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Reconceptualising urbanism, ecologyand networked infrastructuresMark Swilling aa Sustainability Institute, School of Public Leadership ,Stellenbosch University , Stellenbosch, South AfricaPublished online: 26 May 2011.

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Social DynamicsVol. 37, No. 1, March 2011, 7895

ISSN 0253-3952 print/ISSN 1940-7874 online 2011 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/02533952.2011.569997http://www.informaworld.com

Reconceptualising urbanism, ecology and networked infrastructures

Mark Swilling*

Sustainability Institute, School of Public Leadership, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South AfricaTaylor and FrancisRSDY_A_569997.sgm10.1080/02533952.2011.569997Social Dynamics0253-3952 (print)/1940-7874 (online)Original Article2011Taylor & Francis371000000March 2011MarkSwillingswilling@sun.ac.za

There is increasing consensus that the existing system of production andconsumption is ecologically unsustainable and inequitable. The global economydepends on the use of 60 billion tons of material resources and 500 exajoules ofenergy annually. It is these flows that are responsible for resource depletion,negative environmental impacts and social injustice in many developing countrieswhere these resources are extracted. However, the bulk of these resources areused, consumed and disposed of as wastes within cities. More specifically, theway urban infrastructures are configured determines how these resource flows areconducted through cities. It follows that these flows could be reconfigured ifexisting urban infrastructures were retrofitted or new ones designed to ensure themore sustainable use of these resources in cities. The result would be a shift fromunsustainable urbanism to a more sustainable urbanism. Inclusive and splinteredurbanism are reviewed as dominant forms of unsustainable urbanism as a result ofthe way urban infrastructures are configured, while green urbanism and slumurbanism are reviewed as possible alternatives. A conception of liveableurbanism is proposed as a way of thinking about urban development that restoresecosystems and promotes sufficiency.

Keywords: sustainability; urban infrastructure; resource flows; urbanism

Introduction

Within the limits of this paper, it will only be possible to sketch the outlines of aconceptual framework that may be useful for deepening our understanding of what itis that is so unsustainable about cities and, therefore, what needs to change.1 Urbanresearchers and the sustainability community have failed to recognise the signifi-cance of the vast networked urban infrastructures that connect everyday living andworking, to the natural and informational resources, that urban dwellers depend on ina wide variety of ways across cities in the developed and developing world. The coreargument is that investments in urban infrastructures may well become the focus ofstrategies to resolve the global economic crisis, but in so doing key questions areraised about what kind of infrastructures will be designed, funded and built in orderto make sure that cities become more sustainable in future. This argument draws onrecent work on the material flows through cities that are made possible by specificconfigurations of networked infrastructures. (Guy et al. 2001, Heynen et al. 2006,Swilling 2006, Graham 2010, Hodson and Marvin 2010a, Hodson and Marvin2010b, Little 2010, Swilling 2010a, Swilling and De Wit 2010). An understanding of

*Email: swilling@sun.ac.za

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urban infrastructure is necessary for coming to terms with the challenge of buildingmore sustainable cities, by reworking the material flows through the ecological andurban systems that are structured and directed by these infrastructures (or what isconceptually depicted in this literature as the sociometabolism of the city (see Weiszand Steinberger 2010)).

Cities are not fixed physical artefacts or historical subjects, nor are they simplyspaces within which other things happen. Cities from this perspective are, pre-eminently, emergent outcomes of complex interactions between overlapping sociopo-litical, cultural, institutional and technical networks that are, in turn, in a constant stateof flux as vast sociometabolic flows of material resources (water, solid waste, sewage,building materials, electricity), bodies, energy, cultural practices and informationwork their way through urban systems in ways that are simultaneously routinised,crisis-ridden and transformative. This dynamic mix that shapes and structures every-day city life is what is referred to in this paper as urbanism. However, these flows andrelated modes of living are dependent on infrastructures that can be configured indifferent ways. Four distinct configurations of these networked infrastructures andsociometabolic flows are discussed in terms of the four urbanisms that they foster andshape inclusive urbanism, splintered urbanism, slum urbanism and green urbanism.We conclude by proposing in more idealised terms what we have called a more live-able urbanism that addresses directly the need to reconcile decent livelihoods withecologically sustainable living.

Globalisation, restructuring urban space and resource flows

The second urbanisation wave has taken place more or less at the same time aseconomic globalisation has reconfigured the spatial and temporal relationshipsbetween cities and between the globalised networked enclaves within cities scatteredacross the globe, in both developed and developing economies that share a place inthe new hyper-mobilities of the information age (Graham and Marvin 2001). As aresult, new borders have been created between the included and those that have beenexcluded by their disconnectedness. A well-established literature now exists thatdocuments in great detail the combined impact of the information revolution, neolib-eral economic policies, financialisation (nominally secured by urban assets), privati-sation of public services, the geographical relocation of production by capital flowsinto low-wage, rapidly industrialising zones (mainly in Asia, but also in Latin Amer-ica and Eastern Europe) and the rise of new globally networked urban spaces that aremore connected to each other via ICTs than to their respective home bases ornational hinterlands (see Borja and Castells 1997, Castells 1999, Bridge and Watson2000, Sassen 2000, Urry 2000, Graham and Marvin 2001, Amin and Thrift 2002). Akey characteristic of this new globalised economic geography is what Castells callsthe space of flows that has, in turn, trumped the space of place in the newnetworked world that neoliberal globalisation has stimulated and promoted (Castells1997).

