The Divided City

I argue that the origin of today’s environmental crisis resides in the basic premise of the western city, as clearly illustrated by Lorenzetti’s painting “Effetti del Buon Governo”: a fundamental separation between places of consumption – located within the city limits – and places of production, where enough surpluses of raw materials and food are created to support city development. The dislocation of production activities has only increased since the industrial revolution: over the past 150 years, the massive loss of natural land to the combined effect of relentless expansion of urban areas, modern infrastructures and extraction of natural resources resulted in a drastic reduction of bio-diversity, air and water pollution, and the depletion of natural resources. As advanced societies become increasingly dependent on the mass production of industrialized agriculture and vast mining operations, the places of production and extraction are being gradually relocated in remote areas of the planet, often outside the control of environmental agencies, away from public scrutiny, and removed from the collective consciousness.