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.
Vanesa Castán Broto critiques sustainable development agendas that approach green cities as merely engines of economic growth.
This short film combines remote sensing, qualitative interviews, desk research, and illustrations to show the complexities and controversies surrounding mangrove reforestation in Senegal and The Gambia.
By theorizing the temporalities of political-economic transformations as embodied in key conservationist and educational institutions, Erin Fitz-Henry argues that we can deepen our understanding of “worlds-otherwise” and work toward clarifying the institutional conditions that mitigate their flourishing.
Ryan Hackett reviews Jessica Dempsey’s book Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics.
Northcott’s article for the Special Commentary section discusses the content of Pope Francis’s Laudato si’, highlighting the economic implications of the Pope’s statements and the theological basis for them in the Christian tradition and elsewhere.
Goodchild’s article for the Special Commentary section analyzes Pope Francis’s Laudato si, focusing particularly on the concept of connectedness and the economic changes necessary for the Pope’s statements to become reality.
Vardy and Smith’s article for the Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities argues that “resilience signals the pernicious return of structural-functionalism precisely at the moment when much more nuanced, thoughtful, and critical attention should be given to the relationships and differences between and within human and nonhuman populations.”
Matthew MacLellan argues that Garrett Hardin’s primary object of critique in his influential “The Tragedy of the Commons” is not the commons or shared property at all—as is almost universally assumed by Hardin’s critics—but is rather Adam Smith’s theory of markets and its viability for protecting scarce resources.
