Cities are not isolates: To reduce their impacts a change in urban-rural interdependencies and the direction of modernity are required

Abstract

It has become assumed that most humans will live in cities going forward and that they can be made to mitigate their environmental impacts. These assumptions come out of a period that has enjoyed ample energy from fossil fuels, and invisible to most, enormous resource flows from non-urban areas. For cities to reduce their GHGs, that means they must be reduced in resourcing areas, challenging our current deep dependence on fossil energy. This perspective suggests there is a need for new research that investigates how to reduce GHGs in resourcing areas through intensive agroecology, how to build climate appropriate, low embedded GHG emissions buildings, low energy technologies, to move to a future where we begin to live within the limits of the planet.