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s.m.a.r.t.Paths to Sustainability

A Common Agenda at LastJeffrey Sachs / Teresa RiberaThe Social Dimension of SustainabilityJoan McDonald / Marek Harsdorff / Paolo BifaniHardware versus Software and MindwareTodd Litman / Albert CuchíWater, Renewable Energy and InfrastructuresYolanda Kakabadse / Sven Tesk / Anne Whiston Spirn / Ahmed Djoghlaf Dialogue between Generations and GenderAisa Kirabo Kacyira / Siddharth Agarwal / Mariana CorreiaHow We Finance the TransitionMike Berners-Lee / Arab Hoballah / Raymond J. ColeDifferent Visions. One Planet, One CityMary Evelyn Tucker / Víctor Lapuente / Firdaous OussidhoumThe Challenge of TransversalityDaniel Innerarity / Domingo Jiménez Beltrán / Michael BattyCommunication for ChangeSuzanne Goldenberg / Eduardo Martínez de Pisón / María Novo

PortfoliosTze Tsung Nicolás Leong / James Mollison / BoomoonNaoya Hatakeyama / Thierry Cohen Steve McCurry / Nick Cobbing / Rodney Graham

s.m.a.r.t.Paths toSustainability

s.m.a.r.t.

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This book has been possible thanks to 34 authors from five continents,specialized in economics, environment, architecture, landscape architecture,politics, finances, photography, arts, communications and culture,who have joined their names in this project for sustainability.

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The notion of “sustainability” impregnates theagendas of public and private organizations, politicalparties, firms, NGOs, and social players of all kinds.From Mexico City to Sydney, Dubai to Madrid, there isa shared concern about the severe challenges we faceas a consequence of climate change and other globalphenomena that threaten the equilibrium of ourplanet. Our lands are rapidly turning into deserts. Ourcities are increasingly overpopulated and polluted.Water is a natural resource that is growing scarcerover time. Throughout our history, economic growthhas been irremediably linked to the deterioration ofthe planet’s environmental conditions. Somethingmust change.

Not without great effort, we have managed to generatean ample consensus in recent years that it is now“essential” for our societies to change directiontoward a more sustainable world that will give rise toa new economic and social model.

However, the concept of “sustainability” in itself canprove ambiguous. It is continually used, and oftenimprecisely. We risk emptying it of content.

This is where the idea of s.m.a.r.t. comes in, aproposal that takes material form in the magnificentand highly informed contributions to this volume. It is an acronym that encompasses the elements of an integral vision of the future based not only on thenotion of sustainability itself, but also on mitigation,adaptation, resilience and the transformation of societies.

For without sustainability, progress will be simplyimpossible. A collective effort is necessary for themitigation of the harmful effects of our activity, byreducing greenhouse gas emissions through cleanenergies, for example, or by ensuring a more reasonableand efficient management of water. Initiatives are neededto encourage the adaptation of communities to theconsequences of global warming by means ofinfrastructures capable of withstanding the greaterfrequency and intensity of extreme meteorologicalphenomena. In this way, we shall help equip the societieswe live in and whose services we provide with theresilience necessary to confront these hurdles. Finally,our response to these challenges has a clear objective: thetransformation of the world into a safer and morebalanced planet.

Much can be done by firms both large and small inpursuing these ambitious goals. At ACCIONA, we arecommitted to this new s.m.a.r.t. model of development,which takes sustainability as the basis for specific actionsaimed at mitigation, adaptation, resilience andtransformation. It is a formula that can make economicgrowth compatible with the decarbonization of oureconomies, for our own benefit and, above all, that offuture generations. That is our proposal, and that is whatthe book in your hands is about.

I have not only the hope but also the firm conviction thatmore and more players and organizations will embracethe s.m.a.r.t. criteria and join us in this new “sector”,whose guiding principle is precisely to contribute to anincreasingly sustainable society and world.

