London: A Multi-Century Struggle for Sustainable Development in an Urban Environment
The Great Fire of London (anon., c. 1675), via Wikimedia Commons — public domain.
William C. Clark
This teaching case sketches key episodes in the two-thousand-year history of the interactions between society and environment that have shaped the City of London and its immediate hinterlands — from Roman settlement through plague, fire, fuel crises, and industrialization to the modern metropolis. The result is an empirical puzzle for use in teaching and theorizing about the long-term coevolution of social-environmental systems, and about how such systems might be guided toward sustainability. Frameworks for thinking about that coevolution have multiplied in sustainability science; empirical cases that actually span multi-decade to multi-century timeframes remain rare. London is one of them.
A companion piece, Looking Outward: Refocusing Attention on London’s Hinterland, extends the case beyond the city’s immediate surroundings to the distant places and resources on which London’s growth depended.
Using this case in the course
The London case is first assigned in Unit 1.4 (anthropogenic resources), alongside the shorter version in Matson et al. (2016, pp. 143–165), and returns in Unit 2.1 (system dynamics), Unit 2.4 (horizontal connections), Unit 3.3 (measuring progress), and Unit 3.4 (adaptation). Used this way, the case lets students watch the ideas of successive units accumulate around a single place — and practice the essential work of fitting general ideas to context. Sustainable development is a long, intergenerational process; cases that span generations let students watch development pathways — and efforts to bend them — unfold at the time scales that matter.
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How to cite
Clark, W. C. (2015). London: A Multi-Century Struggle for Sustainable Development in an Urban Environment. HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series No. RWP15-047, Harvard Kennedy School. Available from the Harvard Kennedy School.
© William C. Clark. Like any published paper, the case is under copyright by its author and provided open access — free to read, download, and assign in your own courses.