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(Re)Analysing the Sustainable City: Nature, Urbanisation and the Regulation of Socio-environmental Relations in the UK
Mark Whitehead Urban Stud 2003 40: 1183 DOI: 10.1080/0042098032000084550 The online version of this article can be found at: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/40/7/1183
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Urban Studies, Vol. 40, No. 7, 11831206, 2003
(Re)Analysing the Sustainable City: Nature, Urbanisation and the Regulation of Socio-environmental Relations in the UK
Mark Whitehead
[Paper rst received, October 2001; in nal form, July 2002]
Summary. The sustainable city has now become a leading paradigm of urban development throughout the world. Although the practices, discourses and ideologies associated with the sustainable city have been widely disseminated, analyses of sustainable urban development remain surprisingly anodyne. Drawing upon the insights of regulation theory, this paper attempts to develop a critical engagement with the sustainable city as a space of socio-ecological regulation. Focusing upon two examples of sustainable urban development in practicethe rst, the struggle over work-place environments in Stoke-on-Trent; and the second, the reinsertion of nature into the Black Country urban regionthis paper explores the regulatory geography of the sustainable city and the environmental visions and practices with which it is associated.
The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of festering guilt: a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive (Raban, 1988, p. 17). The statistical arguments are now wellrehearsed; with urban areas already providing a home for nearly half of the worlds population, within a generation it is estimated that the numbers living in urban communities will have increased by two and a half billion people (that is actually the same number of people who currently live in urban areas) (UNCHS, 2001, p. 6). Perhaps Harvey (1996) most effectively captures the contemporary importance of urban areas in his poignant reection on the urbanising logic of the 20th century: The 20th century has been the century of urbanisation The future of the most of humanity now lies, for the rst time in history, fundamentally in urbanising areas.
The qualities of urban living in the 21st century will dene the qualities of civilisation itself (Harvey, 1996, p. 403). Whether it be in terms of the ecological footprints of mega-cities or the socioenvironmental injustices of urban habitats themselves, the sentiments of Harvey suggest that the social, economic and environmental conditions of humanityfound both within and beyond the cityare now inextricably linked to the multifaceted processes of urbanisation.1 Drawing on the insights of Harvey, this paper explores the ways in which urbanisationunderstood as the critical spatial dynamic in the reproduction and regulation of capitalismis producing, managing and re-articulating the relationships which exist between modern society and the environment. Although concerns have already been raised over the kinds of socio-environmental
Mark Whitehead is in the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3DB, UK. Fax: 01970 622 659. E-mail: msw@aber.ac.uk. 0042-0980 Print/1360-063X On-line/03/07118324 2003 The Editors of Urban Studies DOI: 10.1080/0042098032000084550 Downloaded from usj.sagepub.com at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Biblioteca Alfonso Borrero Cabal, S.J. on November 18, 2013
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relations which are being produced as part of capitalist urbanisation (see Hardoy and Satterthwaite, 1992; UNCHS, 2001), the precise extent and severity of the socioecological problems inherent within the contemporary urban world continue to be an object of much debate and conjecture. Despite this uncertainty, there does appear to be a considerable degree of consensus over how the international political community should address the complex hybrid of social, economic and ecological problems which face urban areas. The axiomatic response at the moment is to build sustainable cities. Given this overriding consensus, and in order to explore the emerging relationship between urbanisation and the socio-ecological reproduction of capitalism, this paper focuses specically upon the purported emergence of sustainable cities within the UK. The concept of the sustainable city has gained a signicant amount of political momentum in Britain (see DETR, 1999a, ch. 1, 1999b, 2000; DoE, 1994, ch. 26; DoE, 1990, ch. 8) and in the wider international political community (European Commission, 1998; United Nations Centre for Human Settlement, 2001; World Commission on the Environment and Development, 1987, ch. 9) over the course of the past 15 years. Despite the rapid proliferation of the sustainable city ideal, analyses of sustainable development in urban areas have remained surprisingly anodyne. In this context, this paper is particularly critical of the focus of contemporary research on the practical implementation of sustainable development as a policy goal (see European Commission, 1998, 1996; Hall. P, 1999; Hall. T, 1998; Haughton and Hunter, 1994; Mega and Petrella, 1997; Satterthwaite, 1999; Whittaker, 1995), while there has been relatively little analysis of the sustainable city as an object of political contestation and struggle.2 In order to facilitate a broad theoretical study of sustainable cities, this paper turns to a series of writings dedicated to the ideological and material relationships which exist between cities, nature and the environment (see Boyer, 1997; Cronon, 1991; Davis,
1999; Gandy, 1996; Keil and Graham, 1999; Harvey, 1996, 2000; Smith, 1984; Swyngedouw, 1997). Drawing upon these works and the wider theoretical insights of the regulation approach (see Jessop, 1990; MacLeod, 1997, for reviews), this paper claims that it is possible to developed a more concerted, critical analysis of the discourses and material practices which are becoming synonymous with the sustainable city. Analysis begins by charting the emergence of the sustainable city as an international and national political objective and briey considers the different ways in which this phenomenon has been analysed. In light of the apparent weakness of traditional accounts of the sustainable city, this paper then introduces the regulation approach to the analysis of social and economic change and development. Drawing on the insights of the regulation approach, analysis explores the potential insights offered when the sustainable city is understood as part of the wider regularisation (or normalisation) of the socio-ecological contradictions of capitalist urbanisation. The nal section of this paper considers two examples of the sustainable city in practice in the UK. Drawing on research carried out on environmental health reform in Stoke-on-Trent and the politics of nature in the Black Country of the English Midlands, this paper considers the ways in which the discourses and practices of sustainable development are simultaneously dening the problems and potential solutions to urban development in the UK today. In particular, analysis considers the ways in which strategies for urban sustainability are being forged within the wider socioeconomic context of neo-liberal regulation and interurban competition in the UK (see Tickell and Peck, 1992; Peck and Tickell, 1994) and the effects which this is having on the types of sustainable city which are being produced.