José Manuel Entrecanales, Chairman of ACCIONA

ForewordIt is possible to progresswhile preserving the planet


Foreword

IntroductionA Common Agenda at Last

10. Paths to SustainabilityJeffrey D. Sachs

14. The Paris Agreement:Horizon of a New EconomyTeresa Ribera

1. The Social Dimension of Sustainability

20. Hands That Build CitiesJoan McDonald

24. Employment and SustainabilityMarek Harsdorff

32. Food and DevelopmentPaolo Bifani

36. HorizonsSze Tsung Nicolás Leong

2. Hardware versus Software and Mindware

56. Mobility and Innovation. The New Transportation ParadigmTodd Litman

62. Sustainable RehabilitationAlbert Cuchí

66. PlaygroundJames Mollison

3. Water, Renewable Energy and Infrastructures

86.Caring for Natural Water Supply NetworksYolanda Kakabadse

90.The Future of Renewable EnergiesSven Teske

94.Landscape Literacy and Design for EcologicalDemocracyAnne Whiston Spirn

100. Biodiversity in an Urbanized WorldAhmed Djoghlaf

104. Boomoon

4. Dialogue between Generations and Gender

118. The New Urban Agenda and the Role of Women in CitiesAisa Kirabo Kacyira

122. Youth and PovertySiddharth Agarwal

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128.Experiences from the Past for Today’s ChallengesMariana Correia

134. Lime HillsNaoya Hatakeyama

5. How We Finance the Transition

156. Disinvestment, Investment, Subsidies and TaxMike Berners-Lee

162. Delivering Sustainable Consumption and ProductionArab Hoballah

168. Regenerative DevelopmentRaymond J. Cole

172. Darkened CitiesThierry Cohen

6. Different Visions. One Planet, One City

190. World Religions and EcologyMary Evelyn Tucker

194. Quality of Government and SustainableDevelopmentVíctor Lapuente

198. The Great Challenge for Intermediary CitiesFirdaous Oussidhoum

202. Gateway to IndiaSteve McCurry

7. The Challenge of Transversality

216. The Government of Intelligent SystemsDaniel Innerarity

222. Energy Governance and Sustainability as a Vector of ChangeDomingo Jiménez Beltrán

228. Technology and the Democratic Management of Urban ComplexityMichael Batty

232. IceNick Cobbing

8. Communication for Change

248.The Responsibilities of the MediaSuzanne Goldenberg

252. Landscape, Culture and SustainabilityEduardo Martínez de Pisón

256. The Role of Art and Education. Change in Timesof UncertaintyMaría Novo

262. TreesRodney Graham

281. Authors


IntroductionA Common Agendaat Last

Ours can be thegeneration that endspoverty, achieves socialjustice in the allocation of basic needs, and finallybrings global warming and the loss of biodiversityunder control

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Energy is the centralnucleus of this response,but not the only one.Changing soil use,deforestation, agricultureand livestock farmingmake up the otherbattlefield in which ourfuture is at stakeTeresa Ribera


Paths to Sustainability

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is university professor at ColumbiaUniversity and special advisor to UN SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres on the SustainableDevelopment Goals.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”Charles Dickens’ immortal characterization of theFrench Revolution applies equally to our own time. Itwas the best of times: global poverty is at an all-timelow, and life expectancy is at an all-time high. It was theworst of times: humanity is creating an environmentaldisaster by its own hands. So, which is it? Both. Andwhat does the future portend? That depends on us. Ourfate is squarely in our own hands on this one.

Here’s another description, this one by the greatbiologist E. O. Wilson: “We have created a Star Warscivilization, with Stone Age emotions, medievalinstitutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about.We are terribly confused by the mere fact of ourexistence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest oflife.” The problem, in this view, is that our wondroustechnologies, the ones that are ending poverty andextending life, are also running far faster than ouremotional development and institutional capacities tocontrol them.

