IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v57y2020i7p1502-1519.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cities and the Anthropocene: Urban governance for the new era of regenerative cities

Author

Listed:
  • Giles Thomson

    (Sustainability Policy Institute, Curtin University, Australia)

  • Peter Newman

    (Sustainability Policy Institute, Curtin University, Australia)

Abstract

The emerging ‘grand challenges’ of climate change, resource scarcity and population growth present a risk nexus to cities in the Anthropocene. This article discusses the potential that rapid urbanisation presents to help mitigate these risks through large-scale transitions if future urban development is delivered using evidence-based policies that promote regenerative urban outcomes (e.g. decarbonising energy, recycling water and waste, generating local food, integrating biodiversity). Observations from an Australian case study are used to describe urban governance approaches capable of supporting regenerative urbanism. The regenerative urbanism concept is associated with macro-scale urban and transport planning that shapes different urban fabrics (walking, transit, automobile), as the underlying infrastructure of each fabric exhibits a different performance, with automobile fabric being the least regenerative. Supporting urban systems based upon regenerative design principles at different scales (macro, meso and micro) can deliver deep and dramatic outcomes for not just reducing the impact of the grand challenges but turning them into regenerative change. In combination, these approaches form the cornerstone of regenerative cities that can address the grand challenges of the Anthropocene, while simultaneously improving livability and urban productivity to foster human flourishing.