1. Understanding the Sustainable City: Some Political and Analytical Contexts In order to develop a critical analysis of the sustainable city, it is important initially to
(RE)ANALYSING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY
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Table 1. Major international and European-level policies and initiatives on sustainable urban development Events and initiatives United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) Habitat I (Vancouver) Establishment of United Nations Centre for Human Settlement (UNCHS) World Commission on Environment and Development Report United Nations Sustainable Cities Programme European Commissions Green Paper on the Urban Environment Year 1972 1976 1978 Link to sustainable city agenda Recommendation IPlanning and Management of Human Settlements for Environmental Quality Establishment of international programme designed to slow down the growth of urban areas Specic remit to deliver more sustainable patterns of living in urban and rural areas Chapter 9 The Urban Challenge described the need to create more sustainable urban communities both in the developed and developing worlds Integration of the sustainable development remits of the UNCHS and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Response by the European commission and leading European cities to the perceived neglect of urban environmental issues relative to those of rural areas Independent group composed of national representatives and experts with a remit to consider how future town and land-use planning could develop the urban environmental facets of the European Communitys Environmental Programme Agenda 21Chapter 2, Promoting Sustainable Human Settlement Development Launched by the European Commissions Expert Panel on the Urban Environment Coalition of 80 urban and regional authorities implementing sustainable urban policies Focus upon the implementation of Local Agenda 21 in urban areas
1987
1990
1990
European Commissions Expert Group on the Urban Environment
1991
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development European Sustainable Cities Programme European Sustainable Cities Campaign Habitat IIThe City Summit
1992 1993 1994 1996
consider what a sustainable city actually is. The formal naming and prioritisation of sustainable urban development originated within the dictates of international politics (see Table 1). The formal political construction of the sustainable city began in 1972 when, at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the importance of developing sustainable patterns of urbanisation was rst discussed at an international level. Recommendation I of the Stockholm Conference emphasised the importance of planning and managing human settlements (prime among these being urban
areas) in a way that was sensitive to local and global environmental quality (UNEP, 2001). Following the recommendations made in Stockholm, in 1978 the United Nations created the Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS), as an agency with direct responsibility for building more sustainable urban and rural communities.3 Following these key international policy statements, the European Union and the UK have created their own programmes for sustainable urban development (see Tables 1 and 2). From within these multiscalar governmental programmes, it is possible to derive a
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Table 2. Recent UK policies on urban sustainability Our Towns and Cities: The Future Delivering an Urban Renaissance (DETR, 2000) Urban Task Force report (chs. 12 on the urban environment) (DETR, 1999a) A Better Quality of Life (Revised UK Sustainable Development Strategy) (DETR, 1999b) The Single Regeneration Budget: A Guide for Partnerships (including new sustainable development guidelines, pp. 2223) (DETR, 1998) UK National Report for Habitat II (DoE, 1996) Good practice guide on The Impacts of Environmental Improvements in Urban Regeneration (HMSO, 1995) Sustainable Development: The UK Strategy (ch. 26 Town and Country) (DoE, 1994) This Common Inheritance: Britains Environmental Strategy (ch. 8 Towns and Cities) (HMSO, 1990)
sense of what the sustainable city actually is. According to the United Nations Sustainable Cities Programme, a sustainable city is a city where achievements in social, economic, and physical development are made to last. A Sustainable City has a lasting supply of the natural resources on which its development depends (using them only at a level of sustainable yield). A Sustainable City maintains a lasting security from environmental hazards which may threaten development achievements (allowing only for acceptable risk) (UNCHS/UNEP, 2001, p. 1). According to the United Nations, the sustainable city constitutes a new moral space, where social values are transformed and more durable social, economic and ecological relations are established. Echoing the sentiments of the United Nations, the European Commission, as part of its own Sustainable Cities Programme, suggests that the sustainable city is an urban space which is modelled upon the precepts, patterns and rules of nature Sustainable urban management should challenge the problems both caused and experienced by cities, recognising that cities themselves provide many potential solutions, instead of shifting problems to other spatial scales or shifting them to future generations. The organisational patterns and administrative systems of munic-
ipalities should adopt the holistic approach of ecosystems thinking. Integration, cooperation, homeostasis, subsidiarity and synergy are key concepts for management towards sustainable development (European Commission, 1996, p. 10) In light of the progressive language evident within the ofcial orthodoxies of sustainable urban development, it appears that the sustainable city is as much a political vision or social idealincorporating its own moral geography and forms of ecological praxisas it is a tangible object, or location on a map. In light of the wide range of initiatives and associated meanings and hopes which are attached to sustainable urban development, this paper adopts a multifaceted and relational understanding of the sustainable city. Consequently, rather than accepting a predetermined denition of the sustainable city, or focusing upon the objects or environmental artefacts which have traditionally been associated with the sustainable city (green lungs, eco-technologies, community gardens, clearair zones), this paper attempts to understand sustainable cities in terms of the complex array of ideas, discourses, material practices and political struggles through which they are produced and reproduced (see Harvey, 1996; Smith, 1999). In this way, the sustainable city is seen as a complex hybrid of social, economic, political and ecological forms, which are continually articulated and
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rearticulated within specic spatial contexts and through particular historical struggles (Swyngedouw, 1997). But how can this new urban phenomenon be understood and, more importantly, how can its potential as a strategy for future socio-environmental development be critically interrogated?
2. Analysing and Re-analysing the Sustainable City: A Regulation Approach to Sustainable Urban Development 2.1 Existing Approaches to the Analysis of the Sustainable City Numerous authors have already attempted to interpret the complex issues surrounding the ideal of the sustainable city (see Blowers and Pain, 1999; Hardoy and Satterthwaite, 1992; Haughton and Hunter, 1994; Lawrence, 1996; Marcuse, 1998; Mega, 1996; Satterthwaite, 1997, 1999; Swyngedouw and Ka ka, 2000). While offering important insights into the nascent political struggles and problems associated with sustainable urban development, many of these analyses have failed to develop an effective critique of the sustainable city. The problems associated with many existing accounts of the sustainable city can be divided in two broad areas: the empirical focus of their analyses of sustainable urban development; and, their reication of the sustainable city as an ontological object. In the rst instance, a preponderance of contemporary work on the sustainable city focuses upon the practical, political implementation of sustainable urban development (see Hall, 2001; Haughton and Hunter, 1994; Gilbert et al., 1996; Mega, 1996; Mega and Petrella, 1997; Pearce, 1994). While it is important to consider the daunting practical issues which do confront the effective implementation of sustainable development in urban areas, such work has tended to reduce analysis of sustainable urban development to a technical matter of institutional restructuring, trafc management, architectural design and the development of green technologies. By focusing upon the local operational
efciency of sustainable development in different urban milieux, accounts of the sustainable city have also become increasingly parochial, with little sense of the wider political, economic and ecological forces which ow through such cities (see Rabinovitch, 1992). The second, and interrelated, problem with contemporary work on sustainable urban development is the tendency to treat the sustainable city as an ontologically pre-given object (see Haughton and Hunter, 1994; Gilbert et al., 1996). In this sense, analyses tend to assume the prior existence of a thing called a sustainable, or indeed an unsustainable, city and ignore the complex discursive processes and socio-political struggles through which sustainable cities are produced. The reication of the sustainable city in this way tends to give a neutral, almost apolitical, veneer to sustainable cities and conceals the asymmetries of power which inform the social construction of urban sustainability. This paper asserts that sustainable cities are never nished objectswhether as ideological visions/blueprints or material artefactsbut are rather in a constant state of becoming. In light of these criticisms, the remainder of this section explores the ways in which a regulationist reading of the sustainable city can enhance understanding of this new urban phenomenon and provide a more meaningful critique of this hegemonic paradigm of metropolitan development. 2.2 A Regulationist Approach to the Sustainable City Before examining the usefulness of a regulation approach for research on the sustainable city, it is important to clarify the parameters of such an approach. The regulation approach nds its origins in work undertaken by a group of French economists in the mid 1970s (see Aglietta, 1979; Boyer, 1979; Lipietz, 1980). Put simply, these academics were concerned to analyse the regulation of the economy beginning from the insight that continued capital accumulation