And here is a third, by Pope Francis, in his remarkableencyclical Laudato si’: “Interdependence obliges us tothink of one world with a common plan. Yet, the sameingenuity which has brought about enormoustechnological progress has so far proved incapable offinding effective ways of dealing with graveenvironmental and social problems worldwide. A globalconsensus is essential for confronting the deeperproblems, which cannot be resolved by unilateralactions on the part of individual countries.”

We have, indeed, a political consensus on the keychallenge, and it takes the name “sustainabledevelopment.” On September 25, 2015, all 193 memberstates of the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agendafor Sustainable Development, and with it, the SeventeenSustainable Development Goals (SDGs) shown in figure1. By sustainable development, the UN member statesmean an economy that is simultaneously prosperous,equitable, and environmentally sustainable.

I have recently described these three goals as “smart, fair,and sustainable.” Smart, today, means the deployment ofadvanced information technologies that save us frombackbreaking labor and enable us to share knowledgeand crucial information with all parts of the world on anearly instantaneous basis. Smart economies can escapefrom poverty and leapfrog in health, education, andquality of life. Fair means that the benefits of moderntechnology are widely shared, that, in the words of theUN, “no one is left behind.” Extreme poverty is an

10 s .m.a . r. t .


anachronism in a world economy that produces $125trillion annually, with an average output per person of$16,600 (IMF estimates for 2017). And sustainable meansliving within “planetary boundaries,” that is, keeping theworld economy within safe operating limits regardingthe uses of vital resources, including water, land, andbiodiversity. The main planetary boundaries arefamously depicted in figure 2, emphasizing the dangersto the climate, ozone level, freshwater, biodiversity, andother parts of the Earth’s systems.

To achieve sustainable development we need a newglobal systems thinking, one that combines a deepknowledge of four separate subsystems: the techno-economic system that has produced vast wealth withthe “godlike” technologies; the political system that isessential for providing the public goods that underpinthe economy and for sharing the benefits of moderntechnology; the social system, that determines whethersocial groups—often divided by language, race, culture,and religion—cooperate or fight. And the Earth systems,including the water, carbon, and nitrogen cycles thathumanity has disturbed and degraded at our peril.

We currently lack such systems thinking. Many peopleare unaware of the underlying techno-economicsystems that enable us to manage an economy of 7.5billion people at such a high level of averageperformance. Very few people understand theunderlying technologies of the Internet, mobiletelephony, aviation, disease prevention and control,food production and distribution, power generation anddistribution, finance and payments, and much more,which make the system function. And experts in onedomain are very rarely expert in others.

Despite the fact that we are all political animals (toparaphrase Aristotle) and live within political systems,we lack a good understanding of how politics can andshould produce sustainable development in our time. AsWilson correctly notes, our institutions are medieval.America’s constitution, a remarkable intellectualachievement, is from 1787. It works, but it also creakstoday, unable to deliver wellbeing on a reliable basis forthe American people.

And though we are all physically part of the biosphereitself, and are naturally drawn toward it (according toWilson’s theory of biophilia), much of humanity ishardly aware that we are destroying it. We are at gravethreat of trespassing all the planetary boundaries, withconsequences that could be dire. One majorcharacteristic of Earth systems is their nonlinearity.

We could easily find ourselves in the midst of rapid anduncontrollable physical change. Another majorcharacteristic is irreversibility (or hysteresis), theproperty that a physical system can swing from onestate to another on a long-term basis. We could soonfind ourselves, for example, with a several-meter rise ofthe sea level as the result of the disintegration of partsof the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets due tohuman-induced global warming. And if that occurs,there is almost surely no return to lower sea levels formillennia afterward.

Perhaps the system we are least in control of these daysis the social system. It is a depressing fact that as theworld economy has become global, our Stone Ageinstincts to view the world as “Us versus Them” seemsalso to be on the rise. For several decades following theatrocities of Hitler it seemed that nationalism was keptat bay, at least to some extent. But now vulgarnationalism is resurging, marked by the primitiveutterances of right-wing nationalist politicians that areemerging in many countries, most notably anddangerously in the United States.

