The (post-)politics of new urban environmental regimes - SAGE Journals

Editorial

Greenest cities? The (post-)politics of new urban environmental regimes

Environment and Planning A 2017, Vol. 49(8) 1710–1718 ! The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17714843 journals.sagepub.com/home/epn

Marit Rosol Department of Geography, University of Calgary, Canada

Vincent Beál Universite´ de Strasbourg, France

Samuel Mo¨ssner Department of Geography, University of Muenster, Germany

Urban areas are increasingly recognized as strategic sites to address climate change and environmental issues. Specific urban projects are marketed as innovative solutions and best-practice examples, and so-called green cities, eco-cities and sustainable cities have emerged worldwide as leading paradigms in urban planning and policy discourse. The transformation of cities into eco-cities (Kenworthy, 2006; Roseland, 1997) is often based on big data and – widely varying – indicators that should proof the success of urban climate governance (Bulkeley, 2010). The European Commission with its ‘Green Capital’ program, Britain’s ‘Sustainable City Index’, France’s ‘EcoCite´’ scheme, the US-American’s ‘Greenest City’ ranking developed by WalletHub’s, the US and Canada ‘Green City Index’ sponsored by Siemens – these programs are all examples of public and private initiatives aimed at identifying and ranking the ‘greenest’ city or cities according to a competitive rationality. They are mostly quantitative approaches, based on ‘hard’ and ‘scientific’ indicators that allow cities to be compared according to their efforts in sustainable urban development. Using these indicators, cities worldwide have increasingly promoted sustainability initiatives in order to position themselves advantageously on the global scene (Chang and Sheppard, 2013; Cugurullo, 2013; Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2014; While et al., 2004). These urban ranking efforts tie into the fact that sustainability has become a metaconsensual policy term (Gill et al., 2012), resting upon broad support from diverse sectors of society. Promoted at first as a way of bringing forward an ecological urban agenda connected to social development, sustainability has lost much of its transformative potential. By now, even car manufacturing in Germany, oil pipelines in Alberta, Canada and nuclear power plants worldwide are being politically justified with reference to sustainability and climate change prevention. Despite controversial national positions regarding the processes, pace and extend of implementing environmental policies – a divergence that became very evident, for example, during the 2009 United Nations Corresponding author: Marit Rosol, Calgary, AB, Canada. Email: [email protected]

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Climate Change Conference – there is wide consensus about the need to act in order to prevent further climate changes, plundering of natural resources and species extinction. However, the question of what this action should look like is still a contentious matter. Some call the term ‘sustainability’ therefore an ‘empty signifier’, i.e. a goal that all parties agree on precisely because it ‘can be used to mean almost anything’ (O’Connor, 1994: 152; see also Davidson, 2010; Krueger and Agyeman, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2009). The idea that urban sustainability can serve global competitive capitalism is nothing new (Desfor and Keil, 2004; Harvey, 1993; Krueger and Gibbs, 2007). It traces back to ecological modernization strategies developed in the 1980s, which aimed at decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation. However, this idea gains new momentum in urban politics as the green economy is nowadays considered as a very profitable sector that may replace the previous industrial sector. In context of rapid changes in social practices and permanent technological innovation, urban actors are not only competing to monetize greenness, they are also increasingly trying to position their city as the ‘greenest’. We contend that there is a need for furthering and updating the debate on urban environmental governance based on three important observations: First, green economy discourses and the increased use of eco-technologies have paved the way for the emergence of a proper economic sector centred around green urbanism. Through the diffusion of a package of neo-managerial instruments of control (indicators, standards, rating systems, etc.) and rewards (rankings, labels, awards, etc.), new modalities of competitiveness such as promoting the so-called exemplary practices have advanced. Second, new urban environmental policies are increasingly produced (trans-)locally and transformed into ‘mobile policies’, that are then sold and exported into other places (McCann and Ward, 2011). Both trends become especially obvious in global ‘Green(est) City’ competitions, which foster ‘extrospective’ strategies of reputation building (McCann, 2013). Third, cities have shifted towards ‘post-political’ and consensual practices (Beál, 2012; Krueger and Buckingham, 2012), which exclude and displace people from the discourse on what counts as ‘sustainable’ and generally transform urban politics at its core. This special issue will explore these, what we call, new urban environmental regimes by analysing its roots, characteristics and contemporary drivers. It does so by providing a collection of five conceptually motivated case studies of environmental policies and ‘greenest city’ strategies from around the globe as well as a discussion paper. All six contributions explore the transformation of urban environmental strategies and the new dynamics of territorial competitiveness. They also engage with recent theoretical debates in urban studies about (post-)neoliberalism, austerity urbanism, policy mobilities and postpolitics/ post-democracy. In this editorial, we seek to contextualize Green(est) City and other urban sustainability initiatives by, firstly, retracing the trajectories from grassroots alternatives into the urban policy mainstream. Secondly, based on crucial insights from the papers in this Special Issue and the wider literature, we present five main characteristics of the current urban environmental regimes. Finally, we conclude with a call for re-politicizing the debate.