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cannot be taken for granted or guaranteed in advance, but instead depends on a series of social, cultural and political supports. The approach, therefore, as Bob Jessop states, aims to study the changing combinations of economic and extra-economic institutions and practices which help to secure, if only temporarily and always in specic economic spaces, a certain stability and predictability in accumulationdespite the fundamental contradictions and conicts generated by the very dynamic of capital itself (Jessop, 1997, p. 288). It is the contention of this paper that the discourses and practices surrounding issues of sustainability now appear to be woven into both the economic and the extra-economic (social environmental) supports associated with capitalist urbanisation. Furthermore, it is asserted that the sustainable city represents an economic space within which the social, economic and ecological contradictions of capitalism are being managed and strategically addressed. From modes to processes: changing understandings of regulation. While exploring the socioeconomic supports of capitalism, many regulationist accounts have adopted the concept of a mode of regulation. Conventionally, the term mode of regulation refers to a specic combination of economic and extraeconomic practices operating together in a mutually reinforcing way (Tickell and Peck, 1995).4 This paper, however, claims that more purchase can be gained on the role of sustainable development within emerging regulatory forms through the conceptualisation of regulation as process (see Goodwin and Painter, 1996; Painter and Goodwin, 1995). There are several reasons why this is the case. These reasons can be summarised by the view that the term mode overemphasises the functionality, stability and coherence of regulatory relations, while underemphasising change, conict and development. A crude account of one stable and enduring mode of regulation quickly breaking down and then equally quickly be-
ing replaced by a markedly different, but equally stable, arrangement is clearly unsatisfactory and historically inaccurate. The concept of a mode of regulation was rst advanced in order to answer the central question posed by regulation theorythat is, how is the reproduction of capitalist social relations secured and developed given the inherent tendency of these relations for crisis and instability? Even if the notion of a mode of regulation were abandoned, this central question would appear to remain. The approach taken by Painter and Goodwin (1995) to answering this, and which this paper follows, emerges from one further problem associated with the concept of a mode of regulation. An unfortunate connotation of the concept is the implication that, at any one time, there must be either perfect regulation (during a mode of regulation) or no regulation at all (during an intermediate crisis phase). Yet this is clearly absurd. Very rarely, if ever, does regulation cease altogether (civil war accompanied by the complete collapse of state institutions is perhaps an example). Equally, even during periods of sustained economic growth, regulation could hardly be described as perfect. The system is simply too complex and the process of regulation too contingent. Any period of stable development will have its setbacks and conicts. Most of the time, therefore, regulation is neither perfect nor wholly absent instead, it is more or less effective at underpinning continued accumulation, depending on the mix and interaction of the various factors involved. This paper therefore understands regulation as a process, rather than as a series of different modes. Instead of looking for coherent modes of regulation, which neatly follow one another, this paper prefers to emphasise the ebb and ow of regulatory processes through time and across space. At certain times and places, those processes will be more effective than at others. Analysis claims that the process of regulation is the product of material and discursive practices that generate and are in turn conditioned by social and political institutions. Furthermore,
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it is argued that these practices and institutions, are increasingly drawing on, and organising their work around notions of sustainable development (see section 1). By focusing upon regulation as a process, this paper hopes to develop a more contingently inscribed account of the regulatory signicance of sustainable forms of urban development and the rise of the sustainable city. Hence it is hoped to understand sustainable development, and its counterpart the sustainable city, as a key discursive and material category through which regulatory ows are increasingly being channelled, challenged and contested. Critically, however, by focusing on the regulatory dynamics of sustainable development, analysis is not simply interested in the ways that economic, social and environmental issues come together to forge sustainable development policies. Instead, attention is drawn to the ways in which specic combinations of economic and socio-ecological forces converge to threaten, or to sustain, the reproduction of capitalism. The uneven and combined development of regulation: the sustainable city as a socioenvironmental space. Since this paper claims that a regulation approach, that treats regulation as process, is able to deal rather more subtly with temporal and spatial variability, it is useful to spend a little time exploring the spatial implications of this type of analysis. This sensitivity to the spatial dimensions of regulation appears important if socioecological regulation in general is to be related to specic sustainable cities in different social and political contexts. The argument proceeds along the following lines. Since regulatory processes are the product of social practices, they must be understood in relation to the concrete contexts of practice (Painter and Goodwin, 1995). As concrete phenomena with specic histories and geographies, practices must be understood as being intrinsically unevenly developed. In other words, the geography of regulation is not an optional extra or nal complicating factor (Tickell and Peck, 1992). On the contrary,
the processes of regulation are constituted geographically.5 They are also organised in and through key spatial sites of regulation. The sustainable city may be considered as one such emerging site of regulationdrawing together a range of practices situated in economic space (such as the labour process, urban-regional growth alliances, international markets), political space (the local state, regional, national and supranational governance) and ecological space (bio-regions, ecological footprints, the global environment). The sustainable city as a site of regulation could thus be viewed as an intersection of political, economic and environmental space (see Satterthwaite, 1997). Understanding the sustainable city as a spatial intersect in this way has two principal implications: the construction of regulatory problems within various sustainable city programmes must be understood in relation to the local social, political and environmental milieux within which sustainability is being contested and realised; and, sustainable cities combine regulatory practices which derive from a variety of spatial scales. In this way, sustainable cities represent very specic geographical manifestations of regulatory processes, with their own political, economic and ecological histories and traditions. However, the sustainable city, as a regulatory space, must always be positioned within the wider regional, national and international regulatory orders within which it is sustained (Tickell and Peck, 1995). Regulation, discourse and the sustainable city. One advantage of emphasising an approach to regulation which is based on socioeconomic process is that it reminds us that issues of social cohesion are politically contested and socially constructed, and will vary from nation to nation (and even from place to place within a nation). Moreover, in accounting for those mediations which can negotiate economic accumulation and social cohesion, attention is focused on discursive as well as material practices. In principle, regulation theory has always been concerned with discourse and regulationist authors often repeat
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the claim that regulation is a social, political and cultural process (Bakshi et al., 1995; Hay and Jessop, 1995, p. 305; Jessop, 1997, pp. 313318). In practice, however, regulationist accounts have rarely considered the contribution of discourse to specic regulatory processes or, in the more usual terminology, modes of regulation. Yet there is no great difculty in building a sensitivity to discourse into a theory of regulation (see Jenson, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1995). Fordism, for example, clearly depended upon some key discursive constructions associated with political consensus, the family wage, the limits of collective bargaining, the mass consumption norm and so on. Critically, for the purposes of this paper, the regulatory processes emerging after Fordismand in particular the purported social and ecological crises of Fordism appear to be mobilising discourses of sustainability. Whereas Fordism was celebrated as the time of unparallelled economic growth and proudly labelled the long boom, we are now rmly xed in a period where the notion of sustainability is much more prevalent. This of course does not mean that the search for economic growth has suddenly been halted. Rather, that the search for growth takes place within a differently constructed set of mediations which now incorporate sustainability. In this sense, economic development is still the prime aim, but now unfettered growth has been replaced by environmentally sensitive development in a range of discursive and material arenas. The very notion of the sustainable city is an exemplication of this. An awareness of the discursive qualities of regulation is vital if the processes surrounding the construction of objects of regulation are to be understood (see Jessop, 1997, p. 297). Cities are subjects involved in regulating economies, but they are also simultaneously objects of regulation. Cities are objects of regulation to the extent that they contain many contradictory tendencies which threaten and undermine regulation. The identication of regulatory problems within citiesor specic objects of urban regulation