Those local places that find a role in this globalised space of flows flourish,while those that fail literally fall off the edge and become irrelevant and dysfunc-tional (Castells 1997, Vol. 1, p. 147) for a global economy that has come to bestructured to meet primarily the consumption needs of an expanding urban-basedclass of about a billion (over-) consumers (United Nations Development Programme1998).

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The triple drivers of the second urbanisation wave were the declining capacity ofrural areas to support naturally expanding populations, natural increase in the cities(which is now a bigger driver than rural-urban migration) and the increasing concen-tration of political, economic and networked informational power in the expandingdeveloping country cities that has emerged together with neoliberal globalisation. Forcities (mainly in sub-Saharan Africa) that were incorporated into the global economyas ports for extracting raw materials rather than as sites for industrialisation and urban-isation, the patterns of globalisation since the early 1980s have meant little more thanexpanding slums. While recognising that poor governance contributes to negativeoutcomes, the reason why the second urbanisation wave has resulted in a billion slumdwellers (United Nations Centre for Human Settlements 2003) is because of theuneven way in which all or parts of cities in the developing world have been includedwithin or excluded from the changing nature of the global economy. Some sub-Saharan African cities were excluded entirely because they simply did not have theinfrastructures to connect up, thus forcing them to depend on a completely differentset of flows to those associated with the global space of flows that Castellsdescribes.2 However, many developing country cities were partially incorporated aslow-wage factories (often in export-processing zones) and related service industriesopened up, requiring labour that could be paid very little, often because they lived inslums (see essays in Part IV of Martine et al. 2008). As the connected parts of devel-oping country cities expanded, the cities needed to be restructured to create spaces forindustrial areas and middle class residential neighbourhoods (in particular in old,densely populated developing country cities like Manila, Mumbai, So Paolo). As aresult, slums were demolished and people forcefully relocated to areas where theywere often disconnected from economic opportunities a process that entailed exten-sive urban social conflict as communities resisted the demolition of their settlements(Peet and Watts 2000, Evans 2002, Cabannes et al. 2010). Vast informal economiesopened up that gave the unemployed access to the crumbs of value that fell from thecircuits of the formal economy and its expanding illegal appendages (loan sharking,child labour, drugs, sex work, organised crime, corruption). In some cases, communi-ties successfully resisted relocation and negotiated their way into at least the outeredges of the space of flows (e.g. as waste pickers), while others accessed localisedflows unrelated to the global economy (e.g. as urban farmers).

The strategic centrality of cities in the global polycrisis is reflected in the impor-tance given to cities in the solutions embedded in so-called rescue packages(Kamal-Chaoui and Roberts 2009, Suzuki et al. 2009, Organisation for EconomicCooperation and Development 2010, United Nations Environment Programme 2010).The evidence suggests that the publicly financed investments to stimulate the globalrecovery will be targeted primarily at investments to refurbish/extend the aging urbaninfrastructures of cities in the developed world, and also the under-serviced, over-burdened urban infrastructures of the burgeoning cities in the developing world (manyof which still only consist of the original colonial enclaves that were built for thesettler elites during the first urbanisation wave). The first global estimates of what itwill take have already started to be published. The US-based global consulting firmBooz Allen Hamilton, which depends heavily for its US $4.5 billion turnover onworldwide contracts to build infrastructure that get allocated to a handful of theworlds largest engineering contractors, has compiled a detailed estimate of the invest-ment required to meet demand for urban infrastructure over the next 25 years acrossall the cities of the world. Significantly called Lights! Water! Motion! and published

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in the influential business journal Strategy and Business, this report estimates that atotal of US $41 trillion is required to refurbish the old (in mainly developed countrycities) and build the new (mainly in developing country cities) urban infrastructuresover the period 20052030 an amount that was greater than the value of all thestocks on the worlds stock exchanges in 2007 (Doshi et al. 2007). Of this, over 50%(US $22.6 trillion) would be required for water systems,3 US $9 trillion for energy,US $7.8 trillion for road and rail infrastructure, and US $1.6 trillion for air- and sea-ports (Doshi et al. 2007, p. 4).

To their credit, Booz Allen Hamilton recognise (albeit only in a side box) that thegrand retooling of the worlds urban infrastructures will mean finding new designsand technologies that will make it possible to use natural resources more sustainably:

[C]ities that ignore environmental impact will find themselves facing another collapseof infrastructure 30 or 40 years from now, and our children and grandchildren will beara much higher price tag. (Doshi et al. 2007, p. 13)

Just as economists look back on the investments in automobiles, roads, petro-chemicals and mass production systems made from the 1930s through to the post-WWII period (including the Marshall Plan in Europe) as the investments thatresolved the 19291933 economic crisis, it is highly likely that in 10 to 15 yearstime researchers will look back and realise that the investments that helped resolvethe crisis of 20072010/11 were, in fact, investments in networked urban infrastruc-tures with, of course, Web 2.0-type ICTs as their operating systems (e.g. smartgrids, telecommuting, virtual shopping, remotely controlled intelligencesystems, digitalisation, etc.).

The question is, of course, what kinds of networked urban infrastructures will bebuilt? Will they set cities up for sustainable socio-ecological metabolisms? Or willthey set cities up against natures resource bases and ecosystems? Will they reinforcethe stark techno-apartheid that is splintering cities around the world or will theycreate the basis for greater equity, reduced levels of poverty and greater opportunitiesto build a sense of community? Will more sustainable modes of resource use reinforceor undermine the search for greater equity and a sense of place?

