URBANIZATION AND THE METROPOLITAN ENVIRONMENT: LESSONS FROM NEW YORK AND SHANGHAI. (cover story)

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Author: Solecki, William D.1 wsolecki@hunter.cuny.eduLeichenko, Robin M.2 rleichen@rutgers.edu

Urban sustainability efforts have reached a crossroads. Recent activities to enhance the prospects of urban sustainability are increasingly hampered by political barriers such as cross-boundary jurisdictional conflicts and by technological concerns such as environmental quality measurement.[1] The problem is compounded by the emerging reality of twenty-first century cities, which includes dramatic population growth, accelerating urban decentralization, and heightened resource demands.[2] These circumstances present significant environmental and social challenges for cities.

By recasting these efforts within the context of broader shifts in patterns and processes of urban spatial development, urban sustainability can be enhanced. As in past eras of urban growth and restructuring, changing social and economic relations drive the current period of urban development. Contemporary processes of globalization are causing a fundamental transformation of city form, structure, and organization.[3] As a result of these conditions, cities throughout the world are becoming woven into extended metropolitan regions, which function as sites of integrated economic production and consumption.[4]

What insights regarding urban sustainability efforts can be gained by knowing that a fundamental transformation of cities is under way? Seeing contemporary urban development through broader spatial and longer temporal lenses provides a greater appreciation of how moments of dynamic urban change in the past enabled today's sustainability efforts. To show this perspective and illustrate how present changes may provide strategies for fostering sustainability in the future, it is helpful to examine these issues generally and in the specific examples of New York and Shanghai--two cities that illustrate metropolitan development particularly well.

Although sustainability as a term and concept is increasingly used in urban planning, its effectiveness as a management strategy has been problematic because of its ambiguous definition, the perception of it as being against economic growth, and its challenging political implications.[5] As typically defined, sustainability activities require a balancing act between potential winners and losers emerging from new policies (which are seen as promoting tensions between environmental protection and social equity or private interests and public interests), or demanding new and complicated government networks and partnerships across local, national, and international scales.[6]

The concept of urban sustainability is even more problematic than the term "sustainability." Urban sustainability efforts that Local Agenda (LA) 21 and other similar broad-scale activities initiated can be critically evaluated given the passage of time since they were established in the early and mid 1990s. These activities now have become fixed within the social fabric of cities and have brought some level of success.[7] In particular, urban sustainability efforts have become associated with general, non-site-specific discussions that advocate for more efficient and equitable resource use via the implementation of new governance structures; largely non-controversial, quality-of-life issues, such as recycling, urban afforestation projects, and open space enhancement; or calculations of sustainability indicators, flow diagrams, and resource (ecological) footprints.[8]

In these situations, the concept of urban sustainability is typically not realized to such a degree that it results in significant, broad-scale societal shifts or restructuring within cities. The sustainability efforts of this type remain progressive and potentially transformative yet are often vaguely defined and not fully implemented. The actions that have been taken in the name of urban sustainability, while often the result of tremendous amounts of effort and commitment, have largely led to limited or simplistic results. Such actions generally did not require significant changes, obligations, or social costs (for example, developing an environmental audit program or sketching out the municipality's ecological footprint). Most urban sustainability projects have focused on a micro-scale, designing or retrofitting neighborhoods or buildings rather than taking actions that would have greater, city-wide impacts (as would creating recycling facilities or building a methane gas plant/biogas project). Alternatively, they were discrete, thereby providing limited potential for coherence or synergy among the various local-level activities (such as reducing municipal use of pesticides and improving heating systems in public buildings).[9]

Overall, the push for increased energy efficiency and resulting greenhouse gas reduction likely has been the area of most significant sustainability action in cities. Many municipalities have instituted policies to promote increased energy efficiency through new regulations and ordinances for lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), and building design. As an example, more than 650 municipalities are members of the ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) Cities for Climate Protection Campaign, which encourages cities to adopt policies and implement measures to achieve quantifiable reductions in local greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality.

Issues subject to debate or multiple interpretations, such as factors driving changing consumption patterns and lifestyle choices, are often not addressed directly in such sustainability efforts. Public images of urban sustainability are often people volunteering to clean up trash in a park or planting street trees or technicians installing new pollution reduction devices. For human geographer Mark Whitehead, urban sustainability efforts have "tended to reduce the analysis of sustainable urban development to a technical matter of institutional restructuring, traffic management, architectural design and the development of green technologies."[10] In this way, many urban sustainability efforts fail to address the larger-scale, longer-term structural shifts associated with the contemporary transformation of cities.