(poor health, derelict environments, ailing economic sectors)is an inherently discursive process. Within an era of sustainable development, the power to explain regulatory crisisor to construct objects of regulationhinges on the ability to understand objects in relation to their social, economic and ecological form. The multifarious discursive construction of objects of regulation within the sustainable city reveals the ambiguities and uncertainties which surround the notion of sustainability. The choice of certain brands of discursive explanation and development trajectories over others also reveals the power relations and regulatory pressures within which sustainable cities are being forged. Regulating socio-environmental relations in the city. The explicit stated aims of sustainable development stress the importance of combining economic, social and environmental considerations within models of development (see World Commission on the Environment and Development, 1987, ch. 1). However, the popular dissemination of sustainable development has resulted in the elevation of environmental concerns in particular to new levels prominence within public policy. Given the new signicance which sustainable development appears to afford environmental issues, it is interesting to reect upon a number of recent attempts which have been made to unite the regulation approach with a study of the environment (see Bridge, 1998; Bridge and McManus, 2000; Gandy, 1996; Leyshon, 1992; Lipietz, 1992, 1996). Within this eclectic mix of work, there appears to be a growing realisation that just as the economic and social relations of capitalism are contradictory and must be regulated, environmental and (human) ecological relations are equally important regulatory concerns (Lipietz, 1996, p. 219). It is perhaps useful to think of the sustainable city as a strategy designed to address the traditional social and economic regulatory problems of urban areas, in and through a new set of environmental priorities and ecological practices. If, as this paper
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suggests, the sustainable city does represent an active reworking of the relationships which exist between urbanisation, regulation and the environment, it is important to consider the different ways in which the environment is implicated in the regulation of urban economies. Drawing upon recent work carried out on the relationship between urban areas and the environment, it is possible to detect the environmental underpinnings of urban regulation in two broad ways: the colonisation of nature within the urbanisation process; and, the socio-cultural reproduction of urban inhabitants. In the rst instance, the work of Davis (1998, 1999) and Cronon (1991)although not explicitly written from a regulationist perspectivereveals the regulatory interplays which exist between nature and urbanisation. In his analysis of Los Angeles, Davis (1998, 1999) has shown how an understanding of the dialectic interplays between nature and society is vital to an appreciation of the material and discursive processes by which urbanisation proceeds. Drawing on the case of Los Angeles, Davis explores how urbanisation in the region has proceeded through two dominant ecological forms: an exploitative ecology of evil (1998, p. 4) and a restrictive ecology of fear (1999, ch. 1). According to Davis, it is through these twin ecologies or environmental relationsone bent on the exploitative domination and subjugation of nature, the other embodying the responses of nature to urbanism through earthquakes, famines and oodsthat urbanisation in Los Angeles has been produced and historically contested. In a similar vein to Davis, Cronons (1991) book Natures Metropolis reveals how urban developmentin this case, Chicagoshas been closely tied to the environmental ows and ecological processes of nature. Within a broad-ranging account of the multiple interplays which have occurred historically between Chicago and its hinterland, the American Mid West, Cronon describes how the Chicago Futures and Options Market emerged out of the complex socio-ecological processes which owed through the wheat landscapes which
surrounded Chicago (Cronon, 1991, ch. 3; Swyngedouw and Ka ka, 2000, p. 576). The work of Cronon clearly reveals the ways in which economic forms of regulationin this case, the nancial markets of the cityhave historically been imbricated by environmental forces. In addition to the relationships which exist between urbanisation and various ecological processes, the everyday environment of the city itself also plays an important part in the regulation of urban space. According to Katz, it is the apparently mundane or messy environmental relations of everyday life which have a crucial role in the sociocultural reproduction of urban communities (Katz, 2001, pp. 711715). Whether it is through the ideologies of quality of life, environmental access and amenity, or the standards of living and working environments, the environmental conditions found within cities constitute key arenas within which the material and socio-cultural reproduction of urban communities occurs (Katz and Kirby, 1991). Indeed, some of the earliest attempts to regulate and ameliorate the socioeconomic and socio-ecological spaces of industrial cities in Europe focused upon the need to reform the environmental conditions of the city. During the 19th century, the public health movement consequently sought to address the complex environmental problems created by the contradictory social, economic and environmental forces in operation in the industrial metropolis (Driver, 1988). Within the practices and principles of the public health movement of the 19th century, the socio-ecological pressures and reformist ideologies which have given rise to the contemporary sustainable city can both be clearly discerned. Whether it be because of the interdependencies of urbanisation and nature, or the importance of social environments to the reproduction of urban life, a broadly dened understanding of the environment appears crucial to understanding the processes through which urban regulation proceeds. The sustainable city appears to reect a political expression of the complex regulatory
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Table 3. The main differences between existing analyses of the sustainable city and the regulationist approach Existing analyses of sustainable urban development Technocratic interpretation of the procedures surrounding the implementation of sustainable urban development (planning restrictions, political management systems, architecture and design, environmental performance indicators) A regulationist approach to the sustainable city Focus upon the contested interplay, ows and couplings between economic, social and environmental (or economic and extra-economic) processes which emerge in the sustainable city Analyse how different discursive combinations of economic, social and ecological modes of explanation are used to explain and construct different objects of regulation within the city Analysis of the political practices through which certain visions of the sustainable city are accepted and normalised over others Appreciation of the uneven spatial development of sustainable cities and how this unevenness is linked to political traditions and regulatory practices Active concern for the structural regulatory forces which shape, inform and congure the sustainable city Analysis of the conformity of sustainable urban development with the necessary conditions for the continued reproduction of capitalist economic and social relations
Identication of an ontologically pregiven sustainable city (or objective blueprint for the creation of sustainable urban settlements)
Focus upon the local process and parochial debates surrounding the implementation of a sustainable city Analysis of the conformity of sustainable urban development with the agreed national and international principles of sustainable development
dynamics which ow between urban social, economic and environmental systems. But what does a regulations approach actually bring to an analysis of the sustainable city? Table 3 sets out the main differences between a regulationist interpretation of the sustainable city and existing accounts of sustainable urban development. This paper claims that the regulation approach provides an heuristic framework within which to explore the processes through which sustainable cities are being produced and reproduced. In particular, it is claimed that a regulationist-inspired account of the sustainable city will combine a rigorous analysis of the political struggles and regulatory practices through which specic socio-ecological objects of regulation are identied and dened in specic cities, with an integrated
analysis of the structural economic forces within which these struggles are played out. The remainder of this paper explores the insights which a regulationist perspective can bring to the study and critical analysis of sustainable urban development.