Networks, flows, urbanisms

By 2005, the global economy was using 500 exajoules of primary energy and extract-ing for use 60 billion tons of raw materials annually (International Energy Agency2009, Krausmann et al. 2009). This translated into 8 tons of primary materials percapita on average, and 4.5 tons of CO2 per capita (in a range from 20 tons per capitafor the average American to 1.2 tons per capita for the average Indian). Which citywill be the first to reconfigure its metabolic flows so that citizens can enjoy a decentquality of life and sense of community, while emitting no more than 2.2 tons of carbonand consuming a maximum of 6 tons of extracted materials per annum? (For the justi-fication of these quantifications of an ecologically and socially just convergence pointsee Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2010.) This convergence point where the poor get moreto have enough and the rich make do with less is what is increasingly referred to assufficiency (first clearly defined by Revi et al. 2006, and elaborated more recentlyby Von Weizsacker et al. 2009). For about a billion of the wealthier urban dwellersthis will entail drastic consumption reduction (from between 15 tons for Europeans

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and 30 tons for North Americans per annum to 6 tons per annum) and for the billionwho live in slums it will mean significant increases in resource consumption. But forabout a billion or so urban dwellers who do not live in slums and who are connectedinto the mainstream sociometabolic flows via a set of networked infrastructures thatdeliver adequate basic services (water, energy, sanitation and waste services to resi-dential site, with access of some sort to public and/or private mobility), this is more orless how they live now.

Building on the small but growing literature on the political ecology of sociomet-abolic urban flows (Girardet 1996, Graham and Marvin 2001, Guy et al. 2001, Girardet2004, Coutard et al. 2005, Heynen et al. 2006, Hodson and Marvin 2009a, Hodson andMarvin 2010a, Hodson and Marvin 2010b, Swilling 2010b), we can now describe inmore conceptual terms the key elements of the urban infrastructure system. These urbaninfrastructures are often vast technical networks that can be configured in many differ-ent ways depending on levels of financial investment, politically determined roles ofthe state relative to markets, institutional capacities, geographical boundaries, technicalknow-how, capacities of civil society to engage the managers, and user demand (which,of course, is fractured by class, race, space and gender). This also implies that differentnetworked infrastructures channel and process the range of sociometabolic flowsthrough the urban system in different ways. It is obvious, for example, that in devel-oping country cities where a formal sanitation system may be nonexistent, humanexcrement will not circulate through the urban system in the same way as in cities thatdo have a formal sanitation system. Anyone who enters central Mumbai for the firsttime can literally smell what it means when large numbers lack access to waterbornesanitation. Similarly, cities that are not hardwired with fibre optic cables will not bepopulated by businesses that depend on 24/7 high-speed low-cost connections to globalinformation flows. It is, therefore, not hard to imagine that different configurations ofnetworked infrastructures and their associated sociometabolic flows will, in a non-deterministic way, influence and shape the nature, mobilities and indeed cultures andsubjectivities of everyday urban living an ensemble of practices and perceptions thatis referred to here as urbanism.4

In summary, we are talking about three key concepts here. The first of these is thenetworked infrastructures which are the physical and technical systems that are fixedin space (roads, cables, satellites, pipes, rail, etc.), and managed by specific sets ofactors embedded within public and/or private institutions which, in turn, must operatewithin specific regulatory environments. These networked infrastructures, in turn,provide conduits for the sociometabolic flows through ecological and urban space intime (vehicles, bodies, water, data, energy, goods, food, etc.). Excluding, for themoment, information flows which have unique properties (e.g. data systems), theseflows can be linear metabolic flows of virgin materials with minimal re-use, or circu-lar metabolisms where outputs are seen as potential inputs (Girardet 1996). But not allinputs translate into outputs in the short term, because a large proportion of the inputresources get fixed in space over very long time frames as buildings and infrastruc-tures.5 Without being reductionist, the third concept, urbanism, refers to the ways oflife associated with these built forms, infrastructures and flows they both shapethrough design how these infrastructures and flows evolve, and are conditioned by theinfrastructures and flows that everyday life depends on.6

Despite the dangers of setting up typologies in advance and then applying them toa wide range of different contexts, we think it is useful to identify four generic urban-isms, each of which displays what Guy and Marvin call a different logic of network

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management (Guy and Marvin 2001, p. 32) and associated flows and practices. Eachof the four is characterised by specific interventions to structure and extend urbaninfrastructures in order to access and direct the sociometabolic flows. None, however,exist in a pure form, especially in todays sprawling developing country cities whereall four can coexist in complex and contradictory ways. Indeed, they have alwayscoexisted in one way or another, but what matters is which becomes dominant atdifferent times. The logics of the four approaches are described below as inclusiveurbanism, splintered urbanism, slum urbanism and green urbanism.7 In our view,none of these adequately addresses the challenge of sufficiency, hence our proposal ofa fifth approach, liveable urbanism.

Inclusive urbanism

The booming Victorian era in Britain (the deployment period of the Age of Steam andRailways) that followed the economic crisis of 18481850 was not simply about knit-ting the British Empire together with railway networks, to speed up the flow of rawmaterials to feed the fast evolving manufacturing sector of post-slavery Britain; it alsokick-started a century-long effort by a small Faustian coterie of city builders whomanaged to capture the imaginations of generations of intellectuals, politicians andfinanciers to build support for their efforts to systematically centralise and standardisethe design and delivery of road, water, waste, energy and communications grids inWestern cities (as well as the colonial/settler enclaves in the New World andcolonial outposts). In so doing, the engineers put in place the infrastructures and insti-tutions that created the modern networked city that was required by the age of steel,electricity and heavy engineering that began in 1875, and the age of oil, automobilesand mass production that began in 1908. It was an awesome vision that sank in steeland concrete the highest of all aspirations of modernity the desire to make progress,and to include everyone equally.

