The green versus brown agenda in city regions, peri-urban and rural

hinterlands.

By Adriana Allen, UCL Development Planning Unit

Tensions and complementaries

Until a few decades ago, environmental concerns where perceived to be a luxury for
affluent societies rather than an essential dimension to be taken into account as part
of the promotion of sustainable development. The debate about the green and brown
agendas partly symbolises the tensions - and apparent contradictions – between the
‘environment versus development’ debate with dialogue between these two agendas
emerging in the early 1990s.

Typically proponents of the ‘green agenda’ have been seen as environmentalists;

where as those of the ‘brown agenda’ are seen as urbanists and development
workers. The principle concern of the green agenda is presented as ecosystem
protection and the immediate and deferred effects of human activity at the regional
and global scale. Whilst the brown agenda is seen as focusing upon human well-
being and social justice and the immediate problems at the local level, especially
those suffered by low-income groups.

Dialogue between proponents of the green and brown agendas started to emerge
through the main outcomes of the UN summits in Rio de Janeiro and Istanbul – the
environment-focused Agenda 21 and the urban-focused Habitat Agenda. This
change in perspective moved from the largely ’environment versus development’
approach that characterised the ecological movement of the 1970s and 1980s, to a
new approach that recognised that environmental concerns are inextricably linked to
social and economic development processes. Furthermore, the Habitat Agenda in
particular recognised that, in an increasingly urbanised world, cities are the locus of
critical social, economic and environmental problems, as well as comprising unique
opportunities for a more sustainable future (Allen and You, 2002).

The perspective embodied in Agenda 21 and the Habitat Agenda also highlighted the
link between sustainability and governance. Rather than being the exclusive domain
of governments and experts, sustainable development was now seen as a process
involving ordinary people in their every day lives. Both agendas underlined the need
to combat poverty and to include those people who are traditionally disenfranchised
and excluded from mainstream decision-making processes. In this context,
sustainability and ‘good’ governance became the two overriding policy considerations
for the international community in the new millennium.

Equity is another common principle shared by both agendas in their approach to

sustainable development. The brown agenda places its emphasis on
intragenerational equity, in recognising that all urban dwellers have needs for healthy
and safe living and working environments and the infrastructure and services these
require. Where as the green agenda places its emphasis upon intergenerational
equity, in the concern that urban development draws upon a finite resource base and
degrades ecological systems in ways that compromise the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs (McGranahan and Satterthwaite, 2000).

Is the bridge between the two agendas robust enough?

Despite the fact that there is obvious complementarity between the green and brown
agendas, a problem remains however in considering both agendas separately, that is
in focusing attention either on local environmental problems which have immediate
and evident impacts on people’s health and quality of life or in looking at
sustainability issues exclusively from the perspective of the natural resources base
and ecosystems health. Promoting one agenda over the other has had the
counterproductive effect of placing them in opposition to each other, competing for
recognition, resources and practitioner support. Even if this split appears to be
increasingly addressed in discursive terms, it still manifests in practice, making it still
difficult to access the potential strength that their coherency offers. Furthermore, it
could be argued that the bridge between the two agendas could be further
strengthened by a deeper contextualisation of the principles advocated vis a vis the
underlying political and socio-economic contemporary processes that render urban
development both environmentally unsustainable and socially inequitable.

For many, urban sustainability involves the ‘greening’ of public policy, business and
technology, a vision dominated by ecological modernisation thought (Hajer, 1996)
which tends to squeeze out of the equation the challenges on environmental injustice
and inequity and more generally a political economy understanding of the causes of
unsustainable development. Some have qualified this interpretation as an effort in
adapting advanced capitalism, so as to mitigate environmental impact through
modern means of production (Lafferty, 2001). The emphasis in this case is on
technological and managerial change in pursuing efficiency within the overall
framework of a market system. The problem with this perspective is that “problems
that have been caused and identified by the North are expected to be solved through
northern innovations implemented by the South” (Myllyla and Kuvaja, 2005:225). In
other words, discourses dominated by technocratic perceptions assume certain
societal conditions (such as social justice, democratic institutions, political motivation,
transparency and so forth) either as unproblematic or as easily ‘manageable’ through
the promotion of ‘good governance’.

Currently, both the green and brown agenda converge in highlighting the global
environmental impacts of the unequal processes of consumption and production in
different parts of the world – with climate change challenges being perhaps the most
obvious concern calling for a link across both agendas. However, as argued by Iris
Young (1990) and subsequently by Nancy Fraser (1998), social justice - and indeed
environmental justice - requires a notion of justice that does not just address the
maldistribution of goods and services – or, in environmental terms, the
maldristribution of environmental ‘goods’ and ‘bads’- but also the institutional
structures and social relations that produce and reproduce such ‘maldistributions’.
Levy (2009) contends that “[i]n the contemporary global context, a concern for
material inequalities so evidently captured in the challenge of the ‘brown’ agenda,
and the political debates and decisions in the institutional processes permeating both
the ‘brown’ and ‘green’ agendas, need to be taken a step further” (page 43). Such
step requires in my view detail analysis on two interrelated fronts.