Wilson has helped us to understand these primitive anddangerous intergroup emotions. According to him, andDarwin before him, human traits were probably forgedin the context of “two-level” natural selection. At onelevel, individuals (and their genes) competed withinlocalized communities. At another level, groups ofindividuals (bands of hunter-gatherers) competed witheach other. The result: strong norms of in-groupcooperation (e.g. for a successful hunt) as well as strongnorms of intergroup rivalry and distrust forged inrepeated wars and competition for land.

What can we achieve if we understand and properlymanage these four interacting systems, the techno-economic, political, social, and environmental? We canachieve sustainable development. Indeed, ours can bethe generation that ends poverty, achieves social justicein the allocation of basic needs, and finally brings globalwarming and the loss of biodiversity under control. Thebest of times. And if we fail to understand these systemsand control them? The worst of times.

So, in this sense, the SDGs are first and foremost a globalhomework assignment: learn about the globaltechnological, political, social, and environmentalsystems, and propose ways to manage them to achieveseventeen goals by 2030. I tell my students that theirhomework assignment indeed is “to end poverty, producesocial justice, and stop climate change by 2030.” When

A COMMON AGENDA AT LAST 11


they panic, I remind them that the assignment is open-book; that they can (and must) work in groups; and thatthe homework is due in thirteen years rather than nextweekend or the next election. The homework is toughbut fair. And everybody can pass.

Here are some hints on the answers.

First, the techno-economic systems are now sopowerful, and becoming even more so (with artificialintelligence, advanced robotics, atomic-scalemanufacturing, and more) that the seventeen SDGs aretruly in reach. The issue is mobilizing the resources andexpertise to achieve them: and not just in a few leadingcountries, but all over the world. My colleagues and Ihave made repeated calculations concerning how muchit would cost to achieve sustainable development, interms of increased investments in fighting poverty,ensuring universal access to healthcare and education,shifting from high-carbon to low-carbon energy to headoff global warming, and protecting threatened marineand terrestrial habitats. The best guess that we havecome to is that the shift of global resources needed is onthe order of 2–3 percent of global output per year, orroughly $3 trillion. That may sound like a hefty sum,and it is, but it is a hefty sum within a huge and richglobal economy. It is a sum easily within reach throughtaxes, markets, foreign assistance, and other methods ofmobilizing and transferring financial resources.

Second, success in achieving the SDGs requires themobilization of expert knowledge within a multi-stakeholder setting. There is no better way tounderstand how to control HIV/AIDS then to askHIV/AIDS experts. There is no better way to understandhow to decarbonize the energy system than to askengineers expert in energy systems. That may seemobvious, but how rarely our society acts that way. We arebombarded by the foolish opinions of pundits,politicians, and blowhards when real evidence is easilywithin reach at universities, think tanks, and academiesof science and engineering. Yet the experts must interactnot only with each other but with all key stakeholders,including civil society, businesses, and government. Weneed the knowledge of experts mobilized in ways thatare fair and trusted by society at large.

Third, success requires sustained and planned effortsover many years or decades. Ensuring that every childcan achieve a secondary education (SDG 4) will requireat least five years of sustained investments in many low-income countries. The same is true of universal healthcoverage (SDG 3). The conversion of today’s energy

12 s .m.a . r. t .

We must help the world to perceive the challenge of sustainable developmentand overcome the normalprofit motives


systems to low-carbon systems will require thirty tofifty years in view of the long lives of our infrastructureand the long lead times needed for large-scaleinvestments in energy systems. I am constantlyreminded, and inspired, by the US moonshot of the1960s. In under nine years the US went from its firstman in space to its first astronaut walking on the moonand returning safely to Earth. America put its bestengineering minds to work to accomplish that miracle,and put significant financial resources into the effort foran entire decade.

