Introduction
In considering the problem of climate change, there is plenty of evidence that urban areas are key contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, paradoxically, the predominant view is that urban living emits less emissions per capita than other land use forms, and that with even more increased urbanization, emissions will drop. This seems unlikely as urban areas depend on rural ones for their inputs: food, fiber, materials, water, and most of their energy, and if these are taken into account, urban areas are not more efficient, they just outsource their emissions (Malik and Lan 2016, Dai et al. 2022).
This is a fundamental truism, emissions are expended outside of the city to support its activities. Essential questions about how humans continue to live on the planet while curbing their emissions and the resource flows embedded in those emissions, remain. Alternative strategies that examine how to achieve decent living with minimum energy are critical to elaborate and work toward (Millward-Hopkins et al. 2020), though seem less prominent in the public discourse than eco-modernist approaches such as carbon capture and sequestration, green hydrogen, bio-energy and massive new infrastructures for solar and wind energy and transmission (Larson et al 2020).
As of 2014, “urban areas consume between 67% and 76% of global energy and generate about three quarters of global carbon emissions. This share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is likely to increase as global urban populations increase by two to three billion this century …. Additionally, to accommodate growing urbanizing populations and economies, urban areas and their built environments are projected to more than triple between 2000 and 2030” (Creutzig et al 2015, 6283–6288). One is left to wonder how Earth is to sustain these patterns without a radical change in how humans live on the planet, including current urbanization. “At the global level, material use has tripled in the last 40 years (Schandl et al., 2017). Global material extraction has increased by a factor of 12 in between 1900 and 2015. Global material extraction increased by 53% between 2002 and 2015, which means that “roughly one third of all materials that have been extracted since 1900 have been mobilized between 2002 and 2015 only” (Krausmann et al., 2018: 139, in Parrique 2019 pp. 87-88). I am certainly not the first to point to ever increasing greenhouse gas emissions and materials flows that are ineluctably related to the types and concentrations of cities we live in today, but unless we are willing to face the consequences of this path of development and change, the future is grim (Moore 2015, Gosh 2021, Smith 2021). In this short essay I attempt to outline a different path forward, including pointing out how our current urban centered world arose and its high energy and materials requirements.
Why Cities Today
A question rarely asked is why cities have come the home of an increasing share of humans today, even leading some to declare humans have become homo urbanis’ [1] (Gardener 2016), where more people live in cities than outside of them for the first time in human history. Before the rise of industrialization and the use of fossil energy, city size was constrained by the low energy densities available for materials extraction, processing, transport and use. With the advent of fossil energy, everything changed (Malm 2016). Many complex parallel and complimentary processes led to the rise of industrial manufacturing which required the concentration of labor, leading to the growth of cities unlike had ever been before experienced (Engels 1845). In Europe, where many of these processes originated, to supply enough labor to cities for the emerging industrial age, people were expulsed from the countryside in a process described as ‘enclosure’. Enclosure in broad outlines, involves the abrogation of traditional rights of access to land, such as the cultivation of crops in public commons (land that was allocated to peasantries), to harvest resources and hunt in woods that were owned by landlords or royalty. Typically, peasants could retain some portion of what they produced on their landlord’s lands, and supplement that with access to these other lands. Peasants also had diverse activities such as weaving, small crafts and more that were used for additional income or goods (Christophers 2019, Malm 2016, Polanyi 1944).
Malm (2016) writes “for a large-scale coal industry to see the light of day [in the UK], the rules for ownership of the land and its contents [traditional rights of access], first had to be rewritten . . . “(pg. 322). Rules were changed such that coal resources were privatized, further jeopardizing villages and homes, making them unlivable due to mining, and thus forcing people to leave. “[U]nder customary law [in England], tenant farmers were entitled to move cattle on commons, take wood and even coal for domestic use and roam freely. . . ancient practices that had to be terminated to allow commercial collieries to open” (pg. 324). People, with reduced means to feed themselves had no place to go, other than to cities to become wage laborers to survive. The revocation of feudal land use rights and practices immediately preceded industrialization in England, but this specific story is not universal; it is largely European. Asian societies pursued entirely different paths, and industrialized later with a far less urban intensification of population (Arrighi 2007).