The crisis of 19291933 not only gave birth to Keynesian social democracy as theall-encompassing framework for fostering the age of oil and mass production and thepost-WW II consumer society; it was also inspired by the democratic vision of aninclusive urbanism where (almost) every urban dweller had rights to cheap, good-quality and accessible infrastructure services and its associated obligations of promptpayment and respect of technical boundaries (Guy and Marvin 2001, p. 29). Presidedover by increasingly large vertically integrated public monopolies delivering uniformcross-subsidised services during a prolonged growth period, massive resource-intensive sociometabolic flows were created that coursed through the consumptioncities that emerged during the first urbanisation wave. The end result was remarkablyequitable, highly unsustainable, and only realised on scale in the developed industrialeconomies. By the end of the 1960s these massive state-run, ecologically destructive,cash-guzzling networked infrastructures had reached their apogee. As major contrib-utors to the fiscal crisis that unfolded as the post-Oil Crisis recession set in from the1970s onwards, they became the prime targets for the neoliberal reformers whodespised cross-subsidised inclusive urbanism and the public monopolies that madethis and the Information Age possible. This vision of an inclusive urbanism,however, never died, because it remained key to the radical right to the city idea.Significantly, this idea has recently reappeared as the cornerstone of UN-HABITATsvision of urban reform, thus signalling the re-emergence of inclusive urbanism withinmainstream discourse (UN-HABITAT 2009).

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Splintered urbanism

The assault on Keynesian economics and the dismantling of social democratic gover-nance that followed the conservative electoral victories in the late 1970s/early 1980sin Western Europe and North America unleashed the forces of economic globalisationand hyper-financialisation, and fostered the emergence of what Castells (1997) callsthe Information Age. The three key investment strategies to revive the global economyinvolved incentives to move industry into developing countries in search of cheaplabour and new markets, financial deregulation to enable the higher-risk debt-financ-ing of expanded consumption of globally traded goods (manufactured mainly in thenew fast-industrialising economies), and drastic regulatory measures to privatise andliberalise the delivery of urban services, to break the power of the large public sectormonopolies in nearly every developed, developing and post-communist society. Thiscommodification of urban services (McDonald and Ruiters 2005) using new debtand intellectual property regimes that effectively transferred a hundred years ofpublicly funded physical and intellectual capital into private hands (usually) at amassive discount opened up the global market for extraordinary, highly profitableprivate sector investments that reconfigured globally networked cities in ways thatwere discussed earlier in this paper.8 More significantly from a sustainability perspec-tive, this globally implemented privatisation of networked urban infrastructures gaveprofit-seeking corporations access to natural resource flows (especially water, wastes,energy and mobility) during a period that was also characterised by accelerated GHGemissions (70% since the 1970s) (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007)and resource extraction (36% since 1980) (Behrens et al. 2007). Given that cities areresponsible for as much as 75% of all CO2 emissions and a huge proportion ofresource consumption (United Nations Environment Programme 2010), and given thatcorporations were licensed to exploit these business opportunities as the second urban-isation wave gathered momentum with no regard for ecological limits, it is unsurpris-ing that the period of neoliberal globalisation has ended not just in a financial crashrooted in the limits of debt-funded splintered urbanism, but in an unprecedentedecological crisis.

Urban infrastructures were rapidly unbundled and the new informational citiesthat emerged as enclaves within but disconnected from the old cities were nowconnected globally through the new privately delivered ICTs. An entirely new globalindustry emerged to deliver high-tech premium infrastructures (Graham and Marvin2001) that ensured that these enclaves (whether they were large swathes of cities likeManhattan or the financial district in London, or islands of modernity in the slumcities of the world, or entirely new cities with connected cores) were kitted out withprivately supplied water, sewage, waste, energy, mobility and communicationservices paid for via user charges collected to a large extent automatically, using newelectronic systems. The democratic vision of an inclusive urbanism held together byan integrated, publicly owned and standardised networked infrastructure was regardedas a threat to the market. Gone was the possibility of Southern cities created duringthe second urbanisation wave benefitting from the globalisation of a vision of a moreinclusive society. In the public choice language of individualised needs, marketsegments, competition and the user pays principle, what you got was what you couldafford.

Unsurprisingly, the result is what Graham and Marvin have appropriately calledsplintered urbanism (Graham and Marvin 2001). While it failed in developmental

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terms because it fostered the unprecedented social fragmentation of cities across thedeveloped and developing world, it also created the space for innovations, choice,access and decentralised solutions more appropriate for the emergence of largecomplex urban systems (such as megacities) that centralised public systems may neverhave been able to cope with. But like inclusive urbanism, splintered urbanismdepended on highly unsustainable linear sociometabolic flows the only differencewas that access to these flows became far more inequitable, as corporations managedto secure ever expanding control of these flows.

Slum urbanism

One in three urban dwellers today live in slums, and yet only 10% of these are seenas the potential beneficiaries of the programmes that aim to achieve the UN Millen-nium Development Goal of improving the living conditions of 100 million slumdwellers by 2015. Assuming for a moment that these plans work, it follows that littlewill be done about the 900 million who are already living in slums! Then add to thisa good proportion of the additional three billion expected to be living in cities inAfrica and Asia by 2050 and a spectre too awesome to contemplate emerges. And soit is not an overstatement at all to say that slum urbanism is probably here to stay forforeseeable generations, as the urban poor themselves incrementally struggle toresolve their own problems, often in opposition to forced relocations to make way forthe premium networked infrastructures of the globally connected enclaves(Cabannes et al. 2010). This is why splintered urbanism and slum urbanism are twosides of the same coin.

