ABSTRACT
Traditionally, within mainstream urban geography, the focus has been overwhelmingly upon the human dimensions of the city. While geographers and others have looked at the physical geographies of the city (see e.g. in Michael Hough’s Cities and Natural Processes (1995) and Ian Laurie’s Nature in Cities (1979)), these have tended to have relatively little impact upon 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 affect a major rethink of its practices and concerns. The late 1990s witnessed an explosion of debate among academics, politicians, pressure groups and in the media, about
sustainability on global, regional and local scales. Much of this debate was focused on the city, which was identified as being a key building block in the path towards a more sustainable world. It is clear that cities have affected and will continue to fundamentally affect the development of the environment and that the environment should, if present concerns are taken seriously, affect the development of cities. For these reasons questions of sustainability and the interrelationship between cities and the environment are likely to emerge at the heart of urban geography in the future.