3. Sustainable Cities in Practice: Analysing the Nature of Sustainable Urban Development 3.1 The Sustainable City in Practice I: The Sick City and the Socio-ecological Regulation of Health In order to articulate more clearly the regulatory framework of analysis outlined above, this paper turns initially to the regulatory politics surrounding the construction and
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implementation of a sustainable city in Stoke-on-Trent. Stoke-on-Trent is an old industrial town in the English Midlands. Initial debates and discussion about sustainable urban development in the town rst started to emerge during 1990. During the period up to 1990, a team of researchers from the University of Leeds compiled an extensive study of sickness rates within the area. The nal report, published in 1990, revealed some worrying trends in the health patterns of the area. It claimed that Stoke had high premature death rates which were linked to elevated incidence of heart problems, strokes, cancer and chest diseases. Analysis also showed that, in some parts of the city, illness rates were running at three times the national average (The Sentinel, 2000a). The report concluded that in 20 of the towns council wards, half of the men living there could expect to die before they reached retirement age. Given the shocking ndings of the Leeds University team, Stoke became infamously known as the sick city. The Leeds University report illustrated a number of regulatory problems facing the town. Signicantly, the social problems associated with the poor health record of Stoke were rapidly linked by public ofcials in the town to the wider economic decline and regulatory failings of the urban economy. With high rates of employee absenteeism (North Staffordshire Health Authority, 1999),6 a damaged and thus supposedly inefcient general workforce, and poor health conditions among the general population, health was constructed as a key social barrier to effective forms of economic regulation in the city (The Sentinel, 2000b). In response to the purported social and economic problems created by ill health in Stoke, a Local Health Alliance was hastily formed. Stokes Local Health Alliance was made up of key public-, private- and voluntary-sector organisations in the town and was established in order to forge an integrated response to the health problems in the area. The Local Health Alliance was essentially a political response to the damaging depictions of Stoke as a sick city. However, as the
sentiments of Stoke-on-Trent City Councils Chief Executive reveal, the health problems of Stoke not only necessitated the re-imaging of Stoke, as a t and prosperous place, it also provided the political impetus for local health groups to devise new and imaginative strategies to tackle persistent health problems We have to change the image of Stoke-onTrent from sick city to t city [however] Health is much more complex than just tness and there are related issues such as lifestyle, poor housing and poverty. We have done a lot of talking and working together, but most of all we need action (Stoke-on-Trent City Councils Chief Executive; quoted in The Sentinel, 2000b). In the context of the need to rethink health policy in the town, the Local Health Alliance attempted to develop a radical approach to health policy. The struggles surrounding the construction of health as an object of regulation by Stokes Local Health Alliance reveal the role which local political traditions and cultural practices play in emerging patterns of socioeconomic development. The particular construction of health as an issue of urban sustainability by the Health Alliance also serves to illustrate the contingent and highly contested discursive compromises which coalesce around key objects of regulation in urban areas. In response to the health problems of the city, Stokes Local Health Alliance constructed what they termed a social model of health. This social model of health created a local discourse within which ill health in Stoke was understood not as a medical issue, but as a product of broader social, economic and environmental forces. Drawing upon this social model, or regulatory discourse of health, Stokes Local Health Alliance sought to address ill health through a broad programme of policies which sought to tackle issues of class inequality and poverty. The construction of health as a distinctly classrelated object of regulation, was undoubtedly inspired by the strong socialist political traditions and cultures which pervaded in the
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town. The neo-socialist sentiments of the Local Health Alliance are apparent in one local health workers description of the root causes of ill-health in Stoke When you break everything down in a Western market economy, income is what determines whether you are healthy or not, it determines where your kids are educated, where you live. I mean social class is really determined by income, which is linked to the kind of job you have and this determines where you t into a system of social classication there is a very large number of long-term limiting illnesses in the area. With a rich mining tradition in the area we nd a lot of people with respiratory problems and a variety of other long-term illnesses which prevent them from working, back problems, mobility problems. These are people who are never going to work again so we want to focus on issues concerning those who cant improve their lot through getting a job, you know the softer social stuff, accessing the benets which they are entitled to and improving self-esteem (Project leader, North Staffordshire Health Authority, 1999). This social model of health interprets the poor health of the city not as an aberration, or social accident, but as the product of a complex array of poor living conditions, unsafe working environments and high levels of social poverty in the city. Understood in these terms, poor health was interpreted in Stoke as a legacy of erstwhile regulatory regimes in the city and used as a political vehicle for challenging existing industrial practices and social compromises in Stoke. The effects of this model of health have been twofold. First, it has actively branded health as a complex and hybrid object of socioeconomic regulation within the city. Secondly, this model of health also suggested that the key to creating a more sustainable, healthy city in Stoke, was not the imposition of a rational programme of medical reform, but rather involved changing the overall ecology of the city (Osborne and Rose, 1999, p. 752).
In an attempt to gain British state and international support for the towns plight, the Local Health Alliance gradually began to articulate their social paradigm of health policy through the languages of sustainable urban development. Consequently, rather than utilising more conventional discourses of public health reform (underinvestment in the National Health Service, shortages in the provision of community health care services, low levels of public health awareness), Stokes Local Health Alliance chose to interpret and position the health problems of the city in the context of the wider social, economic and environmental factors which were collectively generating an unsustainable pattern of urban development in Stoke. The integrated, sustainable understanding of health developed in Stoke is evident in the candour of a Local Health Authority representative from the area Local people have a very sophisticated understanding of what health is. They dont see health as the Health Authority tend to do, in terms of health in a very narrow sense so the kinds of things local people were saying when asked what do you think affects your health? were the fact that I havent got a job, I havent got any money the fact that I have got metal frame windows and you know it causes condensation, the heating bills are too expensive so I cant have the heat on because the house is too draughty because it is not properly insulated thats what affected their health and they saw it in a very holistic way, which we expected. So they felt that what you do to address health needs is to bring more jobs to the area, improve the housing conditions, improve benets and if people are actually not accessing benets enable them to do so. So the agenda was a very broad one all of these things are interlinked and health is a very complex issue (North Staffordshire Health Authority, Health Alliance programme leader, 1999; emphasis added). By relating health to wider social, economic and environmental conditions, Stokes
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Health Alliance presented a complex picture of local health conditions in the city. By describing health in this multifaceted way, Stokes Health Alliance was both conforming to an emerging sustainable health agenda (see DoH, 1998; Satterthwaite, 1997) and positioning health reform within the wider processes of urban socioeconomic restructuring and (re)regulation. Given the shocking nature of the Leeds University report into sickness levels in Stoke, and local socialist empathy with their social model of health, the Local Health Alliances vision of sustainability was able to predominate over other more ecologically inspired plans for urban development which were being promoted by various environmental groups in the town.7 Despite the local prominence of Stokes Local Health Alliances vision of the sustainable city, their social model of health met with signicant political resistance from the British state. In many ways, the very concept of a social model of health was designed to challenge hegemonic neo-liberal Conservative ideologies of health. As one local health worker pointed out from the late 1970s government ideology, philosophy, thinking about health has been set by the medical agenda if you look at right-wing politics, Conservatism, its about free choice, liberty, individualism and so on the problems that we had in trying to develop a social model of health that recognised that what you have to do to improve health is to address poverty, unemployment and whatever, which is about increasing public spending, that is very much an anathema to the Conservatives (project leaderNorth Staffordshire Health Authority, 1999). In a related vein, one Health Authority member claimed that British Conservative health policy was characterised by a concern for the symptoms not the causes [of ill health], so it was about targets set in a very medical wayi.e. reducing coronary heart disease, reducing cancer and so on. It was very much about lifestylewhat causes people to die is their lifestyle, their
lifestyle choices. So basically it was seen that you have to get people to make healthy choices and victim blaming (project leader, North Staffordshire Health Authority, 1999; emphasis added). The process of victim blaming, common within Conservative health policy, tended to fetishise ill health. The social, economic and environmental causes of ill health were thus hidden beneath the veneer of rational choice and personal freedoms. Despite its obvious shortcomings, this neo-liberal construction of health did, however, provide an important political framework for regulating health problems in Britain. By dislocating health from its socioeconomic backdrop, neo-liberal health discourses were able partially to insulate the state from health-related crises. While not resolving health problems, such discourses did provide a coping strategy within which unresolved regulatory tensions could be managed without damaging the legitimacy of the state (see Peck and Tickell, 1994 p. 319). By claiming that ill health was linked to social and environmental injustice, Stokes Health Alliance not only identied health as a key object of regulation in the city, it also challenged the prevailing neo-liberal orthodoxies and regulatory strategies (see Tickell and Peck, 1992, 1995). The tension which existed between Stokes local model of health and existing state conventions of health care is captured in the comments of a representative from the North Staffordshire Health Authority We couldnt mention the word poverty in anything. When the rst Single Regeneration Budget proposal went in we were told to take the word poverty out. We had specic anti-poverty initiatives and the government said you cant have that, there is no poverty, not in this country anyway, you have got to go to West Africa to see poverty, because it doesnt exist here. We werent allowed to use that kind of terminology (North Staffordshire Health Authority representative, 1999; emphasis added).
