Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

The Anthropocene and urbanisation in historical perspective

Christoph Bernhardt explores the role of urbanisation for the emergence of the Anthropocene and addresses their ambivalent relationship.

The majority of the global population nowadays lives in urban settlements and 75% of the global energy production is consumed in cities. Urbanisation undoubtedly has a major impact on the earth system. However, from a historical perspective, the relationship between urbanisation and the Anthropocene is fundamentally ambivalent.

Die Mehrheit der Weltbevölkerung lebt heute in urbanen Siedlungen, und 75 % der weltweit produzierten Energie wird in Städten verbraucht. Die Urbanisierung hat zweifelsohne erhebliche Auswirkungen auf das Erdsystem. Aus historischer Sicht ist die Beziehung zwischen Urbanisierung und dem Anthropozän jedoch grundlegend ambivalent.


In the last two decades the “Anthropocene” has become a kind of master narrative in many scientific and public discourses. The concept explores the question of a new geological age shaped by mankind and of a “great acceleration” in the exploitation of global resources and environmental degradation since the 1950s.[1] It was first developed in the earth sciences, but soon infiltrated the social sciences as well as the humanities and was popularized by major art projects and exhibitions.[2] The planetary and long-term approach of the concept challenges the social and the historical sciences in two ways: it calls for research on the socio-cultural key triggers of the Anthropocene and requires a down-scaling of research questions and approaches from the planetary to the transnational and the regional scale.[3]

This blog entry aims to address these challenges by exploring the role of urbanisation for the emergence of the Anthropocene. With regard to the fact, that since 2007 the majority of the global population is living in urban settlements and 75% of the global energy production is consumed in cities,[4] there is little doubt about the major impact of urbanisation on the earth system. However, from a historical perspective, the relationship between urbanisation and the Anthropocene is fundamentally ambivalent and remains a significant research deficit.

Global urban population (columns) and level of urbanization (lines) by region (1950-2050). Source: German Advisory Council on Global Change: Flagship Report (2016)44.

Urbanisation in the Anthropocene debate

In the early days of the Anthropocene debate around the year 2000, urbanisation did not yet play a major role. In the most important research program “International Geosphere-Biosphere Program” (IGBP), which was directed by Australian climatologist Will Steffen, global emissions of carbon dioxide, stratospheric ozone, ocean acidification and marine fish capture stood in the centre of interest. In this set of variables, urbanisation was only indirectly present by some indicators, like “tropical forest loss”, “domesticated land” and “terrestrial biosphere degradation”. But in parallel to the “earth system trends” the research group around Steffen also discussed twelve major global “socio-economic trends”, and among them several urban-related variables like “urban population”, “primary energy use” and “water use”.[5]

Global socio-economic trends, 1750-2010. Source: Steffen et al 2015, 4.

In the course of the 2000s, “urbanisation” made a rapid career in the Anthropocene debate. Historian John McNeill, who at the time was one of the few historians in this discourse, stated in his path-breaking book “Something New Under the Sun”, that the urbanisation of the 20th century shaped nearly all spheres of human live und meant a dramatic break with the development in previous centuries.[6] Will Steffen and his group, too, drew attention to the fact that in 2007, for the first time in history, the majority of the global human population lived in cities.[7] In a lively transdisciplinary discourse, sociologists Brenner and Schmid observed the rise of a “planetary urbanization”, and historian Carl Nightingale retraced 6.000 years of urbanisation from a critical socio-ecological point of view.[8] Leading German climatologists Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber and others actively intervened in the field of urban planning and architecture, which they regarded as a key instrument to mitigate the dangerous trends of climate change and environmental degradation. As a result, a so-called “New European Bauhaus” was founded as an institution for the reform of urban planning and architecture, which became a key element within the “Green New Deal” policy of the EU.[9]

Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber and Ursula von der Leyen on the occasion of a Round Table on the “New European Bauhaus” (Brussels, Sept. 2021). Source: Potsdamer Institut für Klimafolgenforschung.

In 2016 a major Flagship Report was delivered to the German Federal Government by the high ranked German Advisory Council on Global Change. The report, entitled “Humanity on the Move: Unlocking the transformative power of cities”, set out this strategic orientation in more than 500 pages. As the title of the report indicates, it discussed the huge potential of cities to mitigate global environmental degradation but also pointed out the harmful effects of a non-sustainable urbanisation.[10]

Flagship Report of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (2016). Source: WBGU.