This history may seem irrelevant to urban growth today, but I would suggest that, as
Christophers (2019) explains for the UK, and Smith (among others) (2021) for China, the changing of rules of land access and or ownership, continues, and has, in fact accelerated and expanded globally over the past few decades. This process is driven by development interests, working to increase profits and capital accumulation, accelerating the financialization of rural activities, including land rents in the countryside, often leading to expropriation. People continue to be pushed out of traditional livelihoods as peasants or other trades (forestry, fishing) into cities. These are generally people whose rural livelihoods are not highly emissions intensive and who make way for industrial agriculture, large scale grazing and mining.
An apocryphal example is China’s push for the rationalization of agriculture through the consolidation of small parcels to create more ‘efficient scales’ of farming akin to what is prevalent in the U.S.. Academic articles claim that this is a net positive for Chinese food production (Duan et al 2021, Tang et al 2019), however, the flip side of this consolidation is forced rural to urban migration and the growth of Chinese cities, and long term degradation of land, as we have seen in place such as the U.S..
In India, similar trends of enclosure are occurring. The 2020-2021 largely Sikh farmer’s protests were against three farm acts that would undermine agricultural small-scale businessmen, and leave the farmers at the mercy of corporate buyers, who would have market power to push down prices for products and ultimately drive smaller farmers out of the farm sector in favor of larger enterprises, in a country already experiencing such forces and high rates of farmer suicide. These farmers’ future, too, would be urban (Mashal et al. 2021). There are countless example like this across the developing world, one might recall the 1990s Zapatista movement in Chiapas Mexico, protesting against the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement allowing cheap American corn into the country, undermining locally grown traditional corn and livelihoods. Even in the U.S., the structure of agriculture works against smaller growers growing diversified crops, and there are fewer and fewer small to medium sized farm enterprises. The consequences for urban energy and materials use of such forced migrations are poorly examined as a coupled system, hence the claim of reduced energy use per capita in cities.
While the consensus is that land consolidation will improve agricultural productivity, there is a growing literature that shows that small scale ecologically-based methods for agricultural production are far less energy consumptive, release fewer GHGs than industrial production, sequester more carbon than industrial agriculture and are highly productive -- acre for acre, more productive than industrial agriculture. Such agriculture allows people to stay on the land, productively, rather than to move in high energy dependent urban areas, and to produce surpluses. Current industrial agricultural systems reduce diversity at the farm level and create structurally simplified landscapes that also contribute significantly to GHG emissions and global warming (Lin et al 2011, Badgley et al 2007, UNEP-UNCTAS 2008).
While this discussion is not about alternative agricultural models, nor enclosures, per se, I
raise these issues to provide a counter point to the naturalization of urban growth that has
occurred due to a lack of consideration of the political and economic drivers of such migration and the elimination of decent low carbon livelihoods. Landscapes are being transformed largely through a process of expropriation into ones that are put into high energy input uses: industrial agriculture, mining, industrial forests and more to supply the inputs into support large urban concentrations, and through which inequality is deepened. These processes are being exacerbated through fiscal policies that favor cities and disinvest in rural areas, for example schools, internet, health services, infrastructure, the development of markets and transportation, and more.
Understanding these driving processes can lead to understanding that people move to cities for many reasons, but one that is not sufficiently accounted for, is they have no place left to go. For many in the non-affluent West, cities mean living in miserable conditions (Davis 2017). Denaturalizing the move to the city is important. Urbanization is the flip side of being expulsed from other means of livelihood outside the city.
Cities and Materials Use
The Programme for Energy Efficiency in Buildings’ (PEEB) 2021 working paper describes the world today as going through an unprecedented phase of massive construction wherein an area the size of the city of Paris [some say the size of New York City] is added to the global built surface every week. PEEB anticipates Asia and Africa to see the highest growth going forward.
Currently, buildings and construction are responsible for 38% of energy related CO2 emissions, more than industry or transport. Further, PEEB points out that the embodied carbon in cities is responsible for 10% of global energy-related GHGs (pg 6). The continued pattern of high modernist building patterns relying on cement, aluminum, glass and insulation materials is a
significant contributor to climate change. Further, most of new urban land worldwide is being
developed outward rather than upward, setting in place an urban form that is difficult to change,
enables higher energy use per dwelling unit, and requires higher energy use to maintain
(Fournier et al. 2019, Mahtta et al 2019) and irreversibly makes impossible any other use of that land, such as agriculture, open space, forestry or other.