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The Conservative government were reluctant to accept the link between poverty and ill health and resisted the call of the Stokes Local Health Alliance for a more, not less, interventionist brand of neo-Fordist/ Keynesian health policy in the city. In light of these structural constraints, it became difcult for the Health Alliance to obtain the necessary statutory and nancial powers to implement sustainable health reform policies in the town. The barriers to health reform and certain patterns of sustainable urban development in Stoke, reveal the ways in which the political and ideological structures of the state play a crucial role in the emergence and constitution of regulatory processes. The regulatory form and function of sustainable cities do not emerge from a neutral vacuum; they are always conditioned by local, regional, national and international structures of power (Jessop, 1997). In light of the structural constraints which were placed on the policies and ideals of Stokes Health Alliance, the preferred social model of health and sustainable urban development was adapted and reformed within a series of health programmes which were deemed acceptable to the state. One of the most signicant of these schemes was Stokes Healthy Workplace Initiative. Working in liaison with Stokes Health Alliance, the North Staffordshire Health Authority devised the Healthy Workplace Initiative as a way of contributing to Stokes wider programme of environmental health reform (see North Staffordshire Health Authority, 1999). Drawing together a series of public health service providers and local employers, the initiative sought to improve working environments throughout the town. From the rst Factories Act of 1833, to the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974, the working environment has long been a basis for socialist and wider political struggle in the UK (Harvey, 1998). In this context, the initiative conveniently addressed key socialist and health-related concerns in the town. The fundamental premise of the Healthy Workplace Initiative was to improve working environments through three broad strategies: per-
suading employers to develop a new set of spatial practices of safety and maintenance in the workplace; encouraging employers to invest in the physical improvement of the workplace environment; and, informing employees about practices which help to facilitate the self-production of healthy workplaces, and of the legal rights which they hold concerning workplace environments. Despite trying to create healthier working environments and improve the overall performance of the citys economy, however, the Healthy Workplace Initiative did not always meet with support from local businesses in Stoke. One representative of the Healthy Workplace Initiative articulated the local resistances which the scheme had encountered The concept of the altruistic, supportive employer is a nice idea, but in fact if their priorities are survivaland if we take the indigenous industries of North Staffordshire now there are some pretty severe problemsthe local mining industry has been decimated the pottery industries are going through an enormous change at the moment because of overseas competitionit is no use going naively into these organisations and asking, Have you thought about your responsibilities to your workforce? (workplace projects leader, North Staffordshire Health Authority, 1999). Confronted with increasingly global forms of competition, the local industries of Stoke were faced with a regulatory dilemma which has been etched into the whole history of capitalismthe predicament that workers are simultaneously a cost of production and a source of value (Jessop, 1998). Reconciling the need to increase productivity, reduce the cost of production and improve working conditions, is a perpetual problem of capitalist economies. In the context of the regulatory difculties of the working environments of Stoke, the leader of the workplace initiative in Stoke reected on the importance which had been placed within the project of con-
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stantly stressing the long-term economic benets that a healthy workforce could bring to employers Opportunities arise for securing the understanding of employers in seeing the advantages from a management point of view which come from having an efcient workforce because I have to say very clearly my vested interest is to secure for the director of public health some improvement in the health of the population in some small way, yours is not, yours is to secure a return for your shareholders and continuing prots (workplace projects leader, North Staffordshire Health Authority, 1999; emphasis added). In this context, it is not difcult to see how the formation and implementation of local strategies for sustainable development are always dependent on economic regulatory pressures operating both within and beyond urban areas. In the context of the economic pressures facing local employers in Stoke, and because of the dependence of the Healthy Workplace Initiative on employers co-operation, the initiative rapidly changed from being a project concerned with the socio-environmental rights of workers, to being a subsidy for capital improvements in the workplace. Focusing primarily upon those aspects of workplace reform which could bring quantitative economic returns through cost-savings and improved efciency, the Healthy Workplace Initiative has become much more about sustaining economic prots, than securing improved working conditions for employees. The problems and constraints experienced within Stokes programme of urban health reform illustrate how, within programmes of sustainable urban development, economic power can prevail over social and ecological need. In regulatory terms, it is important to contextualise the economic imperatives of Stokes Healthy Workplace Scheme within the prevailing neo-liberal economic systems operating in Britain at the time. While prot and competition are constant features of cap-
italist development, Peck and Tickell (1994) claim that the economic policies adopted by the British state during the 1980s and 1990s increased interurban competition and beggar-thy-neighbour politics. As a regulatory strategy designed to manage the unresolved crisis of Keynesian/Fordism and the associated scal crisis of the state, such neo-liberal policies emphasised the need of individual cities to fend for themselves within an increasingly global economy (Jessop, 2001). The economic pressures created within this neo-liberal economic system made local socialist programmes of reform difcult to fund and legitimate. In this context, the opportunities for a radical programme of sustainable health reform in Stoke were not only inhibited by the ideological restraints of the British state, but also by the prevailing regulatory practices of the neo-liberal economy. Ultimately, and despite the progressive rhetoric of Stokes social model of health, strategies to create more biologically and environmentally sensitive patterns of urban development in the city were inuenced and transformed within the combined forces of the British state, local capital and neo-liberal economic regulation. It is perhaps also signicant that, despite the apparent functional benets which existing schemes for sustainable urban development in Stoke have for capital, they have failed to address economic decline and downsizing in the city (The Sentinel, 2002). Moreover, recent reports have shown that, despite the best efforts of the Local health Alliance, sickness rates in the town remain well above the national average (The Sentinel, 2001). The failure of health reform and sustainable urban development in the town illustrates that, despite the intentions of sustainable urban development strategies, sustainable city schemes often remain marginal to the wider processes of urban socioeconomic regulation. 3.2 The Sustainable City in Practice II: Sustainable Development and the Politics of Nature in the Black Country The second example of a sustainable city in
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practice to be considered here, relates to the exploitation, conservation and social utilisation of nature in the Black Country. The Black Country is an agglomeration of urban centres in the West Midlands Region of the UK. These urban centres developed through intensive patterns of heavy industrial growth during the 18th and 19th centuries (Wood, 1976). Throughout the early industrial and later Fordist expansion of the Black Country, urbanisation was based upon the ravenous exploitation and consumption of the areas rich endowment of natural resources. While initially an integral part of the economic success and regulation of the urban economy, during the 20th century the exploitation of nature has been constructed as a serious barrier to social and economic development in the area. In the context of this paper, the case of the Black Country serves to illustrate the role of nature within socioeconomic regulation (see Bridge, 1998) and in the formation of the discourses associated with the sustainable city movement. The emergence and construction of nature as an object of regulation in the Black Country rst began during the post-war period of reconstruction in the region. At this time prominent planning groupslike the West Midlands Group on Post-war Reconstruction and Planning (often known simply as the West Midlands Group; see The West Midlands Group, 1948; Holliday, 2000, p. 6; Wood, 1976)developed regional plans through which local nature could be preserved and protected from urban industrial expansion. The main planning document produced by the West Midlands Group (1948), entitled Conurbation, focused primarily on the preservation of rural nature from urban expansion in Birmingham and the Black Country. This plan sought to preserve local nature through a system of green belts and wedges. In this way, nature was initially constructed as an unspoilt, external arena, which belonged to the Arcadian recesses of the West Midlands Regionnot the Black Country. Here, nature was used as a physical regulator (in the judico-political sense) of urban industrial expansion, acting as an
