ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of environmental problems and affluent cities. This immediately raises some interesting problems of definition and analysis. What is an affluent city, and is it a meaningful category for analysis? The overall affluence of a city, for instance, can mask major internal inequalities in terms of uneven exposure to environmental risks and contributions to creating environmental problems. Moreover, many of the environmental problems and risks which we might associate with cities are actually felt outside the city and are rooted in social and economic processes that operate without regard to urban boundaries.