I regard two issues to be our very greatest obstacles toovercome, and they are neither technical nor financial.The first is our limited attention span as individuals andas a society. Humans by nature have limited attentionspans, and in our media-drenched age, advertisers,politicians, and celebrities all fight to capture thatlimited attention. So, a major first-order challenge is tohelp the world to perceive the challenge of sustainabledevelopment. The SDGs were adopted by governments,in part, with that very challenge in mind. But we needmore than individual attention; we need socialattention, meaning that our political, social, business,and academic institutions give adequate focus to theSDGs as well.

The second is moral. To achieve sustainabledevelopment, we must overcome the normal profitmotives. We must say to oil and gas companies: stopyour drilling. We must say to the rich: pay your taxesand share your wealth. We must say to ranchers andfarmers: you must not cut down the rainforest toexpand the cattle ranch or plantation. We must say tothe world’s leading businesses: your shareholders comesecond to Earth itself. We must say to the politicians:your hold on power pales in importance to sustainabledevelopment itself.

This is our greatest challenge. When Donald Trumpsays America First, we must say no! Earth First,Decency First, Sustainable Development First.

We can do it. The lessons in this important volume byAcciona show us the way.


CLIMATE CHANGE

OCEANACIDIFICATION

GLOBAL FRESHWATER USE

CHANGE IN LAND USE

CHEMICAL POLLUTIONNOT YET QUANTIFIED

STRATOSPHERIC OZONE DEPLETION

CARGA ATMOSFÉRICADE AEROSOLES

NOT YET QUANTIFIED

NITROGEN CYCLE(BIOGEOCHEMICAL FLOW BOUNDARY)

PHOSPHOROUS CYCLE(BIOGEOCHEMICAL FLOW BOUNDARY)BIODIVERSITY

LOSS

Figure 1. The Sustainable Development Goals Figure 2. Planetary boundaries


14 s .m.a . r. t .

The Paris Agreement:Horizon of a New Economy

Teresa Ribera

Teresa Ribera is the director of the Institute forSustainable Development and International Relations(IDDRI) in Paris. From 2008 to 2011 she was theSpanish government’s secretary of state for ClimateChange, with responsibilities for environmental andclimate policies in conjunction with the StateMeteorological Agency. From 2004 to 2008 she heldvarious technical posts in the ministries of PublicWorks, Transport and the Environment.

The alarms have gone off on many fronts, and thesensation is spreading that we are in the middle of adifficult race against the clock. “We’ve known about thisfor decades, and the problem seems to be getting worseand worse,” says Leonardo DiCaprio in his documentaryBefore the Flood.

Today, more than ever, recognition is due to theenvironmentalists and scientists determined to seek jointstrategies for tackling climate change. It has taken us fortyyears to realize that only on the basis of a dense networkof mutual understanding and support among energysuppliers, financiers, government leaders and social andeconomic agents of very different kinds can we come upwith an adequate response to the great challenge ahead ofus. It will otherwise be impossible to generate thetransversal response that is required, and instead we shallhave only small marginal adjustments, barely enough for atemporary palliation of the need to act.

Now that the importance of climate change is beyond alldoubt, the Paris Agreement offers an innovative proposalon how to arbitrate effective mechanisms of governanceto confront it on a global scale. Perhaps because we haverealized there is no alternative, or because of the firmnesswith which heads of state and governments have putforward their convictions, or simply because of theunstoppable evolution of social demands, there arecertainly interesting signs after the adoption of the ParisAgreement of a profound change in patterns ofinvestment and economic activity.