ecological frontier, or cordon sanitaire encircling industrialisation (Law, 2000, pp. 57 64; The West Midlands Group, 1948, p. 201). It was not until the 1970s that nature really became a broader issue within the socioeconomic regulation of the urban economy of the Black Country. In the immediate postwar period, it was the presence of regulation, expressed through rapid economic expansion, which appeared to create ecology problems. During the 1970s, however, it was regulatory failure, manifest in regional economic recession, which exposed a new set of tensions inscribed in local socio-ecological relations. In the context of economic recession, the scorched industrial landscape and the lack of environmental amenity in the Black Country became major political issues. The temerity with which local nature had been treated historically, rapidly became constructed as a cause of socio-regulatory failure. As with health in Stoke-on-Trent, the emergence of nature as an object of regulation in the Black Country reveals the instability and internal tensions inherent in regulatory processes. In response to the imbroglios of economic and environmental discontents in the Black Country, a number of initiatives have been instigated in the area in an attempt to restructure local socio-ecological relationsor, in popular local parlance, turn the Black Country green. One of the earliest programmes was called Operation Greenup. Operation Greenup was established by the West Midlands Metropolitan County Council in the 1970s and sought to give nature a more prominent role in urban planning and to implement a suite of environmental improvement projects. This initiative was followed by the West Midlands Regional Nature Conservation Strategy (1986) which was designed to provide a more integrated framework for nature conservation in the wider regional economy. These government led initiatives were essentially a response to the strong nature conservation lobby which emerged in the Black Country during the 1970s.8 These early environmental initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s have recently culmi-
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nated in the creation of the largest concentrated urban greening project in the UK, the Black Country Urban Forest. While drawing inspiration from the nature conservation traditions of the area, the Black Country Urban Forest, as a designated programme of sustainable urban development, is using nature as a much more holistic strategy for urban reform and regeneration (Black Country Urban Forestry Unit, 1995, p. 4). This paper claims that the political struggles surrounding the forest reveal important regulatory processes which are associated with the ecologies of urban development. Originally, the Black Country Urban Forest, drawing upon previous urban conservation strategies in the area, was driven by key ecological objectives of nature conservation and reconsolidation. In this way, the forest brought together the key ecological groups in the area, including the Black Country Urban Wildlife Trust, Groundwork Black Countrythe British Trust for Conservation Volunteers and the Black Country Urban Forestry Unitinto partnership. These groups, which had collectively emerged out of the struggles and regulatory tensions surrounding the utilisation of nature in the Black Country after 1945, represented the local voices or advocates of nature. Due to issues of land-ownership and development rights, this ecological partnership had to join forces with the four Local Authorities in the Black Country (Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, Sandwell MBC, Walsall MBC and Wolverhampton MBC) in order to implement effectively its plans. In addition to forging partnerships with local government and in order to fund and resource the urban forest, environmental groups in the Black Country also sought central government support. With the assistance of central government, the Black Country Urban Forestry Unit was created to implement and manage woodland reform in the region.9 To date, the forest programme has involved the planting of over 70 000 trees and the formation of a range of associated forest enterprise projects. As previously mentioned, one of the main consequences of partnership with local and
national government is that the Black Country Urban Forest is now more than simply an exercise in nature conservationit is a programme of sustainable urban development. From a regulatory perspective, it is interesting to consider the kinds of translation rules which operate when ecological concern is re-articulated in the socioeconomic discourses of sustainability. One of the most obvious manifestations of the regulatory struggles surrounding the forest has emerged over the respective social and ecological functions of the project. From very early on, it was clear that the urban forest could not simply be an ecological conserve or a place for nature. With so much public money owing into the forest, the Black Country Urban Forestry Unit had to repackage the scheme in order to emphasise its social benets. The discourses surrounding the forest were consequently transformed from the languages of ecological science to the lexicon of socio-ecological development. As one project worker with Groundwork Black Country poignantly put it We are not just here to plant trees I would say the agenda has moved on from being about the physical environment to being about sustainable communities, its about sustainable development. Physical regeneration doesnt last; its of no value if you dont include social and economic regeneration (project worker, Groundwork Black Country, 1999). The impossibilitywhich is inscribed within the discourses of sustainable development of addressing ecological ends without also tackling key socioeconomic problems has had a signicant impact on the operating principles of the Urban Forest In terms of our operating principles, what we are saying is that it is not just about placesalthough we do need to improve the physical environment, so that we can create healthy environmentsbut we need to work on the social environment, create social integration, equality of opportunity, social justice (project worker, Groundwork Black Country, 1999).
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Ecological need is always, to a certain extent, dependent upon its social articulation. However, the requirement of the Urban Forestry Unit continually to couch their objectives in relation to social and economic advantage unquestionably inhibits more meaningful and possibly radical ecological engagements (see Latour, 1993). A consequence of the discursive recasting of the Black Country Urban Forest, is that the forest is now actively used as a strategy for tackling social problems in the area. At one level, the urban forest has been used to address some of the problems of the local labour market. The formation and maintenance of the urban forest is in part being facilitated through the utilisation of the local unemployed population. Working in conjunction with the governments Environmental Task Force (an intermediate labour market system), the urban forest has provided a means of absorbing local labour surpluses. Local unemployed people now receive training and subsidised incomes in return for managing the woodlands and producing sustainable woodland products. In addition to absorbing redundant labour, the forest has also been used as a basis for building social and community capital. The urban forest is consequently now being promoted as an ecological arena within which it is possible to bring together divided local communities. Through common ownership schemes which operate throughout the forest, the Urban Forestry Unit is now marketing the project as an effective ecological strategy for building social cohesion in communities traditionally ravaged by poverty and urban decline Urban forestry offers a particularly bold approach to urban greening. In the planting and care of all the trees and woodland in urban areas, and in urban forestry, the people are as important as the trees. Trees and woods help make cities healthier and more attractive for the people who live and work there. The process of deciding where trees should go and of planting and caring for them can bring people together, build
stronger communities and add local distinctiveness to neighbourhoods (National Urban Forestry Unit, 1997, p. 2; emphases added). The purported role of nature in the building of community identity and solidarity was emphasised by one project worker with whom I talked I think that the emphasis has moved away from environmental issues far more towards social inclusion. Now in my opinion it is very easy to build links between social inclusion and the reduction of crime and the environment simple projects such as creating a woodland is a very good way of getting groups together and to reach a consensus on issues they feel divorced from (programme manager, Black Country Urban Forest, 1999). Through these popularised narratives of nature, as an ameliorator of social tensions, the Black Country Urban Forest has been constructed as an ecological frontier through which social tensions as well as ecological injustice can be tackled. Implicit within the community discourses associated with the urban forest, is a new vision of citizenship, within which social rights and responsibilities are expressed through ecological praxis. While the social benets of the forest may seem questionable, such claims do reveal the desire and pressure to construct the Black Country Urban Forest as an arena of urban social regulation. So far it appears that the ecological groups behind the Black Country Urban Forest have been able to develop a sensitivity to social needs within their programme, without overtly compromising their broader environmental objectives. Indeed, fostering local respect and engagement with nature appear important prerequisites for successful ecological programmes. However, the persistent economic problems within the surrounding urban region have presented a more fundamental challenge to the ethos of the urban forest. As previously mentioned, many local industrialists and civic leaders became increasingly concerned that the poor condition
