ABSTRACT
The most outwardly striking characteristic of the environmental agendas examined in the previous chapter concerns the institutionalization, technification and normalizing effects of urban spatial management. Urban environmental management is presented as the rational organization of collective effort to attune urban spatial patterns and organizational and individual behaviour to the exigency of reversing or at least containing a common, global threat. However, this proposition of urban environmental management is both its strength and its weakness. It obviously has some credence among urban populations, at the same time as attempted ‘rational’ responses to the ecological problem constantly falter on the complexity of the overall demands of urban life and the unresolved dilemmas of environmental decision-making. In this chapter we examine some of the features of contemporary urban society and culture which at least make urban environmentalism a politically feasible project. We refer not to green politics or urban policy but, rather, the conditions under which citizens are disposed, one way or another, reluctantly or enthusiastically, to take the environment as a matter of sufficient seriousness as to merit public administration and accept its general consequences in the course of their everyday lives.
