be embedded
within its bioregion and would acknowledge
ecological limits.
• Bioregions as natural social units determined
by ecology rather than economics
• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic
resources such as water, food, products and
services.
• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity
Why ownership matters
• Stewardship not property rights
• Commons not markets e.g. National
Trust
• Participatory economic planning e.g. EU
fisheries policy
• Who will gain the profit?
• Cornish minerals mining: Which system
of ownership would best protect the
environment?
Find out more
www.greeneconomist.org
gaianeconomics.blogspot.com
Green Economics: An
Introduction to Theory, Policy
and Practice (Earthscan, 2009)
The Bioregional Economy:
Land, Liberty and the Pursuit
of Happiness
(Earthcan, 2012)