This volume explores the “green city” concept from a global and interdisciplinary perspective. Contributions examine the conflicts inherent in eco-modernization and investigate opportunities to respond meaningfully to urban environmental challenges.
Content
Barthold analyzes the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group to illustrate how city networks are powerful actors in the global dissemination of eco-modernization strategies aimed at decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation.
May Tan-Mullins looks at the decision-making processes involved in developing the Sino-Singaporean Tianjin Eco-city in China.
Nir Barak explores the limits of techno-managerial approaches towards creating greener cities.
Hornby draws attention to the work of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive installations aim to increase environmental awareness, arguing that Eliasson’s environments are fully orchestrated affairs that share the technologies and efforts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ militarization of climate control.
Greear examines the contemporary trend toward de-industrialized and decentralized production and its implications for ecological sustainability. He suggests we can understand the potential positive ecological implications of such trends by reconceptualizing “incomplete information” in markets, which is often understood as a key way in which markets fail to solve or forestall environmental problems.
In this Special Commentary Section titled “Replies to An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” edited by Eileen Crist and Thom Van Dooren, Eileen Crist considers the Manifesto’s point as view as one of humanism and freedom.
This collection highlights three quintessentially Canadian themes: seasonality, links between mobility and natural resource development, and urbanites’ experiences of the environment through mobility. It divides the intersection of environmental and mobility history into two approaches. The chapters in the first section deal primarily with the construction and productive use of mobility technologies and infrastructure, as well as their environmental constraints and consequences. The chapters in the second section focus on consumers’ uses of those vehicles and pathways: on pleasure travel, tourism, and recreational mobility.
Inspired by courses they’ve developed at Stanford, Mike Osborne and Miles Traer created the Generation Anthropocene podcast, a volunteer-based audio show featuring thought leaders.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, David Dunér scrutinizes the underlying suppositions involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research, particularly the last three factors of the Drake equation.