Between Megalopolis and “Urbicide”: Urban history and metabolism

The close interferences between urbanisation and environmental degradation seem to be quite obvious at first glance. But the historical perspective reveals fundamental ambivalences and shifts, as can be shown along the complex relation between urbanisation and industrialisation: Large modern industries first emerged since the early 19th century within the municipal boundaries of European and American cities. They were massively polluting and destroying urban environments, but were increaslingly relocated in suburban areas or in the countryside in the course of the 20th century.[11] More historical studies are needed which address such attributions and transformations within the contradictory history of cities in the Anthropocene.

In the heart of the “urban factor” within the Anthropocene stands the rapid growth of the urban population since the early modern period, which was exploding on a global scale during the 20th century. Urban agglomerations developed into large megalopolises, and their inhabitants demanded huge amounts of food, water, energy, and many other natural resources. In contrast, they were and still are producing large quantities of waste water and all kinds of rubbish, and they increasingly polluted the air by heating and increasing automobility.[12] At the same time, urban dwellers suffered massively from air and water pollution, poor housing and sanitary conditions, which resulted in high mortality rates, and they were victims of Urbicides in the 20th century wars.

Studies in the urban environmental history of the Anthropocene have analysed, amongst other issues, the relationship between cities and their hinterland, the specific profile of urban biodiversity and urban ecosystems,[13] and the overarching approach of urban metabolism. The metabolism approach analyses in detail the everyday consumption of resources in cities by documenting the material flows of food, raw materials, substances like nitrogen and potash as well as exports of waste water, rubbish etc.[14]

Metabolism of the city of Paris, 2003, 1895. Sources: German Advisory Council on Global Change: Flagship Report (2016), 69; Barles (2005), 40.

Urban Hydrologies and the limits of the modern sanitary city

Beyond material flows, urban socio-ecological regimes have to be analysed in order to better understand the social triggers of the Anthropocene. The study of urban hydrologies can provide insights into such regimes, as can be shown along the rise of the modern sanitary city in the 19th and 20th centuries.[15] In north-western Europe, after a long tradition of extensive drainage programmes, from the early 19th century a minority of urban and landscape planners promoted a co-evolutionary concept of nature and human use of the urban space. Among them was the famous landscape planner Peter Josef Lenné (1780-1850), who tried to respect the intrinsic logics of nature and to design sustainable urban water cycles and green spaces in his planning for Berlin.[16]

In the second half of the 19th century, an opposite hydrological regime became hegemonic in the cities of the Global North. It was based on ideas of urban hygiene, sanitary welfare, the notion of “the city as a machine”, and promoted the concept of modern centralised networks of piped drinking water and sewerage. This new hydrological regime of industrialising water was rapidly spreading over Europe and the US until WW I, exploiting regional water resources to a previously unknown extent. As a result, within a few decades regional water scarcity, massive groundwater depletion and serious soil pollution in the extended sewage farms became endemic.

Sewage farms around Berlin (1906). Source: H. Hahn/F. Langbein: 50 Jahre Berliner Stadtentwässerung, Berlin 1928, 30.

Although the new infrastructure was very costly and created socio-spatial inequalities, it was introduced in many colonial contexts. On the global scale, the negative effects, like social injustice and ecological damage, became very evident, as was shown by Matthew Gandy for the case Mumbai in India, and for many other cities.[17] While the model of modern centralised water networks improved sanitary conditions, public health and quality of life in the urban areas of the Global North, it also massively contributed to terrestrial degradation, desertification, and pollution on a global scale, which Earth system sciences have identified as major harmful trends in the Anthropocene.

Conclusion

The key role of urbanisation in the history of the Anthropocene and for a sustainable management of global development in the future is, in fact, uncontested amongst experts. But cities show a Janus-faced, very ambivalent character as hotspots of pollution and excessive resource consumption on the one hand, and as laboratories for sustainable modes of living on the other. Researching these ambivalences from the local to the planetary scale and exploring the environmental, social, and political development of historical societies can contribute significantly to a better understanding of the history, present and future of the Anthropocene.


[1] Jan Zalasiewicz et al, What should the Anthropocene mean?, in: Nature 632, 2024, 980-984; Will Steffen et al, The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration, in: The Anthropocene Review 2015, 1-18.

