ABSTRACT
The concept of “metropolitan growth” has much to recommend it for use in philosophy of the city, and in environmental philosophy more broadly. Metropolitan regions cut across conventional boundaries, drawing attention to broader patterns and systems that shape inhabited landscapes. Focusing on the growth of metropolitan areas highlights the dynamism of inhabited landscapes, how they have come to be, and their prospects for the future. Taken as a way of framing problems of the built environment, “metropolitan growth” opens up possibilities for practical ethical inquiry that is attentive to complexity, pluralist in its appeal to values, and modest in its aims.