From grassroots alternatives to political mainstream: Urban sustainability trajectories Although urban environmental strategies in the present are dominated by market discourse and by techno-competitive rationalities, this has not always been the case. In the 1970s and 1980s, early environmental initiatives in Amsterdam, Freiburg, Copenhagen, London, Seattle, Berlin and many other cities evolved from grassroots movements.

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These movements demanded more democracy and improved quality of urban life and in doing so also strived for more fundamental social and ecological changes. While some scholars already saw an ‘ideological mystification’ (Castells, 1978: 152) in these early environmental politics, most have considered them as a viable alternative to state-led urban development which was at that time blind to environmental and democratic aspirations (Beál, 2012; Mo¨ssner, 2016; Rosol, 2010). It was no coincidence that these environmental initiatives emerged and gained significance in the wake of the crisis of Fordism when the associated accumulation regime and mode of regulation reached its limits (Brenner, 2004; Mayer, 2006). Subsequently, since the 1980s, environmental policies have been selectively institutionalized on the national level. At the same time, local authorities became considerably more entrepreneurial (Hall and Hubbard, 1996; Harvey, 1989), developing new forms of ‘place marketing’ and significantly reducing local welfare measures and public service provision. In this first wave of ‘roll-back’ neoliberalization (Peck and Tickell, 2002), environmental concerns were marginalized in urban policies. Yet, during the 1990s, many cities in the Global North became aware of the negative consequences of their entrepreneurial policies and tried to mitigate them by introducing forms of ‘roll-out’ neoliberalism, i.e. a more complex set of approaches with implicit or explicit reminiscences to urban sustainability (Keil and Boudreau, 2006; Raco, 2005; While et al., 2004). This wave of roll-out neoliberalism corresponds to new forms of local economy–environment relations that selectively incorporate ‘environmental goals, determined by the balance of pressures for and against environmental policy within and across the city’ (While et al., 2004: 552). By promoting sustainability only symbolically or by subsidizing certain sectors like the ‘green buidlings’ construction sector, local authorities can present themselves as ‘green cities’ while maintaining the economic status quo (ONeill and Gibbs, 2013). The development of environmental planning schemes (Kenis and Lievens, 2017), the elaboration of climate strategies (North et al., 2017), the implementation of large scale eco-cities project (Chang, 2017; Rapoport and Hult, 2017) or the investment in green infrastructures or landscape (Lang and Rothenberg, 2017), are all good examples of a trend that does not consider environmental improvement as a goal in itself anymore, but as a way to enhance competitiveness and improve the image of (parts of) the city.