The adoption of the accord in December 2015 took theworld by surprise, since it went further than anyonefamiliar with the process had imagined beforehand.Moreover, its implementation has broken records,showing that when there is strong political commitment,it is possible to make changes in a short time. Parisrepresents hope and willingness, but it admits of no delayor carelessness. It points to new mechanisms and helpsto recover confidence in our collective capacity to changethings, but it warns of its own insufficiency and calls for aconstant tension that still awaits consolidation.Confirmation is still pending of the most important thingof all, namely its capability to create a different dynamicof development, bolstering the confidence of oursocieties in their ability to do things differently byensuring a future low in greenhouse gas emissions andresilient to the effects of climate change.

In the context of a planet with more human beings andthe same resources, solving the equation that will allow areasonable level of prosperity for all while avoiding the



dangers of climate change requires a transition to adifferent economy. This is the commitment undertakenin Paris. To be able to work against climate change and infavor of the eradication of poverty and the achievementof the goals of sustainable development, the averagetemperature of the planet must not be allowed to rise bymore than 2ºC with respect to the pre-industrial era (andefforts should be made to restrict the rise to 1.5ºC), ourcapacity for adaptation and resilience must bestrengthened, and it must finally be ensured thatfinancial flows are compatible with these two goals. Inother words, there will be no lasting development oreradication of poverty on a planet that is two degreeswarmer. And the time has come to start to understandwhat that means and how it can be prevented.

We are now beginning a new phase in which theemphasis needs to be placed on action. How to impel thetransition to a new economic model that must ofnecessity be “ecological”? The countdown has alreadybegun for the achievement of a triple objective withprofound implications for the economic model.

Given its responsibility in the causes behind climatechange and its undeniable relation to humandevelopment and well-being, energy becomes thepriority target for climatic action, and so also an area ofreal and perceptible change. It changes where demandgrows, and also where there is finance to invest in it.This shakes up traditional suppliers and stimulatesinnovation. We are now witnessing a succession ofannouncements by very different agents: China iscanceling new coal projects; numerous long-terminvestment funds are withdrawing investment fromfossil fuels, demanding much more serious attention tothe evaluation of risks, or even threatening to vetodecisions that show an irresponsible neglect of climaticrisk; there is an (uneven) effort among industrial players,who are announcing commitments on which they areprepared to report rigorously and transparently; and wewere surprised to hear talk of revolution fromtraditional institutions and accredited observers in thefield, such as the International Energy Agency, whichput forward scenarios and prospects that differedgreatly from those of barely a decade ago. We arefascinated by innovative and enterprising enthusiasts fornovel solutions like electric mobility (preaching aspeedier end to the hegemony of petroleum), solar roofs,and alternative ways to accumulate energy. And weimpatiently await the response of financial regulators,who have announced their intention to favor morerigorous risk evaluation frameworks that will

incorporate and discriminate what until not long agowent unnoticed: the immense cost—and consequentrisk—generated by greenhouse gas emissions.

It is a complex puzzle with many pieces, many of whichare starting to change shape. Winning the battle againstclimate change means decarbonizing energy, whichmakes it essential to generalize energy efficiency andcarbon-free solutions. There is a large range of technicaloptions available, and a huge deficit in our capacity toassume them, which is not accompanied by theregulatory frameworks and signals on which we base therationality of our decisions. It remains easier and morecomfortable to opt for conventional solutions, and evenso, ground is starting to be gained by a new way ofmeasuring expected profits, and it is beginning to makeeconomic sense to invest in efficient and renewablealternatives!

Paris has meant a first exercise in diagnosis andcommitment for each of the 196 countries that form partof the multilateral system, but it remains an instrumentfor achieving the goal of a coordinated and effectiveresponse that must materialize on every front. Energy isthe central nucleus of this response, but not the only one.Changing soil use, deforestation, agriculture andlivestock farming make up the other battlefield in whichour future is at stake.

