Cities as Dissipative Structures: Global Change and the Vulnerability of Urban Civilization

Abstract

Techno-industrial society and modern cities as presently conceived are inherently unsustainable. This conclusion flows from the energy and material dynamics of growing cities interpreted in light of the second law of thermodyna­mics. In second law terms, cities are self-organizing, far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures whose “self-organization” is utterly dependent on access to abundant energy and material resources. Cities are also open, growing, dependent subsystems of the materially-closed nongrowing ecosphere—they produce themselves and grow by feeding on energy and matter extracted from their host ecosystems. Indeed, high-income consumer cities are concentrated nodes of material consumption and waste production that parasitize large areas of productive ecosystems and waste sinks lying far outside the cities. The latter constitute the cities’ true “ecological footprints.” In effect, thermodynamic law dictates that cities can increase their own local structure and complexity (negentropy) only by increasing the disorder and randomness (entropy) in their host system, the ecosphere. The problem is that anthropogenic degradation now exceeds ecospheric regeneration and threatens to undermine the very urban civilization causing it. To achieve sustainability, global society must rebalance production and consumption, abandon the growth ethic, relocalize our economies and increase urban-regional self-reliance, all of which fly in the face of prevailing global development ideology.