GGRA03H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Nonpoint Source Pollution, Storm Drain, Sewage Sludge
Document Summary
Ggra03h3 week 9 urban ecosystems, pollution. It is critical to understand the nature of the inputs and outputs. The concept of urban metabolism is a model that describes the flow and transformation of materials and energy within cities. Energy, goods, water, food, and materials are imported by cities, transformed (metabolized), and other products and wastes are exported. Urban metabolism describes the full set of the technical and socio-economic processes that occur in cities, including the production of energy and disposal of wastes. Political ecology starts with the assumption that cities include multiple metabolic processes. Processes of socio-environmental change are never neutral, but are mediated by politics and power, with particular arrangements providing benefits for some, and costs for others. Rapid urbanization in the 20th century meant a huge growth of demand for water, and expansion of the water frontier of many cities. This has led to growing conflicts over water and waste-water in rich and poor countries.
