Lecture 3 Flashcards
What is the difference between urban, urban areas, urban place and urban agglomeration?
- 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
What is conurbation?
similar to urban agglomeration used more so in Europe
What is a metropolitan area?
central city + suburbs + even rural areas (based on integration with centre
where will our cities end up, death and destruction or utopia?
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.
Were trees always present in cities?
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
What are the possible futures we can have?
• 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
What are the trends for cities in the future?
• More cities and more bigger cities
What are cities the main driver of?
the global economy, politics, culture, and ecology
How much energy do cities account for?
• Cities account for more than ¾ of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions
What is the converging crisis?
financial (weakness in world economy) social-inequality (only increased during pandemic-rich get richer) health (pandemic), energy resources biodiversity
What is our growth right now?
- 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
What is our overall trend in fossil fuel consumption ?
• 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)
Since the 1850s how much of the fuel we’ve been using has been non renewable?
88%
What is now a big consumer of energy?
Computers for housing databases
Why are resources finite?
• 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
Why is smog a problem?
factories are a big contributer and limits the health of people
What happens if you over stress a system?
It collapses
-Ecosystme have finite capacity to deal with stress and waste and have finite capacity to give resources
What is the ecological footprint?
• 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
How do ecological footprints vary ?
Ecological footprints vary for different countries based on their population size and per capita impact.
What is the ecological footprint of the average Canadian and and world average?
Canada 5.8 hectares
World 2.7 hectares
What is the ecological plateau?
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
What is more efficient, cities or rural areas?
- 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
What is sustainability?
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)
Why do we say economy and society are embedded in environment?
- 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
What is the definition of urban sustainability?
“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
What is resilience?
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
Whats more important for resilience, to be able to recover or speed at which it is recovered?
ability to recover
What is the opposite of resilience?
Vulnerability
What do new systems go through?
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
What is the difference between resilience and sustainability?
• Sustainability: end goal, state where we want to go
• Resilience: means to get to goal
-We need both and embedded into systems thinking
What is an agropolis?
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
What is a petropolis?
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
What is an ecopolis?
sustainable city. Borrow agropolis ideas like food production closer as wellas energy to be produced right around the city. Needs to be regenerative too
What are cities doing in term of form to achieve sustainability and resilience?
- Increasing population densities to reduce sprawl• Expanding open space
- Planting trees and flowers
- Erecting energy-efficient buildings
- Reinvigorating mass transportation systems
What are cities doing in term of function to achieve sustainability and resilience?
- 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
