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The technosphere: a new concept for urban studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2016

CHRIS OTTER
CHRIS OTTER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210–1367, USA
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Extract

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.

Type
Special Section on urban agency
Information
Urban History , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 145 - 154
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

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