Furthermore, the opportunity for additional fundamental change has diminished. Even in countries where LA21 has been supported by the national government, such as those in the European Union, activities at the local level have languished and been bogged down over issues of interpretation and administrative action.[11] One mechanism to enhance the success of urban sustainability has been to increase the level of civic engagement and connection that community members have in developing and implementing potential efforts.[12] Researchers involved in a recent three-year European project called Developing Institutional and Social Capacities for Urban Sustainability discuss the positive role of enhancing institutional capacity, learning, and interaction in fostering the governance structures of sustainable cities.[13]

In addition to the discussions focused on social organization and action, there is an opportunity to revisit the question of achieving significant urban sustainability through the lens of the long-term effects of patterns of urban spatial restructuring and the transformations now under way. One avenue for advancement is to shift the focus of sustainability initiatives from the city or municipality to the larger scale of the metropolitan-city region--which includes the core city, the extended suburbs and satellite cities that are integrated into a functional region.[14] With rapid urban spatial expansion, a critical challenge is to better understand how cities are changing and the processes driving these changes. A second task is harnessing these transformations by identifying public policies that can take advantage of them and encouraging meaningful sustainability planning efforts.

Three interrelated transformations are changing the material character of urban places. These include spatial expansion of cities and urban decentralization; the shift to an urban metropolitan world; and global convergence of urban/metropolitan form.[15] These trends will play out over the next several decades and most likely beyond.[16]

More than half of the world's population (approximately 6.4 billion people) live in urbanized places. While the demographic growth of cities continues as the result of natural increase and in-migration, there is also a concurrent process of urban decentralization under way. Throughout the world, urban core areas have seen little or moderate growth in recent years, while the surrounding suburban and peri-urban territories have grown at faster rates.[17] In some cases, central cities are experiencing absolute declines in population (Mexico City, Budapest, and Moscow, among many others). The urban sprawl now observed in most large and medium-sized cities has been fostered by the rise of a transnational consumer culture and a global emergence and diffusion of suburban living as a preferred "modern" lifestyle for the middle and upper income classes in cities in developed and rapidly developing countries.[18] In these cases, residents helped by the increased access to private real estate markets and the availability of mortgage financing are choosing to relocate away from central city locations to houses on the urban fringe.

As cities decentralize and new suburban towns are developed distant from old urban cores, the concept of an urban population is also changing. Although it is true that the world's population is predominantly urban, it may be even more accurate to describe it as predominantly metropolitan.[19] Metropolitan populations include people living in central cities and those living in new development areas outside the urban core. This type of development is taking place in the scattering of new towns close to major cities and areas in between that are now being enveloped by the waves of new suburban expansion spilling out from the core cities. While this condition has been present in countries like the United States for some time, as geographer Jean Gottman's 1961 classic Megalopolis documents, this condition is now being seen in countries throughout the world.[20] For example, the growth of extended metropolitan regions is particularly prominent in cities going through rapid economic change, such as an increase in external trade. The Moscow metropolitan region has grown tremendously since the early 1990s with much of the new economic activity and urban land development clustered along outer ring roads distant from the urban core.[21]

The global convergence of urban form is another transformation under way among cities in the various regions of the world such as East Asia and Latin America.[22] Across the globe, cities and the lives of urban dwellers are increasingly similar as production-and-consumption--oriented globalization forces (such as the rise of global investments in local real estate and global marketing of products with international advertising), structure and resculpt the form of urban landscapes.[23] These trends are illustrated by the emergence of urban mega-projects such as London's Docklands, Shanghai's Pudong, and New York's Battery Park City, central business districts in post-colonial cities like Mumbai and Jakarta, and residential zones for transnational elites--upper-middle income and upper-income residents who are directly employed by international companies or whose place of work is connected to international business activities. Developments such as these reflect a proliferation of cities oriented to facilitate globally oriented business and industrial activities as well as provide lifestyle choices and opportunities for consumer-oriented populations.

