ABSTRACT
Traditionally though, despite the imminence and widespread awareness of these crises, the environment has featured little in analyses of the city within mainstream urban geography. While geographers and others have looked at the physical geographies of the city, for example in Ian Laurie’s Nature in Cities (1979) and Michael Hough’s Cities and Natural Processes (1995), these have tended to have relatively little impact on the practice of mainstream urban geography. This, however, is changing and the issue is likely to represent one of the major foci of debate in urban geography in the coming years, and may well be so fundamental as to effect a major rethink of its practices and concerns. Since the mid-1990s we have witnessed an explosion of debate among academics, politicians, pressure groups and in the media, about sustainability at global, regional and local scales. Much of this debate has been focused on the city. This has been reflected in a number of publications such as Haughton and Hunter’s (1994/2003) Sustainable Cities, Shatterthwaite’s (1999) The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Cities, Girard et al.’s (2003) edited volume The Human Sustainable City, Brand and Thomas’s (2005) Urban Environmentalism, Hinchliffe’s (2007) Geographies of Nature, in which the city features prominently, Benton-Short and Short’s (2008) Cities and Nature, and Roberts et al.’s, Environment and the City (2009) that have sought, in different ways, to bring the ecological within analysis of the urban. In the same way that some sub-disciplines of human geography have undergone a cultural turn in recent years, it seems likely that urban geography will undergo an ecological turn, at least to some extent, in the future.