Since the agreement represents only the first step, themeasures already identified by each signatory must beimplemented at once, and favorable conditions must becreated for the generalization of those which proveeffective while boosting regional and sectorial action indifferent areas. Examples that ought to inspire us when itcomes to establishing priorities are an aviation industrycommitted to the reduction of emissions, a maritimetransport sector that assumes its responsibility, cities,service providers and mayors committed to differenturban models, and citizens applying and demandingdifferent products and policies. The coming decade isdecisive. It will be the one that makes the differencebetween a real possibility of slowing down climatechange or the road to unprecedented disaster.

While we may be in the middle of an unfinished raceagainst the clock, it is also important to activate the toolsthat will prove most effective for accelerating change. Wecannot permit ourselves the luxury of failing to takeadvantage of resources or compounding the problem, andso the signals that orient investment decisions have to beclear and coherent. We must learn to evaluate risks andbenefits differently, and for this we need tools that help


to show the cost (damage) caused by the emission ofgreenhouse gases in terms of a price or a rate, greatertransparency with respect to the characteristics of therisks faced and the means necessary to palliate them,rating agencies with the ability to assess them, financialinstruments that make low-emission investmentattractive, and a beneficial use of the resort to debt orbond issues by associating the application of resourceswith a particular goal, as exemplified by “green bonds”and “climatic bonds.” Perhaps this is one of the greatestrevolutions currently under way. Development banking(headed by those of China and Brazil), long-terminvestors, commercial banks and the insurance andreinsurance industry are currently immersed in this task.Some countries such as France and the United Kingdomhave already adopted mandatory reporting rules or evenlimitations on public institutions. There is a growingconviction that for success to be achieved in thisenterprise, it is of prime importance to foster coherenceamong the signals that orient any public or privateinvestment decision. But it is not easy to reorient thefunctioning of financial systems that have been operativefor decades. Ethical challenges are among thecomponents of the increasing level of analyticalsophistication introduced by academics, regulators andfinancial agents. So are effective instruments whichallow losses to be anticipated and risk reduction onoperations to be incentivized, or which make the cost ordamage that will foreseeably be generated in the futurevisible today, together with the acceptance of margins ofuncertainty in novel contexts. Nevertheless, it is worthdrawing special attention to the work carried out by theFinancial Stability Board at the express commission ofthe G20, with the support of a working group co-presided by Michael Bloomberg and AXA, dedicated tothe assessment of alternatives that would ensureclimatic risks were taken more into consideration.

On the other hand, in order to anticipate rationaldecisions, fully compatible with the climatic challenge,and prevent short-term pressure from diverting us fromthe Paris objectives or making them hard to achieve, weare obliged to generalize the use of retrospectivescenarios and backcasting techniques. Setting a cleargoal for 2050, and proposing scenarios in whichdifferent combinations of measures would ensure itsfulfillment, is a good way to promote a debate on how tostructure the transition, securing coherence betweenshort-term decisions and the vital goal ofdecarbonization. Understanding this, the ParisAgreement invites signatories to share any nationalprogress that shows how the main socioeconomic

Paris represents hope andwillingness, it points tonew mechanisms and helpsto recover confidence inour collective capacity tochange things, but it warnsof its own insufficiency and calls for a constanttension that still awaitsconsolidation

16 s .m.a . r. t .



objectives can be reconciled in the domestic sphere withthe processes of decarbonization and resilience. Not thatsuch techniques should be understood as applicable onlyto states. Sub-national governments and boards ofdirectors may also find them useful instruments fortaking complex decisions. A good understanding of thealternatives will be decisive for the question the ParisAgreement proposes addressing by 2020–2023: how tocover the breach between the measures andcommitments announced in 2015 and the objective ofstaying under a temperature increase of 1.5ºC–2ºC,equivalent to zero (or negative) emissions before the endof the century. Here again, the prior political orientationof the leaders of the G20, which will be under Germanpresidency in 2017, seems of capital importance forfueling an informed political discussion on how toguarantee fulfillment of climatic commitments, and alsofor fostering coherent decisions on questions ofinvestment and infrastructures. It is not possible topromote strategies of economic recovery or investmentsin infrastructures based on the reading of an unviablemodel. For example, what additional port capacity isneeded in a world where carbon, petroleum and gastransport is bound to decline? What terrestrial mobilityis needed, and what supporting infrastructures wouldfacilitate it? What consumption and what urban servicesare required by a carbon-neutral society resilient toclimate change? And so on.