First, despite their different emphasis on ‘lower income groups’ and ‘future
generations’ respectively, at the core of the brown and green agendas is a concern
with equity in the distribution of environmental goods and bads. In his book Defining
Environmental Justice, Scholsberg (2007) calls for a wider and more comprehensive
understanding of justice which, without dismissing distributional concerns, explores
other elements that determine poor distribution or, in other words, produce and
reproduce social and environmental injustice, namely: recognition, participation and
capability. Without going into the detail of Scholsberg’s argumentation, his book
provides a valuable framework to understand not only distributional patterns - who
gets what – but more fundamentally why. The central point here is that a deeper
conceptualisation of environmental justice is essential to build a stronger bridge
between the green and brown agendas both in political theory and political practice.
Second, current urban development trends – and their sustainability assessment –
need to be re-embedded into a wider consideration of the political economy driving
such trends. As a consequence of the dialogue between the green and brown
agendas, it is now increasingly recognised that development strategies must ensure
that today’s gains do not result in cities that will need radical restructuring in the
future because they need more resources and have too great an impact on the
environment to be sustainable. However, a significant outcome of macro-economic
restructuring is that the ‘globalisation’ process is generating socio-environmental
conflicts in specific localities.

While it is clear why we should focus attention on the urban environment and
sustainable development, the precise relationship between macro-economic
strategies and the sustainability of contemporary urban development trends remains
largely unexplored. Since the 1980s, industrial production in many cities of the South
has shifted from Fordism to liberal-productivism. But, as Lipietz reminds us, ‘[a]s with
Fordism, liberal-productivism fosters a use of natural resources which makes no
sense, as the ecological debt which past and present generations are handing on to
future generations … will have to be paid for in the next forty years’ (Lipietz 1992:
321). The main difference between the two systems lies in the increasing domination
of transnational markets over national and local political and economic agents.

Contemporary processes of industrial restructuring prompted by neo-liberal macro-

economic strategies not only accelerate competition over environmental resources
but also promote the short-term maximisation of profits through socially and
environmentally unsustainable mechanisms. As a result, not only are local livelihoods
negatively affected and environmental conditions worsened but also existing
regulations governing natural resources are weaken by new struggles between
domestic and foreign capitalists, workers and the state (Allen, 2001). More generally,
this second point calls for an explicit acknowledgment of the impact of neo-liberal
thinking and its translation into structural adjustment policies, and the way these have
impacted on the relation between production and nature but also changed the
institutional landscape in most cities of the global south.

Addressing the sustainability challenge across the urban-rural continuum

Despite the shortcomings discussed in the previous section, dialogue between the
green and brown agendas has been positive in bringing attention not just to the
challenge of promoting ‘sustainable cities’ but also ‘sustainable urbanisation’. As
discussed above, while much of the focus of the brown agenda has been on
improving living conditions and the environment in inner cities and slums, green
agenda advocates have been successful in reminding planners that the urbanisation
process is not restricted to cities, and involves more than the social and physical
dimensions of housing, infrastructure and urban services.
The mutual dependence between cities and their hinterland is a delicate one, and its
balance is constantly affected by the urbanisation process. In developed
countries, urban sprawl continues to consume vast amounts of rural land, often
threatening or destroying natural eco-systems and watersheds. As agricultural
land surrounding cities is converted through suburban development, the
comparative advantage of food produced in proximity to urban markets is lost,
thus reinforcing the trend of globalisation for food to be shipped from further a-
field. This phenomenon, known as food-miles, increases the ecological footprint
of cities often resulting in more energy being consumed for transporting food
than the calorific value of the food itself. Consumer awareness has recently led
to movements and campaigns favouring local production of foodstuffs with
several major cities having adopted policies and land-use practices in favour of
urban and peri-urban agriculture.

In developing countries, the rural-urban interface is also affected by urban sprawl

owing primarily to rapid population growth and to the proliferation of low-income
settlements. The environmental impacts are both direct and indirect. Direct
consequences include the loss of often fertile and productive land, the depletion of
water resources owing to urban and industrial demand, and pollution caused directly
by the unsafe disposal of solid waste and sewerage as well as by uncontrolled
industrial emissions. Indirect consequences include the social costs and risks
associated with settlements located in precarious sites such as flood plains, and the
high costs of extending infrastructure and services to outlying areas.

In both developed and developing countries, competing jurisdictions on the urban-

rural fringe are often a major issue. Examples abound where the policies and
legislation governing urban local governments differ considerably from those of their
adjacent county or rural authorities. This lack of harmonisation often results in
conflicts in land-use, energy supply, transport and water management. The
phenomenon of urban sprawl in many developed countries is attributable in large part
to competing efforts by peri-urban areas to capitalise on cheaper land and lower
taxes to attract suburban housing and commercial development, much to the
detriment of the city. This zero-sum game in economic terms bears direct
environmental consequences in terms of land-use and energy consumption.