Slum urbanism is not a passing phase as cities move along the linear trajectoryfrom a primitive pre-modern urban form to the modern networked city, as imag-ined by so much of the urban development literature and associated aid programmes(see the publications of the World Banks Cities Alliance for a good example of thisway of thinking). Slum urbanism is an urbanism in its own right, with its own compre-hensible networked infrastructures, flows and ways of living that can be understoodas readily as any other form of urbanism. However, to do so means jettisoning therational planning logics at the centre of inclusive and splintered urbanism and accept-ing that what we are trying to analyse is a mess, one that cannot be cleaned up withseemingly rational methods that explain the mess as an absence of a preordained order(Law 2004) in this case the absence of the rational order of the urban planner. Itentails accepting what Pieterse calls a conceptual inversion that makes it possible toexplore the city from the bottom up, or rather through the eyes of the majority of poordenizens who appropriate the city for their own ends (Pieterse 2008, p.109). Ifuniversal access was the centre of inclusive urbanism and commodification thecentre of splintered urbanism, then Asef Bayats notion of quiet encroachment isprobably the best candidate for capturing the essence of slum urbanism:

The notion of quiet encroachment describes the silent, protracted and pervasiveadvancement of ordinary people on those who are propertied and powerful in a quest forsurvival and improvement of their lives. It is characterized by quiet, largely atomized andprolonged mobilization with episodic collective action open and fleeting struggleswithout clear leadership, ideology or structured organization. (Bayat 2000, pp. 5456)

But what is this quiet encroachment about? What is being achieved (and quite oftenpartially lost again) over time? In almost every case it is either to somehow get

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connected to wider networked infrastructures (in particular water, materials for build-ing shelter and food), or to establish autonomous localised networked infrastructuresfor self-managing the flows needed for survival. But it is worth sticking with Bayatsanswer to this question for him the urban poor are inexorably achieving

the redistribution of social goods and opportunities in the form of the (unlawful anddirect) acquisition of collective consumption (land, shelter, piped water, electricity,roads), public space (street sidewalks, intersections, street parking places), opportunities(favourable business conditions, locations, and labels), and other life changes essentialfor survival and a minimal standard of living. (Bayat 2000, p. 548, emphasis added)

Such statements are typical of the entire (and now massive) literature on urbanrenewal, urban social movements and slum upgrading (Menegat 2002, Mitlin andSatterthwaite 2004, De Cruz and Satterthwaite 2005, Samuels 2005, UN-HABITAT2008, Cabannes et al. 2010) the focus is always on the (often highly innovative)community and/or state initiatives to connect the urban poor to what we have callednetworked urban infrastructures, in particular water and sanitation services. Whetherthe focus is on this more technical (invariably top-down) task of getting the poorconnected to services in order to meet basic needs, or on the cultures of quietencroachment where nonformalised, creolised, hodge-podged, hybridised andcontested social orders and territories ambiguate any clear reading of what [is]really going on (Swilling et al. 2003), the urban poor are in one way or another effec-tively building and extending a wide range of (connected and autonomous) networkedinfrastructures, most often piece-by-scrappy-piece, as families translate toeholds intofootholds, into full-scale (albeit often fragile) inclusions (even if it takes a generationor more to get there). If one could imagine adding together the millions of micro-scopic everyday actions of slum dwellers to build, connect, repair, clean and protecttheir tiny spaces, it must surely add up to an effort that is commensurate in (demo-graphic/spatial) scale with the formal investments in networked infrastructures takingplace to connect those who can afford to be part of the formal systems. If this werenot true, how does one explain the sprawling slums that ceaselessly expand across thedeveloping world as the second urbanisation wave gathers momentum within anincreasingly unfair world?

The reinterpretation offered here of slums as an integral part of building thenetworked infrastructures of the cities of the future, and of slum urbanism as the urbanculture of quiet encroachment that animates these activities opens the way toseeing slum dwellers as active manipulators of sociometabolic flows. They are notcut off or excluded from sociometabolic flows simply because they lack access toformally constructed and managed networked infrastructures. In one way or anotherthey find ways to access water, energy, food, mobility, building materials and evenlocations for their sewage and solid waste. Without wanting to reinforce theunfounded romanticised image of the ever creative entrepreneurial slum dweller thatcan be found in many mainstream descriptions of quiet encroachment, it cannot bedenied that slum dwellers are actively participating in the process of connecting them-selves up to the city and its ecological contexts (rivers for conveying both water andwaste, soils for planting food and building materials, biomass for fuels and buildingmaterials, forests for charcoal, and fossil fuels mainly for accessing mobility andspecialist services like cell phone recharge, lighting or the internet).

As slum dwellers quietly encroach or actively protest in defense of their gains inways that are collective and audible (Bayat 2000, p. 547; see also Swilling 2005,

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Cabannes et al. 2010), they slowly participate in the building of connections tonetworked infrastructures that can incrementally secure their access to these flowsover the long term (even if this means doing so via illegal connections, or by failingto pay taxes or service charges) or, as Bayat puts it, for the urban poor modernityis a costly affair (Bayat 2000, p. 549). The global social movement Shack/SlumDwellers International (SDI), a confederation of movements in nearly 30 developingcountries, has demonstrated this in practice countless times over the past twodecades.9 Accessing these flows is obviously key to their future prosperity in the city,but how sustainable these flows are over time depends on conditions that go waybeyond the physical and perceptual purview of the localised spaces that get trans-formed by the quiet encroachment of slum urbanism.

