ancient cities

Young, Iris M. 2004. “Responsibility and Global Labor
Justice.” The Journal of Political Philosophy
12:365–88.
En v i r o n m E n t a l Po l i C y
Environmental policy is the framework and means
by which public decisions take into account the
natural, nonhuman environment. The origins of
environmental policy in modern cities can be traced
to efforts at comprehensive planning. Early examples
include John Claudius Loudon’s Breathing
Places plan for London in 1829, Frederick Law
Olmstead’s work on Boston’s Emerald Necklace
beginning in about 1878, and Daniel Burnham’s
1909 Plan for Chicago. Such plans incorporated
the felt need for green spaces that would improve
the physical beauty of cities, living conditions, and
public access to nature. In the early stages of industrialization,
cities turned to environmental policy
to mitigate air and water pollution from industry
and inadequate sanitation infrastructure and thus
to prevent damage to human health.
Urban Environmental Policy and Regulation
Increased scientific evidence and public consciousness
of the ill effects of industrial toxins on ecosystems
and human health in the 1960s drove the
development of regulations to monitor toxic waste
in North America and Europe. Following this, environmental
impact assessment protocols were legislated
as part of national, and sometimes state or
subnational, development requirements. Today,
urban environmental policy packages encompass
these historical concerns for green space, air and
water pollution abatement, sanitation, and the regulation
of toxins in the environment, but they also
contain a new suite of policy approaches related to
emerging concerns for urban sustainable development.
The latter include policies to reduce energy
use and greenhouse gas emissions to a per capita
“fair earth share” in order to achieve distributional
equity and mitigate climate change. As a means to
reduce global economic insecurity, sustainable
development policies may also encourage farmland
preservation and food production for bioregional
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resilience and close and localize production loops.
Building industry and preservation activities include
improving environmental construction practices
and protecting ecology and biodiversity.
The starting point for urban environmental
policy has been the need for a dependable and
high-quality supply of the basic inputs to life like
water and air and more effective “waste sinks”—
means and mechanisms to externalize waste from
urban production and consumption cycles—in
order to reduce resource- and technology-driven
limits to growth. Thus cities have developed lead
paint abatement programs, air pollution reduction
strategies, and recycling systems. Over time, environmental
policy has become more broad-based
and cross-sectoral, addressing environmental
dimensions of citywide issues in urban management.
Land use and strategic planning, transportation
planning, site and building design, waste
management, environmental impact assessment,
environmental audit procedures, and state-of-theenvironment
reporting are some of the economic
tools and regulatory systems pursued in the name
of environmental policy.
Impact of Urbanization on the Environment
Despite the city’s long-standing promise of a new,
liberated set of human–nature relationships through
scale efficiencies, technological modernization, and
social, political, and economic innovations, the net
impact of cities on the nonhuman environment is still
grossly negative. Moreover, these negative impacts
and hazards are a reality of urban life for all but the
wealthiest citizens and are the result of rational and
conscious trade-offs as well as neglect and oversight.
The city provides a view to the consequences of environmental
degradation that are impossible to ignore
and that thus play an important role in shaping and
rationalizing environmental policy.
Urbanization can bring about irreversible changes
in water patterns and availability and other natural
ecosystem functions. Urbanization also increases
energy consumption along with expectations for
complex humanmade infrastructural standards and
systems. The concentration of industrial emissions
and increased use of private automobiles severely
erodes air quality and other key elements of quality
of life. Acute respiratory illness associated with poor