With higher rates of urbanization using high embedded energy materials, the path toward declining energy use reductions into the future seems unlikely, and thus the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Touted energy efficiency gains are overwhelmed by growth and the oft called for decoupling has not occurred (Parrique et al 2019). In high-income economies where super-rich consumers currently drive high-volume material flows (MFs), a lack of leadership and success in curbing material and energy profligacy set norms of (over)consumption toward which many others strive (Wiedman et al. 2020 in Jian 2022). For example, in Los Angeles County (California), research has shown that wealthy neighborhoods use up to 10 times more residential energy per capita than those living in those which the state deems ‘disadvantaged’ based on their income levels and exposure to environmental hazards. Research into the relationship between the age, size, and energy consumption of buildings in Los Angeles County also shows that increasing efficiency has not translated into absolute reductions in consumption. Among homes constructed between 1900 and 2010, the growth in median home size by construction vintage year outpaced combined energy use intensity (EUI) reductions by 60%. Any past historical energy savings within Los Angeles County, attributable to state mandated energy efficiency policies, could have been equivalently achieved by constraining growth in the size of newly constructed homes (Fournier et al 2019). Imagine if the homes size had been kept at a smaller size and there had been EE policies, what absolute energy savings might have been possible. Such wealth effects are important to recognize since they contribute to the growing ecological footprints of cities.
As the world’s urban population continues to increase, the growth of infrastructure and
building stock will require significant resources. The UN recently estimated that the demand for
raw materials, including sand, gravel, iron ore, coal and wood, to build and operate cities will
increase from 40 billion tons per year in 2010 to 90 billion tons per year in 2050 (IRP 2018 in
Mahtta et al 2019). It is important to realize that any raw materials extraction is accompanied by
greenhouse gas emissions, Herwich (2022) states “[F]rom 1995 to 2015, greenhouse gas
emissions from just material production increased by 120%, with 11 billion tons of CO2-
equivalent emitted in 2015. As a proportion of global emissions, material production rose from
15 to 23%. Overall, the replacement of existing or formation of new capital stocks now accounts
for 60% of material-related emissions” (pg 151).
Urban Energy Use and Climate Change
Given that the urbanization trends and drivers outlined above seem ineluctable, what is being proposed relative to energy use to mitigate climate change? McKinsey & Company (2022)
outline the following at the global scale: The reduction of GHG emissions as much as possible,
the application of net zero carbon strategies, (different than zero carbon in that net zero carbon
assumes the use of offsets of various types and storing CO2 though carbon capture and
sequestration technologies), rapid scaling up of demand for low-emissions asset and products, a
universal transformation of energy and land-use systems (including the much higher physical
footprint of renewable technologies), the need to catalyze capital reallocation and create new
financing structures, and much more.
But much of this remains out of control for cities. Not only are processes of land enclosure sending more and more people into cities, but cities themselves have little autonomy over their destiny. Building energy systems, including renewables, are generally provided by private or state government institutions; building codes and conventions are often set by entities that are at a higher scale than localities; transportation systems are often funded by higher levels of government as well and in many instances, localities have few options for raising funds. With limited tools and resources with which to shape their economic fates, cities are sensitive to pressure from development interests to build dwellings that appeal to wealthier clients and generate revenue (Pincetl 2017). Urban energy use is a bundle – direct energy use to power buildings, as well as enormous embedded energy use that goes into city building: the materials that make up the built environment. Continuing land conversion for urbanization is another form of urban energy use, terraforming to create buildable plots (Pincetl and Kennedy 2021).