Green urbanism

Since about 2005/2006, green urbanism has rapidly evolved as the legitimating ideol-ogy for escalating public sector investments in the kinds of networked urban infra-structures that will restructure sociometabolic flows, although the extent andsignificance from a sustainability perspective will differ drastically from place toplace (e.g. the greening of suburban golf estates in the US and South Africa is verydifferent to Swedish towns that aim to terminate the use of fossil fuels). Where inclu-sive urbanism was about universal access, splintered urbanism about commodifica-tion, and slum urbanism about quiet encroachment, green urbanism10 is aboutminimising damage to the environment.

The aim of green urbanism is usually to reduce the environmental impacts ofcities (GHG emissions, water, wastes, pollution) and reduce dependence on increas-ingly costly and insecure long-distance inputs (mainly fossil fuels, but also foodsupplies, building materials, etc.) (Hodson and Marvin 2009b, Suzuki et al. 2009,Hodson and Marvin 2010b). The Clinton Climate Initiative, for example, is fundingthe C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group which lists 45 major cities as affiliates,including 22 from developing countries.11 Although the primary focus of this partic-ular alliance is on carbon mitigation, it addresses a broader green urbanism agendathat is an uneasy mix of urban ecological modernisation (efficiency, natural capital-ism, greening), resource security (with respect, in particular, to oil dependence),aspects of inclusive urbanism (renewed appreciation for state involvement in ensur-ing universal access, especially in developing countries), and the retention of keyelements of splintered urbanism (for example private delivery of services such as railand telecommunications, in particular the new generation of Web 2.0 infrastructuresand smart grids).12

The top priorities, for example, of President Obamas Green New Deal are allabout massive public sector investments in networked urban infrastructures to retoolUS cities retrofitting buildings to make them energy-efficient, expanding mass transitand freight rail, constructing smart grids to manage electrical grids, and huge invest-ments in renewable energy (wind, solar, second-generation biofuels and bio-basedenergy) (Barbier 2009). Green urbanism has also become the hallmark of Chinas strat-egy to make its fast-tracked, state-driven inclusive urbanism more environmentallysustainable, with a strong focus on reducing the extremely negative environmentalimpacts of solid, airborne and liquid wastes (China Council for International Cooper-ation on Environment and Development 2007, Yong 2007). Green urbanism is not justa developed world phenomenon besides China, it is also taking root in Brazil

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(Schwartz 2004), India (Revi et al. 2006), Costa Rica (Wilde-Ramsing and Potter 2008)and South Korea (Ansems 2009).

Although the recent success of green urbanism has resulted in the taming of itsvision so that it can be turned into grand-scale techno-fixes divorced from the reali-ties of social process, culture and power (Guy et al. 2001, Hodson and Marvin 2009b,Hodson and Marvin 2010b), the ideational roots of this perspective are a strange anddiverse mix of movements and aspirations that extend back at least four decades.These include the ecovillage movements of the 1960s that were anti-urban andautarkic (e.g. Auroville in India, Crystal Waters in Australia, Gaviotas in Colombia,Findhorn in the UK, but now extending globally with many affiliated to the GlobalEcoVillage Network) (Van der Ryn and Cowan 1996); the German and Dutch citieswhich, from the 1980s onwards, invested in the greening of the remarkably equitableinclusive urbanism that evolved during the post-war period (e.g. Freiburg, Germany)(Beatley 2000, Guy et al. 2001); the extraordinary stories of how greening was usedin cities like Curitiba and Bogota to avoid subsidising superfluous middle-classconsumption (in particular of the private car), in order to be able to fund a more inclu-sive third world alternative to slum urbanism (Schwartz 2004, Campbell 2006, World-watch Institute 2007, pp. 8081); the environmental movements (often with supportfrom NGOs) that emerged across the world to protest against the negative social andenvironmental consequences of splintered urbanism (Evans 2002; see also Hawken2007, and various editions over the years of the journal Environment and Urbaniza-tion published by IIED in London); the programmatic and somewhat technocratic prescriptions for greater social and environmental sustainability that emanated fromformal multilateral initiatives such as the Sustainable Cities Programme established in1995 by UN-HABITAT/UNEP, and the global network of local governments knownas ICLEI trading as Local Governments for Sustainability13; extraordinary city-widepartnerships to completely reinvent the city from a sustainability perspective the bestexamples being Seoul (South Korea), where the highway through the city wasreplaced with the river that used to be there, Rizhao (China), Melbourne (Australia)and San Jose (US) (Reed 2007, Worldwatch Institute 2007, pp. 8890, 108110,Ansems 2009, Wassung 2009); and the increasing number of habitat awards forsustainable design that usually feature a vast array of community-based and privatelyfunded projects.

More recently, splintered urbanism has been given a new green sheen by proposalsfor a new generation of green mega-projects by the worlds design glitterati, who wantto design autonomous sustainable cities for the globally connected elites who nowwant to secede completely from unsustainable cities so that they can live in safe, carbon-free cocoons with a One Planet Living stamp of approval from the WWF this beinga bizarre twenty-first-century reincarnation of the autarkic sensibilities of the 1960shippies. These projects include Norman Fosters new city called Masdar, planned forthe Abu Dhabi desert (and financed by petrodollars); Dongtan, which Arup (the largestconsulting engineering firm in the world) has designed in partnership with the Chinesestate as the first sustainable city and which is planned for Chongmin Island just offthe coast of Shanghai; and Lennar Corporations plan blessed by California GovernorSchwarzenegger for transforming Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay into anothericonic sustainable city. Green urbanism has become big business for the globalproperty development community, with signature architectural egos blazing the trail.

