ABSTRACT
The notion of urban sustainable development is in vogue, but how to attain this vision is a matter of rancorous debate. Approaches vary widely: should we look at cities in nature or nature in cities, strive for compact cities, or ask for green technology and recycling (Kos 2008)? Like the parent literature on sustainability generally (for a review, see Paton 2011 and other chapters in this book), concepts, meanings and approaches differ in what we might call ‘urban ecologies’. Some borrow from ‘ecological footprints’ to stress the amount of land that is used up or degraded in the process of ‘conspicuous consumption’, to use a term coined by the institutional political economist Veblen, whereas others use ideas of ‘urban sprawl’ or urban expansion, and then of course there is the idea of ‘urban ecosystem’ used to stress the relationships between the city and nature as an interlocking whole (Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnam 2013: 1-3).
