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Cities in the Arc of Human History: A Materials Perspective

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State of the World

Part of the book series: State of the World ((STWO))

Abstract

In the first decade of this new century, humans passed a historic threshold when half of us were estimated to be living in cities. We became, for the first time, a predominantly urban species. Our journey toward homo urbanis over the past 12,000 years or so was driven by a series of social, environmental, and technological innovations that expanded the materials and energy available to humans to make city living possible and attractive.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This rough estimate reflects vagueness regarding the transition from villages to cities and the gradual pace of the spread of cities. Jericho, for example, is estimated to be 11,000 years old, while cities in Mesopotamia are estimated to have arisen around 7,500 years ago. Thus, 10,000 years is a rough, rounded approximation for the original rise of cities. The figure of 12,000 is from Helmut Haberl et al., “A Socio-Metabolic Transition Toward Sustainability? Challenges for Another Great Transformation,“ Sustainable Development 19, no. 1 (2011): 1–14.

  2. 2.

    Mark Swilling et al., City-Level Decoupling. Urban Resource Flows and the Governance of Infrastructure Transitions A Report of the Working Group on Cities of the International Resource Panel (Paris: United Nations Environment Programme, 2013); Haberl et al., “A Socio-Metabolic Transition Toward Sustainability?”

  3. 3.

    Leslie White, The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization (Clinton Corners, NY: Percheron Press, 2005).

  4. 4.

    Rolf Peter Sieferle, “Sustainability in a World History Perspective,” in Brigitta Benzing and Bernd Herrmann, eds., Exploitation and Overexploitation in Societies Past and Present. IUAES-Intercongress 2001 Goettingen (Münster, Germany: LIT Publishing House, 2000), 123–42. Box 2–1 from Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Fridolin Krausmann, and Irene Pailua, “A Sociometabolic Reading of the Anthropocene: Modes of Subsistence, Population Size and Human Impact on Earth,” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 8–13. Figure 2–1 from Sieferle, “Sustainability in a World History Perspective.”

  5. 5.

    Two to four times from Fischer-Kowalski, Krausmann, and Pailua, “A Sociometabolic Reading of the Anthropocene”; 0.01 percent from Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Helmut Haberl, Socioecological Transitions and Global Change: Trajectories of Social Metabolism and Land Use (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2007); passive solar existence from Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution, translated from the German by Michael P. Osman (Cambridge, U.K.: White Horse Press, 2001); Haberl et al., “A Socio-­Metabolic Transition Toward Sustainability?”

  6. 6.

    Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009); Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), 10.

  7. 7.

    Box 2–2 from the following sources: Tim de Chant, “Hunter-Gatherers Show Human Populations Are Hard-Wired for Density,” Scientific American blog, August 16, 2011; Marcus J. Hamilton et al., “Nonlinear Scaling of Space Use in Human Hunter-gatherers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, vol. 11 (2007): 4,765–69; Michael Batty and Peter Ferguson, “Defining City Size,” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 38, no. 5 (2011): 753–56.

  8. 8.

    Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest; Mumford, The City in History.

  9. 9.

    Haberl et al., “A Socio-Metabolic Transition Toward Sustainability?”

  10. 10.

    Fischer-Kowalski, Krausmann, and Pailua, “A Sociometabolic Reading of the Anthropocene”; Table 2–1 from Haberl et al., “A Socio-Metabolic Transition Toward Sustainability?”

  11. 11.

    Vaclav Smil, Energy in Nature and Society. General Energetics of Complex Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Fridolin Krausmann et al., “The Global Sociometabolic Transition: Past and Present Metabolic Profiles and Their Future Trajectories,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 12, no. 5–6 (2008): 637–56.

  12. 12.

    Figure 2–2 from Kees Klein Goldewijk, Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen, “Long-term Dynamic Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way: HYDE 3.1,” The Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73; data available at ftp://ftp.pbl.nl/hyde/supplementary/population/table_4.xls; 2050 projection from United Nations, World Population Prospects (New York: 2015).

  13. 13.

    Mumford, The City in History, 37.

  14. 14.

    Table 2–2 from Ian Morris, Social Development (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, October 2010).

  15. 15.

    Mumford, The City in History, 33.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 34.

  17. 17.

    Thorkild Jacobsen and Robert M. Adams, “Salt and Silt in Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture,” Science 128, no. 3334 (1958): 1,251–58; Haberl et al., “A Socio-Metabolic Transition Toward Sustainability?”

  18. 18.

    Krausmann et al., “The Global Sociometabolic Transition.”

  19. 19.

    Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Fridolin Krausmann, and Barbara Smetschka, “Modelling Transport as a Key Constraint to Urbanisation in Pre-industrial Societies,” in Simron Singh et al., Long Term Socio-Ecological Research: Studies in Society-Nature Interactions Across Spatial and Temporal Scales (New York: Springer, 2014); Krausmann et al., “The Global Sociometabolic Transition.”

  20. 20.

    Table 2–3 from Morris, Social Development; Krausmann et al., “The Global Sociometabolic Transition.”

  21. 21.

    Krausmann et al., “The Global Sociometabolic Transition.”

  22. 22.

    Mumford, The City in History, 359.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 408.

  24. 24.

    “Subway,” Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/technology/subway, updated March 13, 2015; “Skyscraper,” Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/technology/skyscraper, updated April 22, 2015.

  25. 25.

    Krausmann et al., “The Global Sociometabolic Transition.”

  26. 26.

    Fridolin Krausmann et al., “Growth in Global Materials Use, GDP and Population During the 20th Century,” Ecological Economics 68, no. 10 (2009): 2,696–2,705. Table 2–4 from Haberl et al., “A Socio-Metabolic Transition Toward Sustainability?”

  27. 27.

    Krausmann et al., “The Global Sociometabolic Transition.”

  28. 28.

    Figure 2–3 from Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census (Lewiston, NY: Saint David’s University Press, 1987).

  29. 29.

    Krausmann et al., “The Global Sociometabolic Transition.”

  30. 30.

    Fischer-Kowalski, Krausmann, and Pailua, “A Sociometabolic Reading of the Anthropocene”; Peter Victor, “Questioning Economic Growth,” Nature 468 (November 18, 2010): 370–71.

  31. 31.

    Table 2–5 from Fischer-Kowalski, Krausmann, and Pailua, “A Sociometabolic Reading of the Anthropocene.”

  32. 32.

    Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker et al., Factor Five: Transforming the Global Economy Through 80 % Improvements in Resource Productivity (London: Earthscan, 2009).

  33. 33.

    Krausmann et al., “The Global Sociometabolic Transition.”

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  1. Gary Gardner
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Gardner, G. (2016). Cities in the Arc of Human History: A Materials Perspective. In: State of the World. State of the World. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-756-8_2

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