[2] Frank Adloff/Sieghard Neckel (ed.): Gesellschaftstheorie im Anthropozän, Frankfurt a.M. 2020; Rachel Carson Center: Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (2014-2016); Haus der Kulturen der Welt: The Anthropocene Project 2013-2014.

[3] Rakhyun E. Kim/Louis J. Kotzé: Governing the complexity of planetary boundaries: a state-of-the-art analysis of social science scholarship, in Duncan French/Louis J. Kotzé (eds.): Research Handbook on Law, Governance and Planetary Boundaries, Cheltenham 2022; 45-64; Christoph Rosol/ Thomas Turnbull/Jürgen Renn: Introduction: The Mississippi River Basin Basin – a model for studying the Anthropocene in situ, in: The Anthropocene Review 8/2, 2021, 99-114.

[4] German Advisory Council on Global Change: Flagship Report. Humanity on the Move: Unlocking the transformative power of cities, Berlin 2016, 1; Dieter Schott: Europäische Urbanisierung (1000-2000), Köln/Weimar/Wien 2014, 11-12.

[5] Steffen et al: The trajectory, 3-7.

[6] Quoted from John R. McNeill: Blue planet. Die Geschichte der Umwelt im 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/Main 2003, 297.

[7] Steffen et al: The trajectory, 9.

[8] Neil Brenner/Christian Schmid: Planetary urbanization, in: Matthew Gandy (ed.), Urban Constellations. Berlin 2012, 10-13; Carl Nightingale, Earthopolis. A Biography of our urban Planet, Cambridge 2022.

[9] See https://www.pik-potsdam.de/de/aktuelles/nachrichten/wichtige-schritte-fuer-eine-neue-philosophie-des-bauens-in-bruessel-und-brandenburg (Last visit 04.04.2025).

[10] German Advisory Council on Global Change: Flagship Report (2016).

[11] Christoph Bernhardt: The Contested Industrial City: Governing Pollution in France and Germany, 1810-1930, in Clemens Zimmermann (ed.): Industrial Cities: History and Future, Frankfurt/Main, 46-65.

[12] William Cronon: Nature´s Metropolis. Chicago and the Great West, New York/London 1991; Martin Melosi: The Sanitary City. Urban Infrastructure in America from the Colonial Times to the Present, Baltimore/London 2000.

[13] Jens Lachmund: Greening Berlin. The Co-Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature. Cambridge/MA 2012.

[14] Sabine Barles: A Metabolic Approach to the City: Nineteenth and 20th century Paris, in: Dieter Schott/Bill Luckin/Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud (eds.): Resources of the City. Contributions to an Environmental History of Modern Europe, Aldershot 2005, 28-47.

[15] Cornelis Disco: Dividing the Waters: Urban Growth, City Life and Water Management in Amsterdam 1100–2000, in: Sarah Bell et. al (eds): Urban Water Trajectories, Berlin/New York 2017, 5-20.

[16] Christoph Bernhardt: Concepts of Urban Agency and the Transformation of Urban Hinterlands: The Case of Berlin, Eighteenth to Twentieth Century, in: Tim Soens et al. (eds.): Urbanizing Nature: Actors and Agency. (Dis)Connecting Cities and Nature since 1500, New York 2019, 50-64.

[17] Matthew Gandy: The Fabric of Space. Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination, Cambridge/MA 2014, 109-144.


Christoph Bernhardt is a Senior Fellow in the research area ‘Contemporary History and Archives’ at IRS. He is also Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Institute of History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.


Title picture: The earth at night (2012): Urban lights.


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Lab 2.3 ZeitRaum-Wahrnehmungen des Anthropozäns (8. April 2025). The Anthropocene and urbanisation in historical perspective. Value of the Past. Abgerufen am 18. April 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13po2


Autor: Lab 2.3 ZeitRaum-Wahrnehmungen des Anthropozäns

Das Lab 2.3 untersucht in einem interdisziplinären, Natur-, Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften verbindenden Ansatz und verschiedenste Forschungseinrichtungen vernetzenden Projekt das epistemische Potential einer Verknüpfung geo-biologischer Zeitlichkeiten und lokal-planetarer Raumbezüge.

Schreibe einen Kommentar

Deine E-Mail-Adresse wird nicht veröffentlicht. Erforderliche Felder sind mit * markiert

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.