Lecture 3

Question 1

What is the difference between urban, urban areas, urban place and urban agglomeration?

Answer 1

• Urban - in, relating to, or characteristic of a town or city
• Urban area – central city + suburbs
• Urban place - #s (how many people live in that place)
• Urban agglomeration – contiguous built-up area

Question 2

What is conurbation?

Answer 2

similar to urban agglomeration used more so in Europe

Question 3

What is a metropolitan area?

Answer 3

central city + suburbs + even rural areas (based on integration with centre

Question 4

where will our cities end up, death and destruction or utopia?

Answer 4

the actual one we will eventually get is somewhere in between the 2
-We have a say at what the future is going to look like at a local level, not so much global.

Question 5

Were trees always present in cities?

Answer 5

No, Cities used to be starved for trees (mostly in center areas and very unsanitary places). Vegetation cools down the cities and take up air pollutants . Doctors started pushing for more trees in the cities

Question 6

What are the possible futures we can have?

Answer 6

• The Global City (connected with other global cities for flows of capital and people)
• The Neoliberal City (les affaires, hands off governemtn and letting business do what they want to do)
• The Green City (should be the dominant aspect)
• The Securitized City (depenfing the 1 %)
• The Mad Max City (death and destruction)
• The Utopian City (utopia ideal)
- Each city can have an element of this

Question 7

What are the trends for cities in the future?

Answer 7

• More cities and more bigger cities

Question 8

What are cities the main driver of?

Answer 8

the global economy, politics, culture, and ecology

Question 9

How much energy do cities account for?

Answer 9

• Cities account for more than ¾ of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions

Question 10

What is the converging crisis?

Answer 10

financial (weakness in world economy)
social-inequality (only increased during pandemic-rich get richer)
health (pandemic), 
energy
resources
biodiversity

Question 11

What is our growth right now?

Answer 11

• Our growth right now is exponential, our use of resources is exponential but they cant last forever especially on a planet with finite resources
• We can’t go living with an exponential growth mindset on a finite planet

Question 12

What is our overall trend in fossil fuel consumption ?

Answer 12

• Story of fossil fuels, we’ve extracted around half of the world sources of fossil fuels, harder to get the other half of the reserves. We will be going down the production curve and transition into renewable energy (to build these we need fossil fuels)

Question 13

Since the 1850s how much of the fuel we’ve been using has been non renewable?

Answer 13

88%

Question 14

What is now a big consumer of energy?

Answer 14

Computers for housing databases

Question 15

Why are resources finite?

Answer 15

• Cant capture all the sun for solar, limited metals to make these sources
• Polluting our water
• Trouble spots are in the middle east for fresh water and they are pulling a lot of fresh water
Waste assimilation is finite

Question 16

Why is smog a problem?

Answer 16

factories are a big contributer and limits the health of people

Question 17

What happens if you over stress a system?

Answer 17

It collapses

-Ecosystme have finite capacity to deal with stress and waste and have finite capacity to give resources

Question 18

What is the ecological footprint?

Answer 18

• A measure of land needed to provide resources to keep ones lifestyle at that level and the land needed to assimilate the waste from the person or population
-Physical footprint is smaller than the ecological footprint of a city

Question 19

How do ecological footprints vary ?

Answer 19

Ecological footprints vary for different countries based on their population size and per capita impact.

Question 20

What is the ecological footprint of the average Canadian and and world average?

Answer 20

Canada 5.8 hectares

World 2.7 hectares

Question 21

What is the ecological plateau?

Answer 21

What we need (health, education, what ,makes a good human life) and when you plot with ecological foot print.

Incremental increase in ecological footprint we don’t get an increase further in human development around a certain point

Question 22

What is more efficient, cities or rural areas?

Answer 22

• Cities are more efficient and the footprint would be smaller (in terms of CO2 emissions)
• Per capita cities are lower but per area the cities are higher footprint
• Transportation gets more efficient per capita as the urban density increases. Sprawled out cities have a higher energy consumption

Question 23

What is sustainability?

Answer 23

Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs
• Intergenerational equity
• Looking at environment, economy (livelihood to sustain), social (bearable by people and environment, breathable and equitable)

Question 24

Why do we say economy and society are embedded in environment?

Answer 24

• What allows for the human system to flourish
• Environmental conditions fall apart than the other embedded system start to fall and economy and society will go down with them.
• Primary sector allows all of this to happen. Not a lot of people work in this secotr and we have become very efficient in this area so less people working there

Question 25

What is the definition of urban sustainability?

Answer 25

“the enhanced well-being of cities or urban regions, including integrated economic, ecological, and social components, which will maintain the quality of life for future generations.”

-A lot of welth transfer from certain continents and its not taken into account here

Question 26

What is resilience?

Answer 26

Ability of a system to recover from shock
Shock happens infrequently and surprised everyone and has a huge impact
• A dynamic property of systems
• Not good or bad—depends on human values

Question 27

Whats more important for resilience, to be able to recover or speed at which it is recovered?

Answer 27

ability to recover

Question 28

What is the opposite of resilience?

Answer 28

Vulnerability

Question 29

What do new systems go through?

Answer 29

Have a growing phase, then mature phase (conservation), disturbance, renewal phase (nutrients made available for a new system to come up). If the system is resilient then it will start to regrow after distrubance

Question 30

What is the difference between resilience and sustainability?

Answer 30

• Sustainability: end goal, state where we want to go
• Resilience: means to get to goal
-We need both and embedded into systems thinking

Question 31

What is an agropolis?

Answer 31

city that tied very closely to hinterland, all of food coming into citty and all resources are all close by, ecological footprint surrounded the city very closely. Most of histry cities were like this

Question 32

What is a petropolis?

Answer 32

cities planned closely around the car or other modes of transport and based on the use of fossil fuels. Having cheap energy to move goods around the city and bring them in from different parts of the world. Cities now

Question 33

What is an ecopolis?

Answer 33

sustainable city. Borrow agropolis ideas like food production closer as wellas energy to be produced right around the city. Needs to be regenerative too

Question 34

What are cities doing in term of form to achieve sustainability and resilience?

Answer 34

• Increasing population densities to reduce sprawl• Expanding open space
• Planting trees and flowers
• Erecting energy-efficient buildings
• Reinvigorating mass transportation systems

Question 35

What are cities doing in term of function to achieve sustainability and resilience?

Answer 35

• Reducing reliance on fossil fuels and thus greenhouse gases emissions
• Reducing consumption
• Recycling urban wastes
• Utilizing water conservation technologies
• Encouraging walking and cycling
• Cultivating reliance on local food webs
• Involvement of urban residents in decisions making processes
• Reducing urban poverty