Rapid Urbanization, Ecology and Sustainability: The Need for a Broad Strategy, Holism and Transdisciplinarity

This paper questions the conventional approaches to “planetary urbanization,” particularly their neglect to articulate the current process of rapid urban growth within the framework of new climate regimes and the ecological crisis. From this angle, it is irrelevant whether we focus on the idea of “city” or “the urban” in order to grasp contemporary socio-economic developments. Put differently, `”planetary urbanization” is one of the fundamentally constitutive elements of the Anthropocene era. Planetary urbanization is a problematic concept, and one that does not allow us to seriously analyze and assess the ecological threat and begin to craft proposals for a better understanding of sustainable development practices. After suggesting that the idea of “ecology” is fundamentally opposed to the idea of “nature,” we propose a concept of sustainability that is relevant for urban contexts and for an overall situation of planetary urbanization defined within the Anthropocene. Accordingly, an urban context will be defined as sustainable if it is planned and governed to account for the capacity, fitness, resilience, diversity and balance of its ecosystem. We take the view of sustainability as an organic process including environment, economy and community: form and efficiency (environmental factors in design, architecture, engineering and construction) as well as policy (urban plans and practices that explicitly aim at maintaining and improving the social and economic well-being of citizens). We need to step away from any conception of “the natural” as Nature. What is natural is what is sustainable, both urban and non-urban.