Urban decentralization, the emergence of metropolitan populations, and the global confluence of urban form present many challenges for those interested in urban sustainability. At the level of the individual, these processes are associated with a shift in the consumption aspirations of those who increasingly strive to attain modem urban lifestyles with rising levels of per capita consumption. Urban living for all income groups has increasingly been constructed around consumption and a global consumer culture.[24] While the reality for many new rural-to-urban migrants and other residents of extended metropolitan regions in less developed countries is one of grinding poverty and deprivation, cities continue to hold the allure of a better material quality of life for even the poorest of new arrivals. For others, such as local elites, members of the transnational capitalist class, and the growing middle classes, this promise is being fulfilled through the acquisition of electrical appliances, telephones, automobiles, and suburban-style housing.

The proliferation of a decentralized urban form enhances the tendency toward higher per capita consumption as increasingly wealthy and dispersed urban populations have access to new infrastructure and acquire more resource-intensive technology (for example, automobiles on new highways).[25] Many of the emerging metropolitan regions also are quite spatially patchy as the new urban growth is uneven and discontinuous. Often, competing local governmental units in many metropolitan areas each construct their own development strategy and plans. For example, in the case of the sprawling greater Caracas metropolitan region, the resulting decentralized growth has hampered the development of new regional infrastructure and practices associated with more efficient natural resource use such as region-wide water supply systems, electricity systems, and public transportation systems.[26]

In addition to increased individual consumption and less efficient use of natural resources, the new urban form also represents a challenge to urban sustainability efforts because it is associated with more socially fragmented, inequitable, and segregated cities.[27] Within large and decentralized metropolitan regions such as Caracas, the wealthy and emerging middle classes are ever more able to spatially and socially distance themselves from the negative aspects of urban life such as crime, pollution, and traffic congestion by living in gated or controlled enclaves and by displacing environmental externalities onto poor or otherwise marginal populations.[28] This is the case in rapidly developing cities and, increasingly, in cities in the United States. According to the 2001 American Housing Survey, more than seven million households--about 6 percent of the total--are located in developments behind walls and fences.[29] Much higher percentages are found in recently developed states like California and Florida. These circumstances cause residents to see themselves increasingly financially and morally separated from the pressing socioeconomic issues of the day, thereby discouraging the emergence of urban governance strategies that could promote economic integration, help break up concentrated pockets of urban poverty, and move cities toward sustainability.[30]

In summary, decentralization, the rise of the metropolis, and global convergence of urban form present significant challenges to sustainability efforts in urban areas. Paradoxically, the recognition of these processes of urban spatial transformation can also present opportunities for enhanced urban sustainability. By acknowledging these processes, planners and decisionmakers can better understand what the cities of the future will look like and can explore ways to take advantage of this knowledge. For example, expectations of how the emergence of consumption-oriented societies and increased personal wealth will enhance the demand for personal automobile-based transportation can be used to inform decisionmakers on how and when to implement energy-efficient urban transportation programs.

The current period of urban spatial restructuring illustrates the point that cities are in a constant state of becoming. They are "unfinished," as urban scholar Thomas Bender describes in his recent assessment of New York City.[31] Looking back into history, it is clear that new settlement patterns are built either on top of older ones, as in the case of ancient city tells (hills or other rises built up by the construction of new cities on the ruins of earlier cities) or as in the contemporary era, built out as spatial extensions of existing cities. Abrupt changes in city street patterns and street densities are evidence of this spatial phenomenon. The street patterns of New York City are an example of how the colonial-era, irregular jumble of streets in lower Manhattan was replaced by the regular grid pattern in the early nineteenth century as the city shifted from being a mid-sized trading center to a major port and processing site of national significance.

Each urban spatial form that emerges in a city is associated with historically specific socioeconomic characteristics and conditions and becomes fixed in place.[32] By definition, the location and type of businesses and residences and the infrastructure of a city are a reflection of the societal structures that define it.[33] Over time, tensions emerge between the established, locked-in spatial form and new demands of social organization: new modes of capital accumulation, regulatory regimes, and technological innovations.[34] It is in these situations that frictions of space and associated diseconomies and social unrest become evident and where the form of the old city becomes increasingly inadequate to meet new socioeconomic demands.[35] Part of the resolution of these conflicts comes as a radical reordering of urban space and a paradigmatic shift in its spatial logic.

