Matthias
Glaubrecht

Urbanization is one of humanity’s great turning points, which has recently become a powerful mass movement of millions that is causing metropolises around the world to grow ever more rapidly. There are now more city dwellers than rural dwellers on earth, as since around 2008 over half of humanity has lived in the particularly rapidly growing cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America. More and more of them are becoming highly dense urban monsters in which millions of people live in very small spaces in a sea of concrete.

By 2050, around 70 percent of humanity worldwide will live in cities. Although these only cover around three percent of the earth’s surface, through urban sprawl and densification cities cause significant environmental problems. They are not only responsible for 80 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, but also pose an immense challenge for the surrounding country due to the resource consumption of their population and their consumer demands—with consequences also for nature.

Nevertheless, due to the narrow view on comparatively small green cities such as Hamburg or Munich, they are perceived mistakenly as future havens of biodiversity. Because in some cities a dense population of birds, for example, can be seen, often the impression arises that this could generally apply to the abundance of animal and plant species on earth. However, the facts help to dispel a persistent myth of urban ecology—the belief that biodiversity that is disappearing in the countryside can be preserved in the world’s cities in the future.

First, cities practically absorb their means of living from their surroundings and now from the entire world; food and water, but also other resources such as wood, cement, steel, and so on. Everything comes from outside, is digested and released into the surrounding area as waste or wastewater. People consume in the city but produce in the country. This means: the more people move from the countryside to the city, the more agricultural land will be needed, the more agriculture will be industrialized elsewhere, and the more effectively city dwellers will have to be supplied in the future. They are the ones causing the loss of nature and the biodiversity crisis—in many ways. Because more city dwellers not only need more food, but also more space and resources.

As more and more people move into cities, they can either fray at the edges and spread out into the area, or structurally densify the existing urban area. The major cities of the future will be both larger and more densely populated. Thus, they will displace further natural areas, meadows and forests; and through so-called urban densification, they also will cause a displacement of the natural in the inner city. No matter how much urban developers will practice the art of not losing the quality of open spaces in European cities such as Berlin or Barcelona, for example by greening roofs and facades and trying to preserve peripheral strips and parks; nevertheless, the population will continue to become more dense and most world cities will remain far away from the beautiful dream of a «green city»—with ideas of «urban gardening», with garden towers instead of concrete buildings and with housing 3.0 instead of ghettos.

The future of people’s urban living space will most likely look different from what the visionary architects of a green tomorrow’s city would like. Instead, there will be agglomerations made up of several large cities—urban archipelagos with many city islands is how cultural ecologists describe these large and complex human-made structures. Cities in the Global South in particular will grow rapidly and largely uncontrolled, with slums and their toxic mix of social density and social isolation where life will be dangerous. Already today, the overwhelmed administrations of many megacities around the world are hardly able to alleviate poverty, housing shortages and sanitation problems; not to mention taking care of urban relicts of nature.
Looking at the world, will cities really become hotbeds of biodiversity? Definitely no. A park with green lawn and a few trees is suitable as an architectural prop, not as a viable retreat for many and different plants and animals. What we must not ignore: Just like almost every urban park, green roofs and green facades are biologically impoverished residual biotopes in which biodiversity is now only a pitiful imitation of nature—urban green as a reminiscence of former ecologies. Instead of helping biodiversity out of the crisis, cities themselves are becoming ecological problems. And in the future they will eat up even more natural areas, which cannot be compensated for by a little decorative greenery in the city.

The global loss in biodiversity cannot be avoided in any significant way by green cities. From a global perspective, the idea that nature and biodiversity could be preserved in a tomorrow’s city is pure eyewash and wishful thinking. Even a brief visit to Osaka or Rio de Janeiro, for example, should be enough to confront urban ecology enthusiasts with reality; and lead to a fundamental change of perspective that makes them realize that urbanization in general represents another problem for biodiversity—and that cities are not the solution to the impending biological crisis.

In view of the rapidly growing population and crowding into urban centers, «green cities» are at best a beautiful illusion created by architects and city planners. It may be that individual shrinking cities in the Global North are using this to reinvent themselves. But this will neither preserve nor create new nature, the environment and biodiversity. The future will be difficult enough for many people in the megacities of the Global South; but for the diversity of other species there is certainly no urban future.