Sustainable Urban Development: a Georgist Perspective

13 Sustainable urban development A Georgist perspective Franklin Obeng-Odoom Introduction 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 ecosys- tem’ used to stress the relationships between the city and nature as an interlocking whole (Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnam 2013: 1–3). In these conceptions of urban sustainable development, however, the environment is typically decoupled from the environment–society–economy complex. The World Bank’s official position on cities is stated in Reshaping Economic Geography (World Bank 2009), for example. The Bank makes a strong case for economic growth and the need to prioritize it over and above the environment, although it notes that the environment is important too (World Bank 2009: 34). The United Nations does much better in approaching the problem more holisti- cally, but does not carefully theorize the structural connection between capitalism, nature, society, and economy, polity and institutions (Obeng-Odoom 2013). Such is the nature of the neoliberal ideology. It takes hold of the spaces for possible progressive change, including urban planning – both as theory and prac- tice. The structural links between planning and markets under neoliberalism and the tendency for planning to concentrate on form and ignore structure in order to ensure capitalist accumulation have long been theorized. For instance, in one of the seminal texts on neoliberalism, The Road to Serfdom (Hayek 1945), Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek argues that it is only planning for competition and profit that works under capitalism. The work of Campbell and her colleagues (Campbell et al. 2014), recently published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, shows that such is evidently the state of planning today, prompting the researchers to make a passionate plea for new ways of planning generally. 192 Franklin Obeng-Odoom In responding to this call and the more specific concern of this book – explor- ing ways of attaining ‘untamed urbanisms’ – this chapter introduces and outlines the benefits of a Georgist approach to urban sustainable development, previously overlooked in the literature. The approach emphasizes how social investment affects land values and rent, how surplus is generated, and how net income is distributed and impacts on sustainable urban development. Although highly relevant in the current global political economy, the Georgist approach is rarely used in neoclassical resource economics, and these days scarcely used in heterodox urban political economy too (Stilwell and Jordan 2004; Stilwell 2011). This chapter presents Georgism as a challenge to existing discourses on sustainable development. George’s approach to sustainable development throws up complex distribu- tional issues which are hardly acknowledged in the dominant discourses on sustainable development. The chapter argues that the primary emphasis on rent helps to show how the wrongful appropriation of nature tends to lead to speculation and profiteering which, in turn, lead to misuse and abuse of nature. Thus, under capitalist urban development, attaining ‘sustainable urban development’ is an oxymo- ron. Since emphasizing one segment of society neglects the other, and grafting ‘everything’ onto a grand approach buttered with markets generates further con- tradictions, the entire rentier basis of the capitalist system ought to be challenged. Henry George, however, did not provide a road map for moving from ‘here’ to ‘there’, and to this extent Georgism ought to be linked up with other green move- ments, an analysis of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. The rest of the chapter is divided into three parts, dealing with a review of the dominant perspective of sustainability, Georgist analysis of sustainable urban development and its appraisal. Sustainable development: a review of the dominant views While various conceptions of sustainable development characterize the literature, it is the meaning of sustainability stated in Our Common Future (WCED 1987) that is the most widely used, as explained earlier in this book. This view is often styled as the economic approach to sustainability, and is the dominant paradigm in the sustainability literature. It is characterized by the primary emphasis on the economic over the environment, and leads to conclusions such as eco-technological transformation of society, where cleaner and greener technology is encouraged to continue on a business-as-usual pro-growth path. It opposes state intervention, preferring instead to use market-based mechanisms such as emis- sions trading schemes for a clean environment (Paton 2011; Rosewarne et al. 2014). This approach is presented as being apolitical, pro-technocratic, and predominantly based on using modern technologies to ‘save the planet’ (Salleh 2011). The history of modern technology generally has been documented elsewhere (e.g. Hård and Jamison 1998), so it is not repeated here, except the highlights of the relevant aspects of that scholarship to provide context for the subsequent discussion. Green technology first gained roots with the publication of the book Sustainable urban development 193 The Whole Earth Catalog. It made a strong case for individuals to change their lifestyles to save the planet. Accompanying such reforms was the need for quality technological change, leading to the founding of a new movement of ‘appropri- ate technology’ in the 1970s (Steinberg 2010). A highly influential person in the movement, the economist E. F. Schumacher, took a different view. He argued for structural change, as he saw the current system to be incapable of major changes to save the planet. Technology was important for him, but more important was the entire socio-ecological system in his days. With time, the movement slipped away from his ideals and instead got fixated on the notion of clean technology alone – without taking into account the political and systemic issues. This drift was part of a bigger issue of the loss of faith in the Keynesian state and the suc- cessful march of the neoclassical economics establishment and its generals, such as Milton Friedman, to establish that type of economics as the orthodox, the common and the dominant paradigm (Steinberg 2010). In those countries in the periphery of the world system, the World Bank report Environment and Development (World Bank 1992) was the carrier-in-chief of the neoliberal case for sustainability. It announced its full support for the WCED Report and declared that ‘continued, and even accelerated, economic and human development is sustainable and can be consistent with improving environmental conditions’, based on two conditions (1992: iii). The first of these conditions is the aggressive pursuit of the links between more growth and effective environmental management. To achieve this outcome, the Bank preferred that all subsidies on natural resources such as water should be removed because they would tend to lead to overuse. Further, the Bank called for new technology to manage the environment. Second is a call for institutions to voluntarily change their damaging practices towards the environment, so state corporations whose activities damage the environment ought to be made ‘competitive’. A major step in that direction is to create property in land, as excluding others from the use of land is the only way to ensure that the land is put to its highest and best use. Further, the case is made for farmers to create property in land, as it is only private property that will encourage them to better invest in land (World Bank 1992: 1). In this approach, population growth is also blamed for causing poverty, and women in particular are blamed for being too fertile and hence in need of family planning (World Bank 1992: 23, 29, 173). Indeed, the World Bank report argued the case for prioritizing economic growth and voluntary change of behaviour. More recent analysis has been substantially influenced by this tradition. Dercon (2012), for instance, has noted that green growth is likely to be coupled with growing poverty. The growth fetishism has led to calls for limitless green growth (Squires 2013), anchored on an urban form that is green or typified by, among others, green gadgetry, green cars and green buildings (see, e.g., Emmanuel and Baker 2012). In this literature, the notion of urban sustainable development is embraced, but in a reductionist way. The environment is typically decoupled from the environment–society–economy complex. The World Bank’s report on cities, Reshaping Economic Geography (2009), makes clear the interest in economic growth and the need to prioritize it over and above the environment, although the Bank notes 194 Franklin Obeng-Odoom the importance of the environment (2009: 34). It is a classic case of the environmental Kuznets curve, positing that the environment and its sustainability can wait until such a time that income per capita has reached a certain level and the market, the sum total of disjointed individual actions, will ensure that the environment saves itself (for reviews see Acemoglu and Robinson 2002; Stern 2004). The United Nations does much better in attacking the problem more holisti- cally, but does not carefully theorize the structural connection between capitalism, nature, society, and economy, polity and culture. For cities in Africa, the guidance lies in the State of African Cities Reports (e.g., UN-HABITAT 2008, 2010).

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