From this perspective, cities (depending on their age) can be seen as a product of possibly many cycles of lock-in, tension and crisis, and eventual transformative reconstruction. For New York City, the industrial city of the late nineteenth century was built out and over the port city of the early nineteenth century, as the automobile city of the late twentieth century was built out and over the top of the mass transit city of the first half of the twentieth century.[36] For a city like Shanghai, its larger-scale shifts concern its dramatic conversion from a colonial city in the first half of the twentieth century, to a socialist, centrally planned city, and then to its current restructuring as a proto-capitalist city.[37]

The recognition of dynamic urban spatial restructuring enables two significant actions for sustainability. First, understanding the urban historical geography of a city allows the contemporary investigator to identify key points or moments in the past where opportunities in the development path might have enabled or enhanced sustainability options. And second, once those past points or moments are recognized and appreciated, they might help elucidate current or future opportunities for sustainability planning efforts. It is in these shifts from one type of city to another that prospects for enhanced urban sustainability, heightened civic engagement, and reduction of inequity need to be realized and seized. By focusing on these transformative moments and the conditions that lead to longer-term shifts in city formation, city managers might be better able to identify critical points of discontinuity and, therefore, opportunities for possible sustainability intervention. To illustrate these issues, it is instructive to look at the development history and current conditions as they play out in New York City and Shanghai.

New York City was founded as the Dutch colonial outpost New Amsterdam in the first decades of the 1600s, near existing Lenape settlements. By the early 1800s, it had become the largest city in the United States. It remains so today after growing rapidly from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries (2000 population of 8.0 million and metropolitan population of more than 21 million). Since the 1600s, New York has been continually recast--from a minor frontier settlement to a port city, a manufacturing city, a financial center, and eventually a de facto world capital. While each transition was associated with tension and change, probably the most profound transformation came with its shift from being a relatively compact late nineteenth century city clustered around its port to growing into the sprawling early twentieth century city spreading out into places that were then considered its hinterlands.

The case of early metropolitan New York City illustrates several intertwining and seemingly conflicting processes where opportunity for enhanced sustainability activity could be found. During the explosive growth of the mid- and late-nineteenth century, the city was restructured by the economic pressures brought forward by the emergence of a national economy in the United States.[38] The rapid urban growth resulted in a series of actions by decisionmakers that included measures to meet immediate needs such as building a new bridge or highway to alleviate acute traffic congestion (for example, new arterial features like the Brooklyn Bridge, opened in 1883, which linked the City of New York to what was then the City of Brooklyn). These discrete actions quickly became a more comprehensive reimagining and planning out of the future greater city of New York as an integrated metropolitan economy.

An eventual flowering of this effort included the creation of the Greater City of New York in 1898 via the joining of what would soon be the five boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.[39] This act planted the seed for tremendous economic development, population growth, and spatial expansion of the city. The critical element in this transformation was the development of an extensive subway system during the early decades of the twentieth century. While the subway lines were laid down through existing high-density residential areas such as Manhattan, a majority of the track was put into low-density exurbs and farmland, particularly in outer boroughs such as Brooklyn and Queens. Not surprisingly, today's highest residential density areas of these outer boroughs are spatially coincident with the subway lines. The residents of these neighborhoods, by most measures, lead very environmentally friendly lives: For example, they have a low per capita automobile ownership and a high percentage of public transportation use in comparison to their suburban counterparts and many other city residents who live farther from the subway lines.

The growth of the subway system was driven by a desire to ease the congestion on city streets and to open up new areas in the boroughs for middle- and working-class residents relocated from the urban core of the city when it was recast as a business and financial center.[40] Built mostly before the full impact of the automobile on cities was realized, the New York City subways brought a series of unintended consequences that were positive for urban sustainability, and they continue to create opportunities for enhancement. For example, the planned relocation of a professional basketball team from a suburban sports arena to a downtown Brooklyn location with nearby subway access will enable fans to attend games without having to drive• While not a primary factor in the decision, the move is in step with urban sustainability ideals.

The last major phase of subway construction in the city took place in the late 1920s and early 1930s.[41] During that time, there was increasing pressure to construct automobile-oriented infrastructure such as highways and bridges. With continued growth in the region through the earlier part of the twentieth century and the prospect for more, the Regional Plan Association (a nongovemmental organization with significant government influence) developed the first comprehensive plan for the metropolitan New York region (including the city and more than a dozen surrounding counties) in the late 1920s. One element of the plan called for the construction of a metropolitan highway network for the region. This system was built over the next 40 years, linking the emerging region of the time and helping shape the region of the future.

