Cities and Sustainability

In the aftermath of the Brundtland Report and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit the concept of sustainability has become a key idea in national and international discussions. Sustainable development is certainly a desirable and, more debatably, an attainable objective in global terms. However, it is less obviously applicable on a smaller scale, where it is sometimes used synonymously with self-sufficiency. It is argued that the notion of ‘sustainable cities’, popularized in contemporary literature, is simply based on a misconceived idea of the full implications of sustainability, as well as the way that cities have developed historically. The technique of environmental footprint analysis is used to examine the sustainability of cities by placing them in their broader geographic context. The eighteenth-century (Georgian) city of Bath is employed as a case study following Doughty and Hammond (1997 and 2000). Its per capita ‘environmental footprint’ is contrasted with that of the surrounding bioregion, as well as with the United Kingdom, Europe and the World. The footprint of Bath is found to be greater than that of these wider geographic regions, and is nearly twenty times larger than its corresponding land area. This lends support to the authors’ critique of the idea of sustainable cities; cities only survive because they are linked by human, material and communications networks to their hinterlands or bioregions.