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of the Black Countrys environment was a material and ideological barrier to economic investment (Birmingham Post, 1999). In the context of the increasingly aggressive and diverse urban strategies which are being used to hold-down and attract investment (see Harvey, 1989), it became increasingly difcult to justify the existence of the urban forest independently from its economic function. In light of the economic problems of the region and the broader regulatory order of interurban competition, state funding for the urban forest and the granting of development rights by the different local authorities gradually become tied more and more to the wider goal of economic regeneration. In order to gain funding for their ecological vision, the Urban Forestry Unit consequently became keen to emphasise, at least nominally, the potential economic benets of an urban forest In terms of sustainability I think everyone is trying to encourage urban areas to become more attractive for housing developers, to want to build there, for people to want to live there, for industrial activity so everyone wants to improve those urban areas and make them very attractive places (Chief Executive, Groundwork Black Country, 1999). Analysing the forest more closely, however, it appears that the economic functions of the project have started to predominate over its social and ecological roles. Moreover, in prioritising the economic advantages of the forest, it appears that many of the ecological aims of the project are being compromised. A look at the geography of the forest, for example, reveals that, rather than focusing on key ecological areas within the urban conurbation, the major destinations for investment from the 4.5 million scheme have been located along the key transport arteries in the region. Called the Woodlands by the Motorway Priority Zone, the location of the urban forest alongside the M6 and M5 motorways, represents an attempt to recast the regions image to those predominantly living outside the area. The ecological re-imaging of urban
economies represents one of the dominant entrepreneurial strategies used by cities to create attractive, post-industrial business environments (Harvey, 1989; Peck and Tickell, 1994). The location of large areas of the Black Country Urban Forest along key transport intersections has, however, created a spatially fragmented forest and has prevented the formation of a more continuous and ecologically sustainable forest system. The designation of funding within the forest on the basis of visibility, as opposed to ecological need, has obvious implications for the overall rationale of the project. It also illustrates the difculties of translating ecological desire into economic function. The utilisation of the Black Country Urban Forest as an economic resource, illustrates just one of the many ways in which nature can be commodied within urban development (Katz, 1998). Crucially, the commodied exploitation of nature in the Black Country has enabled the area to begin to cast off its traditional industrial image and to be sold as a green and pleasant post-industrial landscape (see Keil and Graham, 1999). In light of this commodication process, the case of the Black Country Urban Forest appears to reect what Katz and Kirby (1991) describe as the aestheticising of nature. According to Katz and Kirby (1991, p. 265), the aestheticisation of nature involves the distancing of nature from many of its social and ecological values. Siginicantly, in the context of this paper, the commodication and aestheticisation of nature in the Black Country, or indeed in any other sustainable city programme, must be understood as part of the on-going regulatory struggles which surround urban nature. Furthermore, this paper asserts that the exploitation of sustainable development strategies as a basis, rst and foremost for economic restructuring, is a product of the contemporary neo-liberal regulatory (dis)order which is intensifying interurban competition and zero-sum economic gain. In many ways, the Black Country Urban Forest represents a microcosm of the historical struggles which have surrounded the socio-ecological regulation of the Black
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Country economy. It also illustrates that the emergence of nature as an object of regulatory crisis does not guarantee its place within any emerging regulatory compromise. The urban forest has brought undoubted ecological benets to the Black Country urban region. However, the political compromises through which ecological concern has been translated into the discourses and practices of sustainable development raise important questions concerning the ways in which economic, social and environmental issues become entangled within the on-going processes and structures of regulation. If no local or national support had been gained, nothing matching the contemporary scale or ecological signicance of the Black Country Urban Forest would exist in the area today. Nevertheless, by playing the sustainable development game, ecological groups in the Black Country have sacriced many of their original desires for the forest and reduced the political space within which more radical ecological programmes can operate in the area in the foreseeable future. 4. Conclusion: Researching the Sustainable City This paper has suggested a series of ways in which the regulation approach can be used to analyse the material and discursive rise of the sustainable city. By drawing upon the regulation approach, analysis has sought to illustrate that the creation of sustainable cities is not simply a technocratic exercise in town planning and urban design, but is part of a wider set of socio-ecological processes of regulation. Understood in these terms, the study of sustainable cities becomes less about simply reciting a set of universal social and ecological principles regarding urban development, and more about analysing the ways in which at different times and in different places certain social, economic and environmental strategies of urban development emerge and who benets most from these strategic formulations. But what does a regulatory approach to the sustainable city actually provide? At one
level, it serves to illustrate that the sustainable city is a social, economic and political construct. Unlike many existing approaches to the social and discursive construction of sustainability (see Hajer, 1995), however, the regulation approach enables the social construction and production of the sustainable city to be interpreted within the prevailing frameworks, structures and practices of capitalist development. In this context, the sustainable city is understood both as the product of historically specic and spatially inscribed regulatory tensions and as a possible space within which future regulatory processes may be realised and contested. Through the two case studies, this paper has explored the ways in which the discourses and practices associated with sustainable urban development are being used to address key objects of local regulatory discontent. By focusing upon the uidity of regulatory processes, analysis has shown the importance of local political traditions and historical regulatory legacies in the discursive construction of strategies of sustainable urban development. Crucially, in the context of the two case studies, this paper has also shown the importance of broader regimes and regulatory structures in the formation and constitution of sustainable cities. In particular, analysis has shown the impacts which neo-liberal state ideology and interurban economic competition are having on the shape and content of strategies of urban sustainability. In bringing together the ideas of sustainable urban development and theories of regulation, this paper has sought to dispel three myths which appear to surround the sustainable city. First, that despite their morally imbued name, sustainable cities, are not equally sustainable for all social and ecological interests. Secondly, sustainable cities are not generic, planned objects, uniformly implemented throughout the world, but are individually constituted phenomena, produced within specic geographical scales and spaces. Thirdly, sustainable cities are not simply business as usually for capitalist urbanisation, but involve the active repackaging or humanisation of neo-liberal projects
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in urban areas, through new discursive regimes and new economic practices (see Jessop, 2001, p. 1). As a multiple space of ecological, economic and social activity, the sustainable city represents a crucial terrain upon which future battles over territorial justice will be waged (Amin and Graham, 1997). Crucially, this paper asserts that this battle can only be won when the ght for sustainable cities becomes a broader quest for socio-ecological justice at a variety of geo-political and economic scales. Notes
1. Noted here is the distinction which Harvey (1973, pp. 307308; 1996, ch. 14) and others (for example, Lefebvre, 1970; Smith, 1984) make between cities as things and urbanisation as a process. As a process, urbanisation cannot be contained or dened within any neat spatial segregation between the city and the countryside, the metropolis and Arcadia, or society and nature. Urbanisation or the production of urban formsis instead characterised by a continual state of ux, change and transformation, which permeates and affects an increasingly wide range of social and ecological contexts in the reproduction of capitalism. With perhaps the exception of writers such as Blowers and Pain (1999), Swynegedouw and Ka ka (2000), Lawrence (1996), Satterthwaite (1997) and Marcuse (1998). During the course of writing this paper, the UNCHS has been renamed the UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlement Programme). Thus the mode of regulation usually labelled as Fordism for example, lasted for around 30 years in the West after the Second World War, and involved technical change in the processes of production, organisational change in capital-labour relations, the political implementation of Keynesian demand management policies and the emergence of a social norm of mass consumption for manual workers and their families. Despite an original emphasis of work on regulation on the national scale as the key site of Fordist regulation, regulationist research has increasingly focused upon the multiple spaces and scales through which regulation is constituted (see MacLeod 1997; Peck and Tickell, 1995; Tickell and Peck, 1992, 1995). In this way, the sustainable city or region could be a signicant space within
6.
7. 8.
9.
the emerging regulatory geography of late capitalism. The levels of worker absenteeism were estimated to be costing the North Staffordshire economy between 93 and 140 million pounds per year, an average loss of 10 000 per employee (North Staffordshire Health Authority, 1999, p. 4). Particularly by Groundwork Stoke and Stoke of Trent City Councils Local Agenda 21 scheme Green Steps. Broadly middle class in its origins, the nature conservation lobby in the Black Country eventually saw the establishment of the rst British urban wildlife trust in the area. The Black Country Urban Forestry Unit has subsequently been renamed the National Urban Forestry Unit. The National Urban Forestry Unit now co-ordinates urban forestry programmes throughout the UK.
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(RE)ANALYSING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY

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