This period was characterized by bitter conflicts between public transportation proponents and private automobile supporters. During this time, opportunities for future sustainability efforts were hindered--particularly those related to efforts to limit highway congestion and automobile-generated air pollution in the city and the outlying areas. The building of the George Washington Bridge, a major highway link across the Hudson River from Manhattan to the state of New Jersey, well illustrates this point. Original plans for the bridge included a subway rail line connection across the bridge. The line was not included in the eventual construction, which was completed in 1931.[42] The future development of northeastern New Jersey emerged as a lower density, almost totally automobile-dependent suburban area, as opposed to the developments in similarly remote stretches of Brooklyn and Queens, which were focused on subway and rail line transit.

In this way, one can look at events of today and speculate about their future impact on sustainability. New York City and its environs are going through a dramatic period of spatial restructuring as result of globalization and other economic transformations. Among other factors, downturns in the industrial sector and waterfront port facilities, the growth of financial services industries, middle class flight to the outer suburbs, and new waves of international immigration have changed New York. One of the results of the process over the past 30 years has been a significant loss of residential property and, more recently, a tremendous growth in new housing construction. More housing units are being built in New York City than in any time since the height of the post-World War II boom in the early 1950s. Large sections of the former industrial waterfront in Brooklyn and Queens are being rezoned for residential development . All this activity has helped push New York's economy and psyche out of the crisis that followed the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

On the surface, these activities are quite positive for the economic and community vitality of the city; however, they have potential negative implications for the longer term sustainability of the city. This housing construction is taking place with limited consideration of environmental factors and energy conservation. Thousands of housing units are being built in low-lying, coastal, flood-prone locations. These lands, furthermore, are subject to the increased flooding threat associated with climate change: induced sea level rise.[43] Another missed opportunity is that the city has been slow to institute energy-saving building codes and regulations on new construction, such as wall insulation or reflective roof and building surfaces, to foster resource use efficiency.

While it is clear that the development history of New York is one of staggered shifts playing out over decades, the development history of Shanghai is one of catastrophic and sudden transformations, temporally compressed. In many other ways, however, New York and Shanghai have parallel development histories. Like New York, Shanghai on the Huangpu branch of the Yangtze River began as a trading settlement at the end of a large inland waterway system. The two cities and their metropolitan regions both serve as significant port, manufacturing, and financial centers. The urban spatial development of both has been heavily influenced by outside--national and international--trends and policy changes. A significant difference between the two cities is that New York's growth has been heavily influenced by local capitalists and boosters, while the process of Shanghai's development has been only intermittently influenced by capitalist interests and/or local boosters and elites and more so by direct government intervention. Even with this and other obvious cultural, political, and economic differences between the two cities, it is clear that every development period of both cities leaves a legacy of sustainability potential for the next generation.

A trading settlement has been present on the muddy banks of the Huangpu River for centuries, but the modem history of Shanghai starts in the mid-nineteenth century when the city and immediate area were seized by foreign, imperial powers and recreated it as an international trade port and later as a financial center. Growth was rapid if not chaotic over the next century. By the 1920s, Shanghai was one of the largest financial centers in the world with a population of 2.5 million. The city was described as one of the most dynamic and sophisticated capitalist entrepôts the world had ever seen.[44] The city experienced rapid growth and spatial expansion during this period relative to what had previously taken place. The Japanese occupation of Shanghai in 1937, World War II, and the Chinese communist revolution of 1949 dramatically changed the process and pattern of urban growth, as the city was transformed from what could be largely described as a capitalist, colonial city to a centrally planned socialist city. During the period from the early 1950s to the early 1990s, Shanghai did not expand significantly, except for urban-rural fringe industrial development during the 1970s and 1980s.

In the early 1990s, the trajectory of the city dramatically changed again, as China's open-door policy and associated economic reform brought new development and economic expansion. China's premier Deng Xiaoping came to Shanghai in 1992 and proclaimed that new central and local government policies would make the city a major, international financial center once again, and with that, there would be significant changes in the organization and structure of the city. The most dramatic of the changes was the construction of the Pudong mega-project--a new financial business district directly across the Huangpu River from the old colonial banking district, the Bund. As the centrally planned city was built over the colonial city, the proto-capitalist city of Shanghai is now being built over the centrally planned city.[45] To illustrate the suddenness and magnitude of change, real estate investment in Shanghai increased from 1.3 billion Yuan (approximately $160 million US) in 1992 to 74.9 billion Yuan in 2002 (approximately $9.2 billion US), and the amount of urban settlement area grew from approximately 144 square kilometers in 1990 to 410 square kilometers in the late 1990s and is projected to increase to 1,100 square kilometers by 2010.[