Читать книгу The Climate City - Группа авторов - Страница 53

Following on from the environmental challenges that urban cities face in cleaning up their urban ecosystems discussed in Chapter 2, The Civilized City, Austin now moves us forward in time to discuss the problems facing developing urban cities.

Throughout the chapter, Austin investigates urban conditions and the battle between the economy and the environment, using Malawi in Africa and China in Asia as examples, in an attempt to understand how cities within these countries and continents reflect their historical socioeconomic national conditions.

We see the struggle of Malawi and other underdeveloped African nations to balance sustainable development with poor economic infrastructure along with the legacy of colonialism, continuing interference from the developed world, and current neocolonialism. Austin also looks at Malawi’s attempts to cater for the increased immigration into the cities from its rural surroundings.

Alongside this is China’s progression from communist pariah state to one of the world’s leading economies, and, a less well-known fact, the global leader in wind energy production, and as one of the first countries in the developing world to introduce sustainable development at a national and regional policy level (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 National policy is driving the scale and pace of wind turbines in China. (Source: chinaface/Getty Images.)

Austin explores China and Malawi as examples of fast-growing economies within nations united by the fact that neither is classed as a “developed” country. The emerging city is at a great disadvantage here, as Austin writes: “underdeveloped countries are seldom able to control their own destiny in the way that it is hopefully expressed in their aspirations for urban renewal”.

So whilst the civilized city must learn how to build sustainably, the emerging city cannot always afford to do so. This chapter explores how poor environmental conditions are a consequence of growth, but more importantly it explains how they can be rectified.