Abstract
On May 23, 2007, demographers estimated that the world’s population became more than 50 percent urban. They further projected that by mid-century more than two-thirds of approximately nine billion humans will be city dwellers. Thus, if sustainability—and climate change in particular—are leading global challenges in the coming decades, it makes sense that cities ought to be at the heart of a response to climate change, especially given the potential for urban development to express the kind of land use, transportation, and energy economics necessary to achieve what might be described as sustainability in a strong sense.
These big-picture observations provided the impetus for Governing for Sustainable Urban Development by Yvonne Rydin. In brief, Rydin argues that sustainable urban development should be a focus of attention because concentrated urban development has the potential to be more sustainable than other forms of development and because governance at the urban scale provides an opportunity to demonstrate this potential on the way to broader-based practices of sustainability.
She begins by reviewing familiar definitions of the term sustainability from Brundtland on down, considers the various ways to understand the interrelationships among social, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainability, and problematizes notions of “strong” or “weak” senses of the term—along the way underlining the biological limits to economic activity. Urban politics, Rydin holds, should be considered a “vital resource in tackling climate change and indeed the whole sustainable development agenda,” because, according to Brundtland, local government is closest to people and thus the most promising site for building commitment for change (13).
The author devotes chapter 2, “Dimensions of Sustainable Urban Development,” to describing the potential for sustainable urban development at the scales of the building, the development site, and the city region. Issues of materials, designs, and technologies for conserving energy or water or generating renewable energy at the building scale will be familiar to many—with the caveat that one of the biggest variables in conservation is always the user. At the scale of the development site, issues of energy cogeneration and district heating and cooling schemes are brought to the fore, along with concerns for urban design for biking and walking. Issues of urban form, transportation networks, waste management, ecosystem management, and infrastructure are highlighted at the scale of the city and region.
In chapter 3, Rydin encourages use of a network model for understanding the dynamic structures that produce urban development and describes the intricacies of how processes of planning and regulation intersect with processes of finance and exchange and the practices of construction—potentially to produce a more sustainable result. It is within this web of relationships among developers, investors, brokers, tenants, planners, politicians, inspectors, architects, engineers, construction managers, contractors, subcontractors, building suppliers, and others that available and emerging technologies of sustainability will be adopted or not. Professionals have a special role to play in this exchange, Rydin points out, but so do the ultimate occupiers of buildings to demand a more sustainable product.
The conceptual heart of the book are the chapters “Governing for Sustainability” (chapter 4) and “Governing and Learning” (chapter 5), which are presented as central to understanding how sustainable urban development might practically be produced in our societies today. Here, Rydin leans heavily on the observation of Stone (1989) that local government, in particular, is no longer capable of making decisions and taking action without the collaboration of a range of private interests, including businesses, philanthropy, community-based organizations, professionals, and others. Instead, governance is produced through networks of stakeholders “that provide new means of legitimacy, release new forms of resources and overcome conflicts in novel ways.” (47)
Rydin takes pains to differentiate among government, governance, and governmentality. The first distinction is important because it separates those things that government can do on its own from those it requires outside help to accomplish—from actors in the network outside of City Hall. The second distinction between network modes of action (governance) and the uses of power in a Foucauldian sense to prompt to people to police themselves (governmentality) is less useful especially when Stone’s concept of regime coherence through social production explains the same go-along-get-along behavior.
Not surprisingly, the most productive modes of learning, in Rydin’s view, are not like the conventional linear forms of learning (wet hair/lather/rinse/repeat), but processes embedded in exactly the kind of networks through which effective governance might be produced. In this context, a range of ideas are useful—about epistemic communities (i.e., communities linked through shared knowledge), communities of practice, the structure of networks, the roles of knowledge brokers, the function of conflict and collaboration in learning, and the value of reframing and boundary objects in the diffusion of new knowledge and practices.
Four more chapters address the role of tools for governing for sustainable urban development—information, financial incentives, spatial planning, and regulation. The piece on information summarizes the way measuring, monitoring, and dash-boarding energy consumption and other data have taken root in the sustainable development field. Promoting life cycle calculations for carbon emissions and using the concept of zero-carbon development as a boundary object (i.e., a teaching tool) are significant, but so is the observation that giving people information does not necessarily mean that they will change their behavior.
Rydin notes the rise during the Thatcher–Reagan era of market-based mechanisms for promoting new forms of development. However, the range of tools available—subsidies, taxes, and permits—on one side of the Atlantic differs markedly from those on the other. More important, the inventory of recent UK-based programs to discourage consumption and promote renewable energy production includes a number of items that do not find much favor in the United States (e.g., carbon taxes, carbon markets, feed-in tariffs). All of these are aimed at influencing the techno-economic calculus of development profit but, as Rydin rightly notes, sometimes the operation of social networks and the influence of cultural values has more impact on behavior.
At a conceptual level, it is not difficult to see how sustainable urban development can be integrated into established practices of spatial planning. We have already gone a long way toward reconsidering the characteristics of good urban form or the coordination of urban investments in light of the need to reduce energy consumption, limit vehicle miles traveled, conserve water, and save land for agriculture and open space. The trick is how to get it done through the complex networks of stakeholders involved in the process. Rydin talks about the need for “embedding norms of mutuality, reciprocity, and trust in the relationships of network members” (113), but in the U.S. context we are likely to see more conflict—often ideologically pitched—than collaboration.
The penultimate chapter addresses the role of regulation in promoting sustainable urban development—not as a straightforward administrative process of making and enforcing rules but, again, as a process embedded in the networks of stakeholders and involving ongoing negotiations and mutual learning.
In the end, Rydin makes a substantial leap from the basic argument—that an approach to governing that focuses on networks and learning and develops informational, financial, spatial planning, and regulatory tools to promote sustainable urban development might make a difference—to a suggestion that urban development as we generally know it may inherently be unsustainable, that we need a less consumerist and material-intensive culture, and that the market-led approach should give way to one that is trust based.
Given the differences between the British town planning system (national, formal, legalistic) and the U.S. approach to planning (local and state, diverse in approach, with an emphasis on individual property rights), the book will be of limited interest for American audiences except for comparative purposes.
Researchers will appreciate the breadth of the literature review. However, this text will be difficult for graduate students to appreciate and even more so for most undergraduate students. While some of the concepts and information in the book are elementary, the language used is highly abstract and the style is dense. A series of well-selected case studies might communicate the concepts here much more effectively and give the reader a stronger sense of how any of this was done.
It is unfortunate that Governing for Sustainable Urban Development leaves the introduction of governance as a concept until the middle of the book. There is a need, of course, to lay down some of the basics about sustainability in general and about the urban development process overall, but the reader will need some patience to get to the meat of the issue in chapter 4.
It is enticing to think that governance is produced in networks of stakeholders and that participants in those networks engage in processes of learning. Likewise for the notion that new resources can be made available, conflicts resolved, and legitimacy for action gained in the process. But most readers will not be able to understand without more concrete examples just how this happens or how they might replicate that success.
Rydin acknowledges that “these modes of governing also need to be aware of the politicized nature of urban development” (139), but there is little address here to the agonistic politics that Americans, at least, have become accustomed to in the age of the Tea Party and anti–Agenda 21 activism. And if the prescription truly is for radical change in the urban development process, the reader needed to know it before the final chapter.