(Re)Analysing the Sustainable City: Nature, Urbanisation and the Regulation of Socio-environmental Relations in the UK

The sustainable city has now become a leading paradigm of urban development throughout the world. Although the practices, discourses and ideologies associated with the sustainable city have been widely disseminated, analyses of sustainable urban development remain surprisingly anodyne. Drawing upon the insights of regulation theory, this paper attempts to develop a critical engagement with the sustainable city as a space of socio-ecological regulation. Focusing upon two examples of sustainable urban development in practice—the first, the struggle over work-place environments in Stoke-on-Trent; and the second, the reinsertion of nature into the Black Country urban region—this paper explores the regulatory geography of the sustainable city and the environmental visions and practices with which it is associated.