Greenest cities? The post-politics of new urban environmental regimes Over the last 10 to 15 years, the incorporation of environmental issues within entrepreneurial and neoliberal urban strategies has been mainstreamed. Of course, there are still grassroots environmental initiatives that offer a strong critique of this kind of weak sustainability, but they are disconnected from environmental strategies taken up and fostered by local and national governments. These governmental strategies are part of new urban environmental regimes which show the following common traits: . Growth-oriented. The agenda of ‘sustainability’ has always been developed in support of a wide range of policies, but it is increasingly used to reinforce local growth dynamics and to foster urban competitiveness geared towards the regional and the global level (Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2014). Most of today’s ‘best practices’ show that climate and environmental policies are subjugated to the overarching goal of economic growth (Gibbs et al., 2013; Freytag et al., 2014; Rosol, 2013), further rolling-out entrepreneurial logic and variegated forms of neoliberalism (Brenner et al., 2010). This observation has been conceptualized as an ‘environmental fix’, i.e. an interpretation of sustainable development

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‘as part of the search for a spatio-institutional fix to safeguard growth trajectories in the wake of industrial capitalism’s long downturn, the global ‘ecological crisis’ and the rise of popular environmentalism’ (While et al., 2004: 551). The narrow focus of environmental policy on the green economy has transformed cities into platforms for private and public actors to sell eco-innovations and technologies. Professionals in disciplines such as architecture, engineering, construction and/or consultancy, their practices and their imaginaries are now shaping the global narrative for sustainability in a very selective and competitive way (Rapoport and Hult, 2017). Neo-managerial. This growth-oriented, competitive urban environmental governance is predominantly state-led and public actors such as government agencies, ministries or local authorities are strongly involved in the reshaping of urban environmental policies. Alongside the transnational practices of global players, such as the so-called Global Intelligence Corps, national ‘green city’ competitions have appeared in countries like the US, the UK or France. These national competitions are based on neo-managerial instruments and tools – eco-construction norms, indicators of performance, rankings and awards, etc. – which have often been elaborated or certified by public or quasi-public authorities (Beál and Pinson, 2015). The influence of these tools is even stronger today in a context of austerity and declining programmatic support towards local authorities (Peck, 2014). This public funding scarcity involves new grant grabbing strategies and favours the development of singular ‘innovation hubs’ and demonstration projects, rather than the general improvement of the urban ecological condition. Best-practice-driven. Urban environmental strategies are now primarily based on demonstration or pilot projects which are supposed to serve as models and be replicated in other parts of the world (Bulkeley and Castan Broto, 2013; Evans et al., 2016). This new rationality – which fuses very well with transition management theories – is often depicted as a vehicle for innovations in terms of environmental governance. However, an urban environmental policy model based on a ‘best-practice-logic’ runs the risk of creating ‘premium ecological enclaves’ (Hodson and Marvin, 2010) for the privileged few. And although it is unlikely that the potential benefits in a particular setting will be the same elsewhere in other places, these experimental strategies shape the global imaginary of urban practitioners and thus have very real effects, although their merits are often not proven (Chang, 2017). This is what Eugene McCann discusses as a landscape of ‘contemporary inter-urban ‘‘referencescapes’’’ (commentary this issue, McCann, 2017: 1816) that frames urban policy-making and favours certain interests and/or visions of green urbanism. Socio-spatially selective. There is a strong social and spatial selectivity in ‘green(est) city’ strategies (Beál, 2015; Kenis and Lievens, 2017). Within the vague and overarching umbrella of sustainability, urban policies and projects are unevenly investing in urban spaces, potentially creating tensions in terms of social justice. The environment is viewed as a tool for transforming the image of urban spaces in order to make it attractive for upper-middle class social groups and for international investments, as demonstrated by eco-gentrification processes in the Global North (Lang and Rothenberg, 2017; Quastel, 2009) or by eco-cities projects in the Global South (Caprotti, 2014). As these new investments in green urbanism are unevenly distributed, they rarely concern deprived areas and their disadvantaged populations (Heynen et al., 2006). City-centric. The new urban environmental regime is also scale selective in the sense that it favours some scales such as the city or the neighborhood in the management of the environmental crisis (Mo¨ssner and Miller, 2015; Wachsmuth et al., 2016). Climate plans or local environmental strategies are rarely experienced beyond the city’s