Suggested Citation

  • Giles Thomson & Peter Newman, 2020. "Cities and the Anthropocene: Urban governance for the new era of regenerative cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(7), pages 1502-1519, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:57:y:2020:i:7:p:1502-1519
    DOI: 10.1177/0042098018779769
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098018779769
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0042098018779769?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bernhard Truffer & Lars Coenen, 2012. "Environmental Innovation and Sustainability Transitions in Regional Studies," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(1), pages 1-21, November.
    2. Yuan Gao & Peter Newman, 2018. "Beijing’s Peak Car Transition: Hope for Emerging Cities in the 1.5 °C Agenda," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 3(2), pages 82-93.
    3. Green, Jemma & Newman, Peter, 2017. "Citizen utilities: The emerging power paradigm," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 283-293.
    4. Matthew Gandy, 2004. "Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 8(3), pages 363-379, December.
    5. Newman, Peter & Davies-Slate, Sebastian & Jones, Evan, 2018. "The Entrepreneur Rail Model: Funding urban rail through majority private investment in urban regeneration," Research in Transportation Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 19-28.
    6. Paul J. Crutzen, 2002. "Geology of mankind," Nature, Nature, vol. 415(6867), pages 23-23, January.
    7. Peter Newman & Anne Matan, 2013. "Green Urbanism in Asia:The Emerging Green Tigers," World Scientific Books, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., number 8596.
    8. McIntosh, James & Trubka, Roman & Newman, Peter, 2014. "Can value capture work in a car dependent city? Willingness to pay for transit access in Perth, Western Australia," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 320-339.
    9. Jan Zalasiewicz & Colin Waters & Martin J. Head, 2017. "Anthropocene: its stratigraphic basis," Nature, Nature, vol. 541(7637), pages 289-289, January.
    10. Margaret Gollagher & Janette Hartz-Karp, 2013. "The Role of Deliberative Collaborative Governance in Achieving Sustainable Cities," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 5(6), pages 1-24, May.
    11. Garry Glazebrook & Peter Newman, 2018. "The City of the Future," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 3(2), pages 1-20.
    12. Jessica Bunning & Colin Beattie & Vanessa Rauland & Peter Newman, 2013. "Low-Carbon Sustainable Precincts: An Australian Perspective," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 5(6), pages 1-22, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jiaxing Cui & Xuesong Kong & Jing Chen & Jianwei Sun & Yuanyuan Zhu, 2021. "Spatially Explicit Evaluation and Driving Factor Identification of Land Use Conflict in Yangtze River Economic Belt," Land, MDPI, vol. 10(1), pages 1-24, January.
    2. Aleksandra Nowysz & Łukasz Mazur & Magdalena Daria Vaverková & Eugeniusz Koda & Jan Winkler, 2022. "Urban Agriculture as an Alternative Source of Food and Water Security in Today’s Sustainable Cities," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(23), pages 1-21, November.
    3. Qingchang He & Andras Reith, 2022. "(Re)Defining Restorative and Regenerative Urban Design and Their Relation to UNSDGs—A Systematic Review," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(24), pages 1-29, December.
    4. Michelle Ann Miller & Mike Douglass & Jonathan Rigg, 2020. "Governing resilient cities for planetary flourishing in the Asia-Pacific," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(7), pages 1359-1371, May.
    5. Ana Corrêa do Lago & Teresa Sánchez Chaparro & Julio Lumbreras, 2023. "A Decade of Climate Action and the Mission towards Climate Neutrality and Adaptation in European Cities: Delivering Urban Transformations?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(24), pages 1-13, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sharma, Rohit & Newman, Peter, 2018. "Does urban rail increase land value in emerging cities? Value uplift from Bangalore Metro," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 70-86.
    2. Li, Xinjian & Love, Peter E.D. & Luo, Hanbin & Fang, Weili, 2022. "A systemic model for implementing land value capture to support urban rail transit infrastructure projects," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 156(C), pages 90-112.
    3. Marcel Bednarz & Tom Broekel, 2020. "Pulled or pushed? The spatial diffusion of wind energy between local demand and supply," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 29(4), pages 893-916.
    4. Wiegand, Julia, 2017. "Dezentrale Stromerzeugung als Chance zur Stärkung der Energie-Resilienz: Eine qualitative Analyse kommunaler Strategien im Raum Unna," Wuppertaler Studienarbeiten zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung, Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, volume 11, number 11.
    5. Jonas Heiberg & Bernhard Truffer, 2021. "The emergence of a global innovation system – a case study from the water sector," GEIST - Geography of Innovation and Sustainability Transitions 2021(09), GEIST Working Paper Series.
    6. Jiaxing Cui & Xuesong Kong & Jing Chen & Jianwei Sun & Yuanyuan Zhu, 2021. "Spatially Explicit Evaluation and Driving Factor Identification of Land Use Conflict in Yangtze River Economic Belt," Land, MDPI, vol. 10(1), pages 1-24, January.
    7. Tommaso Luzzati & Angela Parenti & Tommaso Rughi, 2017. "Spatial error regressions for testing the Cancer-EKC," Discussion Papers 2017/218, Dipartimento di Economia e Management (DEM), University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
    8. Andreas Bjurström & Merritt Polk, 2011. "Climate change and interdisciplinarity: a co-citation analysis of IPCC Third Assessment Report," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(3), pages 525-550, June.
    9. J. Park & T. P. Seager & P. S. C. Rao & M. Convertino & I. Linkov, 2013. "Integrating Risk and Resilience Approaches to Catastrophe Management in Engineering Systems," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 33(3), pages 356-367, March.
    10. Gesa Pflitsch & Verena Radinger-Peer, 2018. "Developing Boundary-Spanning Capacity for Regional Sustainability Transitions—A Comparative Case Study of the Universities of Augsburg (Germany) and Linz (Austria)," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(4), pages 1-26, March.
    11. Ramesh, Niranjana, 2022. "An experiment with the minor geographies of major cities: infrastructural relations among the fragments," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 114952, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    12. Anne P. M. Velenturf & Phil Purnell, 2017. "Resource Recovery from Waste: Restoring the Balance between Resource Scarcity and Waste Overload," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(9), pages 1-17, September.
    13. Damien Bazin & Sylvie Ferrari & Richard B. Howarth, 2021. "Introducing Environmental Ethics into Economic Analysis: Some Insights from Hans Jonas' Imperative of Responsibility," GREDEG Working Papers 2021-05, Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France.
    14. Ibraeva, Anna & Correia, Gonçalo Homem de Almeida & Silva, Cecília & Antunes, António Pais, 2020. "Transit-oriented development: A review of research achievements and challenges," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 132(C), pages 110-130.
    15. Davide Castellani & Giovanni Marin & Sandro Montresor & Antonello Zanfei, 2020. "Foreign Direct Investments and Regional Specialization in Environmental Technologies," SEEDS Working Papers 0620, SEEDS, Sustainability Environmental Economics and Dynamics Studies, revised Apr 2020.
    16. Elisa Giuliani, 2016. "Human Rights and Corporate Social Responsibility in Developing Countries’ Industrial Clusters," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 133(1), pages 39-54, January.
    17. Sangwan Lee & Liming Wang, 2022. "Intermediate Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Prices of Housing near Light Rail Transit: A Case Study of the Portland Metropolitan Area," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(15), pages 1-17, July.
    18. Koschatzky, Knut & Hansmeier, Hendrik & Schnabl, Esther & Stahlecker, Thomas & Wittmann, Florian & Zenker, Andrea, 2022. "Transformative Entwicklungsprozesse in strukturschwachen Regionen des Wandels," Working Papers "Firms and Region" R1/2022, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI).
    19. Vanesa Castán Broto & Harriet Bulkeley, 2013. "Maintaining Climate Change Experiments: Urban Political Ecology and the Everyday Reconfiguration of Urban Infrastructure," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(6), pages 1934-1948, November.
    20. Carter, Virginia & Derudder, Ben & Henríquez, Cristián, 2021. "Assessing local governments’ perception of the potential implementation of biophilic urbanism in Chile: A latent class approach," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:57:y:2020:i:7:p:1502-1519. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.