The emerging landscapes in terms of human settlements challenge conventional

definitions and perceptions of the city and the countryside with regards to their
location, physical structure, functional relation, institutional context and cultural
outlook (Lynch, 2005). For instance, the concept of the ‘informational city’ (Castells,
1989) suggests that, in the context of globalisation, information technology
constitutes the most strategic commodity, dividing wealth between and within cities
into the ‘information rich’ and the ‘information poor’. This has often been understood
as the general blurring of frontiers, not only between the rural and the urban, but
between the so-called ‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds. However, as discussed before, it
should not be assumed that urbanisation runs always vis a vis an even integration of
‘all’ cities and ‘all’ urban dwellers into the world economy, neither that this
increasingly urban-based world economy can be easily ‘shaped’ to redistribute
wealth and to reduce the ever expanding ‘ecological footprint’ that supports it (Rees,
1992).

As global trade has vastly expanded throughout the 20th century, cities have become
less reliant upon their hinterland for sustenance and are increasingly importing not
only their consumer goods, but also food, energy, water and building materials from
distant sources. At the same time, wastes produced in urban areas are increasingly
been exported to distant regions. This means that very often the origin of food and
energy and the destination of wastes is invisible to urban dwellers, creating
dependencies that might not be ecologically or geopolitically stable, secure or
indeed, sustainable (Allen et al, 2007). The problem is that the limits imposed by the
expansion of the urban ecological footprint do not become evident until they are
translated into local impacts, such as higher food or energy prices, frequent floods or
the increment of environment-related diseases such as skin cancer.

A comparison of the urban ecological footprint of cities in developing and developed

countries reveals that, in overall terms, the former rely more heavily on their own
hinterlands than do cities in the developed world, as the latter tend to draw on distant
‘elsewheres’ to satisfy their demands in terms of food, energy and so on, thus
increasingly bypassing their hinterland and resulting in missed opportunities for
reciprocal rural–urban linkages within the same area and/or region. However, the
picture is not that simple. When taking a more disaggregated look at the ecological
footprint of different income groups within fast growing cities in the developing world,
significant differences emerge between the wealthy and the poor, revealing a
consistent link between income and the demands individuals place on the
environment, as regards both their consumption of renewable and non-renewable
resources and their patterns of waste production. This implies that the challenge of
urban sustainability cannot be addressed without an examination of wider
relationships between urban areas and their hinterlands or ‘bio-regions’, nor without
unpacking the inequality that unfortunately prevails in the contemporary urbanisation
process, where conditions of hyper and sub-consumption coexist neck-to-neck.

More sustainable forms of urbanisation will therefore require a more coherent

approach to the urban-rural interface. Successful approaches tend to work through
the concept of the ‘city-region’, where the comparative advantages of urban or
metropolitan centres and their adjacent peri-urban and rural jurisdictions are
combined to promote more balanced use of natural resources such as land, water
and energy, and to support mutually reinforcing social and economic development
initiatives. Such integrated urban-rural approaches to development can contribute
significantly to more sustainable forms of urbanisation. However, they rarely occur by
themselves and in the vast majority of cases, require specific policies as well as more
enabling legislation. Barriers, such as many existing laws and policies, include the
lack of harmonisation in land-use planning and zoning, taxes and tariffs, and
accountability vis-à-vis higher spheres of government (Allen and You, op.cit).

A comparative or contrasting research agenda?

In many ways, the sustainability challenges faced by cities and citizens in the UK and
Brazil could not be more contrasting. However, both contexts present an active
laboratory of planning experiences concerned with the articulation of the green and
brown agendas. In this context, I would suggest to focus on a discrete number of
initiatives engaged with the promotion of urban agriculture (e.g.: London Capital
Growth and Urban Agriculture in Belo Horizonte), as this represents an ideal theme
to test the capacity of such initiatives to respond to the central questions discussed in
this document, namely: (a) the reduction of environmental inequality and (b) the
promotion of the sustainability agenda at the urban-region level and/or across the
rural-urban continuum.

Below is a list of potential questions that could be used to frame the comparison:
 What competing socio-ecological discourses (e.g. ecological modernisation;
environmental justice) dominate the planned interventions analysed?
 What are the driving forces behind their emergence and who are the driving
agents?
 How are such experiences addressing the maldistribution of environmental goods
and bads among different groups within the urban fabric?
 How are the root causes of environmental inequality defined and addressed?
 What can be learnt in terms of effective changes achieved both in terms of
substantial and procedural justice?
 How are these initiatives dealing with the trend of ‘greenfield urbanisation’, where
an ever larger area around a city is built over, usually to low densities, or
otherwise converted to urban uses and functions through concentric, interstitial
and ‘leapfrog’ growth?

References

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