ELSEV1ER

URBAN ECOLOGICAL
F O O T P R I N T S : W H Y CITIES
CANNOT BE
SUSTAINABLE AND WHY THEY
A R E A K E Y TO S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y

William Rees
University o f British Columbia

Mathis Wackernagei
Universidad Anahuac de Xalapa

Introduction: Transforming Human Ecology

It is sometimes said that the industrial revolution stimulated the greatest
human migration in history. This migration swept first through Australia,
Europe, and North America and is still in the process of transforming Asia
and the rest of the world. We refer, of course, to the mass movement of
people from farms and rural villages to cities everywhere. The seeming
abandonment of the countryside is creating an urban w o r l d - - 7 5 % or more
of the people in so-called industrialized countries now live in towns and
cities, and half of humanity will be city dwellers by the end of the century.
Although usually seen as an economic or demographic phenomenon,
urbanization also represents a human ecological transformation. Under-
standing the dramatic shift in human spatial and material relationships with
the rest of nature is a key to sustainability. Our primary purpose, therefore,
is to describe a novel approach to assessing the ecological role of cities and
to estimate the scale of the impact they are having on the ecosphere. The
analysis shows, that as nodes of energy and material consumption, cities
are causally linked to accelerating global ecological decline and are not by
themselves sustainable. At the same time, cities and their inhabitants can
play a major role in helping to achieve global sustainability.

Starting Premise
Our analysis starts from the premise that the late 20th century marks a
nontrivial turning point in the ecological history of human civilization.
For the first time, since the dawn of agriculture and the possibility of
geographically fixed settlements 12,000 years ago, the aggregate scale of

Address requests for reprims to: William Rees, Director, University of British Columbia, School of
Community and Regional Planning, 6333 Memorial Road, Vancouver, BC V6T IZ2, Canada.

E N V I R O N IMPACT ASSESS REV 1996;16:223-248

© 1996 Elsevier Science Inc. 0195-9255/96/$15.00
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