How not to fry the grandchildren? A response to Peter Taylor's 'cities in climate change'

摘要

As part of a wider ongoing academic endeavour1, Peter Taylor's latest piece (Taylor, 2016) sets out to radically decentre the current global environmental policy debate, which is too much focussed on how carbon supply can be cut-back, by taking seriously the role of cities in generating demand for carbon- emitting innovations. The paper strongly embeds the debate about climate change in theories of urbanization, thereby providing a timely antidote against the relative short-sightedness of much of the current climate change analysis. Inspired by Jane Jacobs 'cities first thesis' (cf. Jacobs, 1969) and combined with empirical evidence found in the work of the American emeritus paleo-climatologist Ruddiman, cities are proposed to have been important anthropogenic drivers of climate change, not only since industrialization, but in fact since their very emergence as they stimulated the invention of large-scale agriculture. Invoking rapid urbanization and by now unpredictable levels of climate change, the paper announces to narrate 'the relationship between these two expected circumstances and how we might react to it as urban researchers'. I will structure my commentary of the paper along these lines, first addressing whether Taylor succeeds in establishing the relationship between cities and climate change in a convincing way, to be followed by a reflection on how we could act as researchers to support progressive agency in cities, an agenda subsumed under the 'cities in climate change' thesis.