Creating secure urbanities: The city as a tapestry of layers of eco-infrastructures

The share of the world living in urbanized areas increased from 40.9% in 1985 to more than 50% today. More than half the world's population now lives in cities, and the rate of urbanization is accelerating. Cities produce roughly between 40% and 80% of greenhouse gas emissions. They are particularly vulnerable to climate change. The limited success of the December 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations heightens the urgency of cities' efforts to adapt and mitigate to climate change. Cities in the developing world have the opportunity to emerge as global leaders on this front. In the developing world, urbanization has often taken the form of exploding populations in megacities. Building large scale cities from scratch with minimum resources has become a matter of pressing opportunity for many countries of the developing world. Urban growth in Latin America, India, and, China is fundamentally changing the lives of hundreds of millions of people. So far, this urbanization processes have dramatically increased developing countries' environmental damage and vulnerability to climate change. This paper is aiming to show that urbanization can be a fundamentally sustainable process capable to create secure urbanities through an eco-infrastructure approach for reducing urban vulnerabilities that explores a series of strategic responses which I characterize as a weave of eco-infrastructures, feddback-loop urbanisms, and networks of zero carbon settlements powered by renewable energies.