All of these processes today, contribute to climate change, and the means to make these processes less energy intensive are still elusive: not only are renewable technologies not sufficiently deployed to provide energy to buildings, renewable generation assets will in
themselves require materials to build, and extensive land resources for their deployment. Our
reliance on high energy modernist building materials such as concrete, glass and insulative
materials, is only slowly beginning to be addressed to reduce their GHG content. There are less energy intensive forms of concrete, and an incipient interest in other building materials, including bamboo, laminated lumber and a return to ‘mud’, but the scale at which cities are now being built means that that transition too is unlikely to impact energy use by the building sector, soon. These facts lead to the inevitable understanding that cities can no longer be built the way they have been since the 20th century, nor can their scale be sustained. If renewables are to suffice for their energy, it is defeating to assume they can one-for-one, substitute for current energy supplied by fossil energy unless those renewables are deployed across the landscapes of the world, displacing other uses. Smil (2018) estimates that due to the low power densities of the alternatives to fossil fuels, society might have to deploy 100 or even 1000 times more land to energy production today (2022). Today’s cities, even with the best of intentions, cannot get close to being supplied by renewable energy sources. If we are to seriously reduce GHG emissions, and the concomitant energy flows, the only way forward is to develop pathways toward decent living standards with minimum energy, that include stopping rural to urban migrations, keeping people on the land and able to make a living and descaling cities.
Where to go from here?
It is time to start to think about urban energy use and climate with a wider lens. What are the causes of rural to urban migration? Are the global trends in agricultural land consolidation and expropriation of traditional lands and undermining of traditional livelihoods a foregone
conclusion? If so, why? For more economic growth, or actually superior management of land? What if enclosures were to stop and people were able to make a sufficient income in smaller scale enterprises?
Economic growth seems, thus far, incompatible with energy use reduction; “development” (such as industrial agriculture) has not produced less energy intensive economies, nor has it accompanied any absolute greenhouse gas emissions reductions, it is even questionable if the practices produce more food, and current practices are highly toxic. Rather it has created huge societal transformations, including rural to urban migrations, not an insignificant number of which were not desired. Is it possible to begin to question the pressures for urbanization?
While it may not be popular, indeed it is counter hegemonic, in order to begin to counter the drivers of climate change, we must also begin to ask about our heretofore unquestioned future as homo urbanis. Perhaps we should begin to imagine a middle way, a way of parsimony and just enough, of retaining people on the land and a future of smaller less energy intensive cities, starting to be built with more local materials. This does not mean sprawl, rather it entails cities that house people on smaller footprints in thermally well performing buildings (with provision of access to open space, or to the urban periphery), the reduction of meat consumption, fewer appliances, greater use of appropriate technologies that are less energy intensive and are directed toward reuse (composting toilets come to mind, electric bicycles, small scale tractors that are electric, telephones that can be repaired with components that are recycled, over and over) and much less consumption. According to World Bank (Hoornweg 2021), larger cities use disproportionally more energy than smaller ones, and require more energy for growth and maintenance (citing Bettencourt and Lobo 2007, Bristow and Kenney 2013, Sugar and Kennedy 2020). Yes, it will involve an enormous economic transformation, where the goal is sufficiency, not efficiency and profit. This is not a problem of new technologies. As Millward et al., (2020) explain, “[T]he material sacrifices are, in theory, far smaller than many popular narratives imply. And quite the opposite is true for the ~ 4 billion currently living in poverty. . . for whom life could, be substantially improved” pg. 10.
Conclusion
The future needs better imagination for us to get off this treadmill of high energy futures and rising greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with our modern lifestyles. Humans can live well still working the land, living in smaller communities with more parsimonious lifestyles. Dotting the countryside with dense cities of up to 500,000 people or less, supported by intensive biological agriculture and much less consumption overall, would offer a different future than the high energy sprawl we are now building that gobbles up the land and creates wasted spaces. With our increasingly sophisticated biological science applied to organic/regenerative agriculture, recuperating local knowledge about seeds and seasons, the development of low energy sophisticated appropriate technologies, coupled to highly performing low energy materials building, the future is one of decent living standards for all. Our current approach, including increased urbanization and the mistaken assumption cities are de facto more energy efficient, means catastrophic ecological collapse, increased poverty and alienation, and nearly unlivable heat in many of the parts of the world where people are being forced into cities. Clearly we need to choose another path. While this perspective may seem utopian, perhaps what we need are more utopias and less fantasies about human technological prowess and ability to master the Earth.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Rob Cudd for a thorough reading and his edits.
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[1] Homo Urbanis: urban man [sic], a way of describing the future of humans as being urban dwellers