Bioregions and Ecocities

Imagining the Regenerative City?

Molly Scott Cato

Professor of Strategy and Sustainability

Roehampton Business School

Where are we going?

• A few nasty shocks

• A little bit of theory does you good

• Visions of the future

The Vulnerability of Complexity

• A system of energy intensity

• Extended supply chains reduce resilience

• Weakening of community bonds

• 99% of UK food imports depend: unsurprisingly they are at sea-level.

• In 2007 the IPCC predicted a 0.35m rise in sea levels by the end of the 21st century.

• In 2009 scientists declared that sea-level rise was occurring at twice the rate they had estimated just two years earlier

The Insecurity of Lengthy Supply Chains

Where are the world’s ports?

Plans for London?

• Thames Barrier closed 34 times in the 1990s to protect London from flooding and 80 times in the 2000s

• Current standard of protection will last until 2030• There are over £200 billion of capital assets in the

Thames tidal floodplain, including 500,000 properties, nearly 100 tube/train stations, City airport, 400 schools, 16 hospitals and 8 power stations

• 1.25 million people live or work below the Thames average high tide.

London is Relatively Safe

• Top ten global cities in terms of exposed population: Mumbai, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Miami, Ho Chi Minh City, Kolkata, Greater New York, Osaka-Kobe, Alexandria and New Orleans

Diseconomies of Scale

• Leopold Kohr: Modern cities as destructive and inefficient– Power commodities: ‘tanks, bombs or the increase

in government services required to administer increased power’

– Density commodities: ‘rendered necessary as a result of population increases, such as traffic lights, first-aid equipment, tube services, or replacement goods for losses which would never have occurred in less harassed smaller societies’

Optimal scale?

• Plato: 40,000 people• Dunbar number: 150

people

• ‘the greatest sum of well-being can be obtained when a variety of agricultural, industrial and intellectual pursuits are combined in each community; and that man shows his best when he is in a position to apply his usually varied capacities to several pursuits in the farm, the workshop, the factory, the study or the studio, instead of being riveted for life to one of these pursuits only.’

• (Kropotkin, 1899: 18).

• Localism is essentially hierarchical: we are left to pick up the pieces

• Need to raise the question of political economy and the destructive nature of the WTO

• Allowing local variation in business rates, or allowing local authorities to introduce taxes on land?

• Localisation reacts to globalisation to rebuild local systems of provisioning

Localisation not Localism

Market town or city-state?

• A post-colonial approach to provisioning• The importance of hinterland• ‘Knowing place for the urban-dweller, then,

means learning the details of the trade and resource-dependency between city and country and the population limits appropriate to the region’s carrying capacity. It also suggests exploring the natural potential of the land on which the city rests’

Domesday map• People lived where the resources were

• Colonial system broke this connection

• Current provisioning relies on exploitation

Oil Cities

Polanyi’s ‘great transformation’

• Stage I: Displacement and Enclosure

• Stage II: Loss of connection between people and land: concern for population

• Stage III: Dependence on ‘rented’ land and labour overseas: the ‘fictitious commodities’

• How can we reverse these processes?

Herbie Girardet’s vision of Petropolis

Ecopolis: the regnerative city

UK Self-Sufficiency of Rates in Different Historical Periods

Time -period %of food produced domestically

Pre-1750 C. 100

1750-1830s 90-100b

1870s c. 60

1914 c. 40

1930s 30-40

1950s 40-50

1980s 60-70

2000 60

What is a bioregion?• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than

political) boundaries’• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘life-place’—

with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and non-human living communities. Bioregions can be variously defined by the geography of watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and related identifiable landforms and by the unique human cultures that grow from natural limits and potentials of the region

An economic bioregion• A bioregional economy would be embedded

within its bioregion and would acknowledge ecological limits.

• Bioregions as natural social units determined by ecology rather than economics

• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic resources such as water, food, products and services.

• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity

Why ownership matters

• Stewardship not property rights• Commons not markets e.g. National

Trust• Participatory economic planning e.g. EU

fisheries policy• Who will gain the profit?• Cornish minerals mining: Which system

of ownership would best protect the environment?

Find out more

www.greeneconomist.org

gaianeconomics.blogspot.com

Green Economics: AnIntroduction to Theory, Policy and Practice (Earthscan, 2009)

The Bioregional Economy: Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness(Earthcan, 2012)