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administrative boundaries, and consequentially the most unsustainable and uneven dynamics of global production and consumption flows are often externalized. These strategies are characterized by the priority given to investments and reflections at the city scale, whereas contemporary environmental problems would require a metropolitan, regional or even global understanding in a context of planetary urbanization (Arboleda, 2016; Brenner and Schmid, 2014). . Post-democratic. Urban environmental policy underwent an evolution, away from antagonistic positioning driven by activists towards a consensual mainstreaming in urban politics that characterizes post-democracy (Swyngedouw, 2011: 372, see also Beál, 2012; Krueger and Agyeman, 2005; Rosol, 2014). This reduces democracy to elections, and favours decision-making behind closed doors (Crouch, 2004) and new forms of ‘politainment’ (Jo¨rke, 2005: 482), in which political decisions and positions are guided by professional marketing strategies. In this sense, environmental politics become de-politicized and excluded from democratic debates. In the words of Erik Swyngedouw: ‘it is a politics reduced to the administration and management of processes whose parameters are defined by consensual socio-scientific knowledges’ (Swyngedouw, 2009: 602). This results in more than just a political consensus around a certain issue, it aims at a societal unification and standardization in which antagonist interests and perspectives are subordinated and negated.

(Re-)politicizing the debate The rise of sustainability discourse in urban governance has produced many positive outcomes that address climate change and environmental degradation. The benefits range from the implementation of green technologies in the building and construction sector and the economic success of green businesses to increased support for cycling and walking, waste prevention and recycling, and generally a changing public mindset. Despite these successes, today ‘we are more uncertain than ever whether there will be a green happy ending of history’ (Ueko¨tter, 2014: 101). Moreover, on the path to institutionalizing green ideas and environmental ideologies, it would appear that something fundamental has been lost along the way. The commodification of the ideas of early environmental movements – what Kenis and Lievens (2015) call ‘economizing the green’ instead of greening the economy – has led to a contradictory situation (Krueger and Gibbs, 2007) of ‘actually existing sustainabilities’ (Krueger and Agyeman, 2005) that seems more removed from the ideas of socio-ecological transformations than ever before. In the face of these developments and even more in the very recent rise of governments that seek to expand fossil fuels, roll-back environmental protection and deny anthropogenic climate change, perhaps what is then required is a return to the early days of environmental movements. We can still learn from grassroots movements that resisted the idea of unlimited growth and called for more transparent decision-making processes. The transformative power of environmentalism still consists of the potential to question the capitalist and social system as a whole. There are still many grassroots initiatives that challenge growthbased capitalism and engage in numerous fights against environmental degradation (Klein, 2015; Martinez-Alier, 2003). These movements – such as the recent conflict over Gezi Park in Istanbul (Erensu¨ and Karaman, 2017) – have evident politicizing effects by highlighting embedded inequalities or linking geographically disconnected

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environmental, social and economic issues. However, the crucial question, how to effectively bring about change, still remains unanswered. From this perspective, critical (urban) sustainability research must highlight the contradictions of capitalism and question growth-orientated motives. With regard to green urbanism, the question therefore is no longer (if it ever was?) how to ‘better’ implement green ideas and processes into cities, but rather how to challenge and change a system that juxtaposes ecology, the economy and the social in a simplistic way. There is an urgent need to re-politicize the environmental question and the very nature of sustainability. But the actions of (new) grassroots environmental movements alone will not be sufficient; it also needs environmental (urban) policy to unfold their transformative power. Acknowledgement The Special Issue is an outcome of a session organized by the guest editors at the RGS/IBG London in 2014 named ‘Greenest Cities? Urban Sustainability and the (Post-)Politics of Territorial Competitiveness’. We would like to thank all our authors and the editor David Demeritt for making this Special Issue happen. It has been a truly collective effort! Special thanks to Eugene McCann, Catherine Chang and Peter North for their comments on earlier versions of this editorial and to Katherine Yee for her careful proofreading.

Declaration of conflicting interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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