Counterpoint
of the city’s economic footprint is much broader and more uneven (Cronon 1991). This “uneven development” was identified by Marx as being a fundamental characteristic of capitalism, leading to the simultaneous emergence of concentrations of wealth and capital on the one hand and poverty and oppression on the other. In extreme cases of “uneven development,” short-term economic gains often involve the permanent loss of the very ecologies and social structures on which both rural and urban rely.
In principle, of course, every artificially created thing is only other things rearranged—that is to say, displaced and recomposed. The surface extraction of materials, mining and open pit mining, vividly illustrate the “cut and fill” nature of architecture, infrastructure, and urbanization. It is important that urban designers look to the origins of the resources they work with and acknowledge that the extraction of subterranean resources, such as water, oil, and “natural” gas from distant regions causes geological fractures and leaves substantial underground voids, destabilizing the land above, depleting and poisoning groundwater, and causing sinkholes and earthquakes. Recognition of the importance of urban context must therefore broaden the conceptual scope of urban design.