The Ethics of Blue Urbanism

Abstract

Blue urbanism represents a compelling new vision (and movement) for how we think about cities and urbanization on the blue planet. It emphasizes a new connection with, and emphasis on, the marine environments and nature within which coastal cities are situated. It advocates for new forms of urban design, parks, and conservation that recognize this profound marine setting. Advancing this vision will require taking on a host of ethical and value dilemmas: this chapter is an initial effort to identify and sort through some of the bigger of these open ethical questions. They include important questions about the moral status of marine nature and the extent of ethical duties that blue cities have both to protect the marine nature and wildness and to invest in programs to connect urbanites to this marine nature. Other important categories of ethical questions include the extent to which there are public rights to the blue; questions about the fairness of risk associated with climate change and sea-level rise, and forms of ethical adaptation; intergenerational and intertemporal ethics; virtue ethics and blue citizenship; and questions about the ethics of the politics and decision-making processes through which blue urbanism emerges, among others. Less a definitive treatise than an exploratory discussion, the chapter is meant to show how ethical quandaries permeate the new vision and agenda of blue urbanism. The author begins as well to identify here some of the elements of an ethical blue urbanism to guide this emerging movement.