Abstract
Our planet is being anthroposized at high speed with Climate Change and other global environmental damages as its consequence. As home of most consumers, many are looking at cities for solutions. Urban densification is often seen as ‘the’ way towards more urban sustainability. However, externalities of urban consumption and the complexity of the urban system are mostly left out of consideration, leading to unexpected results. This chapter advocates a transition from consumption-centered to resource-centered cities. In an age of rapid urbanization, this chapter further argues how shrinking cities could unexpectedly function as catalysts for change. A shrinking population and a retreat of the current economic system give shrinking cities the potential for becoming front-running resource-centered cities.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Complex Adaptive Systems’ (CAS) are a specific category of complex systems—open evolutionary systems such as a rain forest, a business, a society, our immune systems, the World Wide Web, or the rapidly globalizing world economy—where the components are strongly interrelated, self-organizing, and dynamic (Sanders 2008, p. 275).
- 2.
“Cities have a pronounced effect on traditional rural economies and their long-standing cultural adaptation to biological diversity. Rural populations have become consumers of products produced in the industrial economy, one much less sensitive to biological diversity. The rural condition has evolved into a new system of social relations, one that does not work with biodiversity. These developments all signal that the urban condition is a major factor in any environmental future” (Sassen 2009).
- 3.
‘Urban Harvesting’ is a concept that is based on tracking and harvesting all the resources in the city and bringing them back in an endless resource cycle. Also called ‘Urban Mining’, definitions may differ including or excluding certain resources and methodologies.
- 4.
The ‘rebound effect’ is an unexpected behavioral or systemic response that reduces or even turns around the expected result of for instance an efficiency measure. An example in this context: the beneficial effects of a reduced population leading to less demand for resources could be offset by an increase in personal consumption caused by price decreases of goods resulting from excessive stocks.
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De Flander, K. (2013). Resource-Centered Cities and the Opportunity of Shrinkage. In: Khare, A., Beckman, T. (eds) Mitigating Climate Change. Springer Environmental Science and Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37030-4_3
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