The technosphere: a new concept for urban studies

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

E-ISSN: 1469-8706|44|1|145-154

ISSN: 0963-9268

Source: Urban History, Vol.44, Iss.1, 2017-02, pp. : 145-154

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Abstract

According to the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, ‘cities are responsible for 67% of the total global energy consumption and more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and these trends significantly intensify the severity of some of the two great challenges of our time; climate change and energy security’. Moreover, if cities are driving anthropogenic climate change, the effects are felt everywhere on earth, from glaciers to atolls, from oceans to the troposphere. It is no longer simply society that has been, to cite Henri Lefebvre, ‘completely urbanized’. The entire planet and its atmosphere have been subordinated to the metabolic demands of extremely large human settlements.