Urban sustainability and the limits of classical environmentalism

Abstract

Translating environmental concern into social debate and public policy is one of the notable achievements of industrial societies over the past generation. Yet the process that has emerged in rich countries does not appear to be simply transferable, or even tenable, over time. The search for sustainable development may, accordingly, require practical models of social change that have yet to be invented or imagined. In this paper, the problems of applying the existing model of environmentalism to two kinds of cities are analyzed: poor cities, in which population is growing faster than income, and rich cities, whose local environmental problems have been largely solved, but whose residents make consumption and investment choices with distant environmental impacts that are hard to perceive.