Despite their diversity, all these currents and initiatives have contributed in vari-ous ways to the body of practice and knowledge that we have called green urbanism.

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But not all the elements of these antecedents are embodied in contemporary main-stream green urbanism. In particular, the commitments to social justice and the resto-ration of nature that are part of the tradition have been conveniently extirpatedbecause they do not fit comfortably with the desire that lies at the centre of greenurbanism, which is to reconcile sustainability and over-consumption across a range ofgreen enclaves rather than within the context of retrofitted cities (Hodson andMarvin 2010b). We will return to this later when we propose liveable urbanism as analternative perspective.

Nevertheless, we must not under-estimate how fundamentally these investments inmore ecologically sustainable sociometabolic flows (now popularly known as green-tech) could change what it means to live a middle-class urban life, and in so doingredefine the kind of urbanism others may aspire to achieve. These changes couldinclude any combination of the following: bringing an end to travel by privatelyowned cars; compulsory high-density living in buildings that generate more energythan they consume; enforced waste separation at source; drinking potable watercaptured from sewage plants; heavy penalties for long-distance travel (by car and air);bans on toxic pollution of all kinds, that could result in the disappearance of a numberof consumables (e.g. certain kinds of plastics); decentralised and home-based telecom-muting that will reduce demand for separate commercial and industrial districts; re-engagement with local food production in private allotments or peri-urban farms,either directly or via farmers markets; rapid price increases for energy-intensive fooditems like meat and for consumer goods like cell phones that rely on rare non-renew-able metals; regulatory and market interventions to restrict carbon-intensive importsand enforce zero-waste; massive new skills training programmes for green collarjobs in the new clean tech industries; and heavy investments in the restoration ofurban ecosystems services (such as forests, aquifers, wild areas, rivers and soils). Allthese changes are already underway in one city or another, and if added up and extrap-olated into the future, they represent an image of urban futures that are as differentfrom today as the vision of a modern city for the new bourgeoisie that Baron Hauss-mann must have envisaged in 1852 as he contemplated ramming his boulevards,gardens, railways, gas pipes and aqueducts through the teaming slums of Paris.

Towards a liveable urbanism

Green urbanism has managed to focus attention on what is so ecologically unsustain-able about cities, namely the ever-expanding, resource-intensive, environmentallydestructive sociometabolic flows that support the prevailing urban production andconsumption systems. Networked urban infrastructures have gradually evolved intohighly complex systems that source and deploy these flows from across increasinglyvast natural catchments and value chains. Up until recently, these infrastructures havebeen designed and operated as if there are no limits, and those who manage them havenot developed the skills or been incentivised to think any differently. Greenurbanism, therefore, goes up against the entire history of urbanism by suggesting thatcities can grow and urban livelihoods improve without increasing indeed, even byreversing demand for resources.

The danger with green urbanism is that it is fast becoming a techno-fix for green-ing the elite residential enclaves and commercial parks of splintered urbanism, with-out facing the inescapable need to reverse over-consumption and end urban povertyby bringing back in the universal access ethos of inclusive urbanism. Following the

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remarkably fresh critical new work by Janice Birkeland (2008), who argues that weneed to go from design for sterility to design for fertility, there is a compelling argu-ment that it is time to go beyond the minimising damage ethos of green urbanismand replace it with the more ambitious notion that urban developments should bedesigned to restore life. The minimising damage idea is expressed most clearly inthe Green Building movement. As Birkeland quips: Indeed, if we labelled cigarettesthe way we label buildings, people might start smoking more light cigarettes to gethealthier (Birkeland 2008, p. viii). If sustainable development means little more thanretarded collapse, then yes, minimising damage makes sense. But if sustainabledevelopment means a more equitable world where natural resources are not depleted,then clearly there is a need to be more ambitious about what ecologically sustainableurban development could achieve.

Liveable urbanism is inspired by the many examples from around the world wheredevelopment processes have resulted in the restoration of nature (with Auroville,India, and Gaviotas, Colombia, most likely being the best examples, but there are nowliterally thousands of others). It also captures the way of life of the billion or so urbancitizens who have sufficient and therefore live largely within the carrying capacity ofthe planet. They have connections to networked infrastructures, livelihoods that makeit possible to pay for services and often a sense of community solidarity. Liveableurbanism makes it possible for those who live modestly to find common ground withthose quiet encroachments of slum urbanism that empower the urban poor, to build upfrom below local economies of inclusive self-sufficiency that contest the relocationsthat splintered urbanism tends to foster as developers build more shopping malls,resorts, export processing zones, highways, railways, waste dumps, sewage plants andsecurity estates. To this extent, liveable urbanism is closer to the ethos of inclusiveurbanism than to the callous selfishness of splintered urbanism. However, liveableurbanism has much to learn from the latters faith in social entrepreneurship as thedriver of a diversity of delivery systems, instead of advocating a return to the rigiditiesof public sector monopolies that gave inclusive urbanism a bad name. The floweringof autonomous sustainable communities (or EcoVillages) as manifestations of ecolog-ical entrepreneurship is compatible with a liveable urbanism that depends on emergingmodes of bio-economic diversification of a kind that actively includes the urban poorin new networks of production and consumption (for example, when urban marketsmake it possible for peri-urban food growers to sell directly to households, thusbypassing the supermarkets which usually push up the prices for consumers and pushdown the prices for farmers).

