Urban sustainability in an age of enduring inequalities: Advancing theory and ecometrics for the 21st-century city

Abstract

The environmental fragility of cities under advanced urbanization has motivated extensive efforts to promote the sustainability of urban ecosystems and physical infrastructures. Less attention has been devoted to neighborhood inequalities and fissures in the civic infrastructure that potentially challenge social sustainability and the capacity of cities to collectively address environmental challenges. This article draws on a program of research in three American cities—Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles—to develop hypotheses and methodological strategies for assessing how the multidimensional and multilevel inequalities that characterize contemporary cities bear on sustainability. In addition to standard concerns with relative inequality in income, the article reviews evidence on compounded deprivation, racial cleavages, civic engagement, institutional cynicism, and segregated patterns of urban mobility and organizational ties that differentially connect neighborhood resources. Harnessing “ecometric” measurement tools and emerging sources of urban data with a theoretically guided framework on neighborhood inequality can enhance the pursuit of sustainable cities, both in the United States and globally.

Smart Cities, Big Data, and Sustainability Union

“…Sampson [46] has talked about the increasing fragility of city spaces under rapid urbanization, which has resulted in an emphasis on sustainability efforts in modern infrastructures. However, neighborhood inequalities in contemporary life influence both environmental and social elements that influence sustainability [46].…”

Sustainability in an urbanizing planet

“…There were many individual case studies of the biological impacts of urbanization, or the health impacts of urbanization, but very little that was integrative across the different branches and that incorporated trade-offs or feedbacks. The articles in this Special Feature illustrate this point: each deals with one aspect of sustainability, such as biological (7), socioeconomic (8,9), biophysical (5), or technical (6). Each article acknowledges the need to create bridges among these fields and to examine urban and environmental systems as fully coupled or explicitly incorporating feedback loops.…”

“…Each article acknowledges the need to create bridges among these fields and to examine urban and environmental systems as fully coupled or explicitly incorporating feedback loops. As Sampson (8) argues, social and environmental sustainability are strongly connected, and social sustainability may be more fundamental than environmental sustainability for producing livable and equitable cities that can be maintained over the long term. This observation, however, needs to be tested with more integrative research.…”

“…8)? Several of the articles provide fine-grain data for a few cities (8,9), but assessments of the feedbacks and trade-offs across spatial scales are required as well.…”

“…Fourth, there is need for more theoretically grounded work building toward general explanations of our observations, potentially improving analytical options for projections of future outcomes (8,9). At least two theoretical pathways warrant attention.…”