Figure 2.4: Effects of political economy lock-ins


Political economy


Economic structural drivers


lock-Ins


Empowers vested interests


Perpetuate Deepen


Existing systems of power


Unjust distributions of benefits of environmental initiatives


Burdens of


environmental impacts


Inequities in urban


development models


carbon aspirations described in chapter 4. Crucially, this general trend applies as much to informal economies as it does to the “recorded” or formal economy, which means it affects the broad economic base that underpins most cities. Examples ranging from just-in-time production processes in the fashion industry, to the dependence of technology firms on essential – and often rare – minerals, illustrate the strong interdependence between urban and peri-urban informal economies and the global economic processes and financial drivers at work in international value chains (Kelly 2019; Chen and Carré eds. 2020).


People living in and managing cities are not solely responsible for perpetuating these environmentally unsustainable economic models. In fact, the transformational work of actors at the city level is often hindered by economic processes at national and international levels that measure success in terms of gross domestic product (Shehabi 2020) and are bound up with the resource-extractive logic of global trade and the imperative of shareholder profit (Kavanagh and Veldman 2020). The growing allure of urban land for global capital flows also means that many cities feel trapped in “there is no alternative” growth scenarios. Changing these conceptions and practices to fully include the notions of finite planetary


resources, and cities and urban areas as common goods, is therefore a multi-actor, multi-scale, endeavour that goes beyond the sole remit of city actors. However, many cities and city-based actors play an active role in such processes. They proactively participate in global economic competition and adopt or maintain approaches based on the intensive use of resources, entrepreneurship and real estate development that contribute to the increasing commodification of urban life (Shin, Lees and López-Morales 2015; Shatkin 2017). Such approaches contrast with long- standing evidence of their environmental costs (Revi et al. 2014; UNEP 2019a) and their impact on deepening social, infrastructure and spatial divides in urban settings (Sassen 1991; Graham and Marvin 2001).


Structural drivers of environmentally unsustainable urbanization also affect the many cities that play a smaller role in the global economy. These include cities bypassed by evolving global demand, such as the rust-belt cities of Europe and North America, small and medium-sized cities in parts of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and cities like Havana that are purposefully excluded for geopolitical reasons. Cities and urban areas on the margins of global economic networks face major barriers to just transformations. These are often rooted in weak or even


Urban Dynamics for Environmental Action 27


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