Although they hardly ever make the headlines, hundreds of thousands of initiativesare underway within slum communities around the world that are slowly but surelystitching together ways of connecting slum dwellers to flows of water, energy, food,mobility and building materials. These initiatives, of course, run contrary to the oppo-site logic: daily (usually violent) attacks on slums to relocate people who are in theway of progress (Cabannes et al. 2010). In their remarkable review of these initia-tives, Cabannes et al. document the strategies of engagement that these communitiesuse to contest evictions, strategies which include negotiation (with SDI as the keychampion of this strategy), occupy-resist-live, legal challenges via the courts, openstruggle and resistance, building rights and pragmatic policies, and campaigning toinfluence public opinion (Cabannes et al. 2010). Where relocation is resisted andconnections made to flows that make survival in the city possible (Mitlin 2008), slumdwellers join the ranks of the billion or so people who already live modestly connected

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to the basic flows that networked urban infrastructures can provide, and who havesufficient to live decent, hardworking lives. Herein lies the historic significance of themovements that SDI gives voice to. This quiet encroachment through countless organ-isational initiatives is also an unacknowledged driver of the creation of massivedomestic markets that are, in turn, catalysing the sonic booms in emerging marketsin virtually every developing country outside of China.14 Maybe this means that slumurbanism is making possible a new kind of bottom-up inclusive urbanism, where stateinterventions to provide services are largely reactive responses to grassroots powerrather than a proactive project of inclusion, as was the case in developed economiesduring the FordistWelfarist period that followed the 1929 Depression.

Conclusion

If the various global agreements about a more sustainable future have any meaning atall, this will entail a fundamental recognition that there are natural limits to thecurrent system of production and consumption that depends on the extraction and useof 60 billion tons of materials and 500 exajoules of energy per annum. What is notadequately recognised is that as the second urbanisation wave accelerates, cities willbecome increasingly significant sites for innovations that will make it possible forurban citizens to achieve sufficient levels of wellbeing in less resource- and energy-intensive ways. It has been argued in this paper that this can only happen if moresustainable sociometabolic flows are achieved by reconfiguring the networked urbaninfrastructures that conduct these flows through cities. Water, sewage, energy, solidwaste, food, building materials and mobility of goods and people are the key resourceflows through cities that everyday life and local economies depend on. If nothingchanges, resource depletion will gradually undermine the possibility of more equita-ble and liveable cities coming into being. Instead, inequalities and conflicts will riseas the rising resource prices become affordable only for the rich. It has been demon-strated in this paper that urbanism depends on the way we configure the networkedinfrastructures of the city. As we move into an era characterised by a search forgreen urbanism, serious questions need to be asked as to whether this approach is anadequate response to slum urbanism and the severity of the ecological crisis. Liveableurbanism has been offered as an alternative because it emphasises sufficiency and theneed to move beyond just minimising damage. When we realise that investmentsaimed at restoring our ecosystems along with investments in social cohesion andinnovation are a key element of the future economy of networked, ecologicallythriving, socially integrated bio-economic regions, that is when we will havecommenced the co-creation with nature and each other of a new kind of liveableurbanism.

Notes1. For a more detailed elaboration of this conceptual framework as well as an empirical

application of this framework to the City of Cape Town, see Swilling and Anneckeforthcoming.

2. Hence the significance of studies that have refused to assume that just because these citiesfall off the edge of the information highway, they somehow cease to exist instead theyare also dependent on local, regional and global flows of information that structure verydifferent modes of value to those that flow through the formalised global economy (Simone2004a; see also Swilling et al. 2003).

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3. Although not specifically defined, we presume this means water and sanitation infrastruc-ture because the one without the other does not make much technical sense.

4. This is our reading of the argument developed by Pile and Thrift (1996), but also an inter-pretation of our earlier work on African cities with AbdouMaliq Simone (Swilling et al.2003) and Simones other writings (see Simone 2004a, 2004b). See also recent work onCape Town that explores these ideas (Swilling 2010b).

5. Birkeland, for example, has suggested that 90% of extracted materials remained fixed inuse as buildings and infrastructures (2008, p. 26).

6. This is our interpretation, using slightly different language, of the argument that Guy andMarvin (2001) have developed.

7. The first two, inclusive and splintered urbanism, have been thoroughly described andanalysed in the pathbreaking book by Graham and Marvin (2001). The notion of greenurbanism was coined by Beatley in his classic review of Western European cities whichexperimented with sustainability (Beatley 2000). And the concept of slum urbanism issubstantially drawn from Davis (2005), but qualified by the work of Pieterse (2008),Bayat (2000) and Swilling et al. (2003), who do not share the foreboding sense of anabsence of agency that pervades Davis work (for a critical review see Satterthwaite2006).

8. For a personal insider account of how this was managed in practice by ruthless privatecontractors across many developing countries, see Perkins 2004.

9. See www.sdinet.org.10. We have borrowed the term green urbanism from the title of a seminal text by Beatley

(see Beatley 2000).11. See http://www.c40cities.org.12. A similar eclectic mix of discourses is what Keil and Boudreau have identified in the make-

up of what they call urban ecological modernization (2006) with reference to their read-ing of the environmental politics of Toronto.

13. See http://www.iclei.org/.14. Although even China now has its quiet encroachments see Liu and Vlaskamp 2010.

Notes on contributorProfessor Mark Swilling is Programme Coordinator: Sustainable Development Planning andManagement in the School of Public Leadership, University of Stellenbosch and AcademicDirector of the Sustainability Institute. Notable books include: Governing Africas Cities,(University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1997); Sustaining Cape Town: Imagining a LivableCity, (Sun Media Press, 2011); and Just Sustainabilities: Exploring Sustainability in an UnfairWorld, (Juta, forthcoming).

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