Sustainability and the City

CHAPTER 4

Cyclicality in the City

We typically view human life as a linear process that progresses stepwise and that hopefully also includes elements of growth and advancement. For example, we invest our resources and effort early in life, such as in the pursuit of an academic degree, to harvest the anticipated benefits later in life, such as good jobs. In so doing, most of us are continuously looking ahead and moving in one direction toward the future. Even human cognitive processes, in which a response to a step is elicited before another step is taken, are usually linear. In addition, although our lives are in a sense dictated by cycles, such as the day/night cycle and the seasons of the year, perhaps because time proceeds irreversibly along ...