The construction of a new economic horizon after theParis Agreement goes beyond its technological andfinancial implications, beyond the fiscal system andbeyond the use of good planning techniques. It alsorequires the incorporation of the obligations thataccompany the effects of climate change so that answerscan be anticipated for a reality we can glimpse today,with changes in hydrometeorological patterns affectingboth infrastructures and demand for services, and withimpacts on the physical conditions of the territory, oncrop yields (and so on the welfare of much of the world’spopulation), on migratory movements or tensions withinor across borders, and on markets for raw materials. Itwould be illusory to suppose that a defensive strategywhich eluded these changes could be a success. Asystemic reading of the Paris Agreement thereforeobliges us to reinforce our knowledge of thevulnerabilities that need to be addressed.

In this respect, two significant conclusions should behighlighted. The first is that in a closely interdependentworld, economic and social prosperity and the prospectof development and economic activity beyond the OECD

countries are critical for humanity as a whole. Thematter of climatic vulnerability therefore needs to betaken seriously if we want a better understanding of thereal prospects of success and return on any investment,public or private. Finally, it is essential to reinforcesolidarity, both between and within countries, with thesocial groups most vulnerable to the effects of climatechange and/or the change in production model. This isnot only for ethical or moral reasons, important thoughthese are, but also because of the negative economiceffect of a lack of suitable strategies for those who regardthemselves a priori as losers, and who see no choice butto resist change or fight for survival. A greater role needsto be played in this case by public institutions, but it isnot their exclusive concern, nor is it reasonable that civilsociety should refuse to be involved in this process.

Paris may be insufficient, but it is certainly a useful toolfor accompanying the construction of a new economichorizon, a twenty-first century necessity that must notbe renounced.


To attend to the need fordwellings in cities, notonly do the slum dwellersalready living there haveto be rehoused in betterconditions, butallowances also have tobe made for the rapidformation of newdwellings

Joan MacDonald


1.The Social Dimensionof Sustainability

Global companies areadopting circularproduction systems,moving away fromproduce-use-discarddynamics in favor ofproduce-use-reuse onesand circular service systems

Marek Harsdorff

The undernourishedpopulation now numbers 868 million people, and 2,000million suffer from some formof micronutrient deficiency

Paolo Bifani


Hands That Build Cities

Joan MacDonald

Joan McDonald is an architect specialized in urbanand housing policy. She was Chile's undersecretary forHousing and Urban Development between 1990 and1994 and director of the Metropolitan Housing andUrbanization Service in 1997.

Surviving in the City

To be able to lead their everyday life, human beings needto condition their environment. They must furnishthemselves with the materials necessary for separatingoff a domestic ambience which will afford them a certaindegree of comfort. From their psychological, social andcultural reality, requirements also arise, which they willseek to satisfy in their habitat as individuals, couples,family groups or neighborhood communities. If they livein the city, they will moreover attempt to have easyaccess to its networks of services, and will try to remainclose to urban facilities and the work opportunities theyprovide. Most people also hope that their dwellings willbe available for reasonably long periods of time and inrelatively safe places, so that their family andneighborhood life can go by without too manyunexpected upheavals. These are simple concreteaspirations that we all seek to fulfill in a satisfactorydwelling. Nevertheless, many citizens, and especially thepoorest, are unable to own dwellings that respond evenremotely to these conditions.

It is difficult and tough for the poor to survive in today’scity. They can perhaps construct a basic lodging with thefew resources they possess, as their forefathers did. But itwill be harder and harder for them to find a place tobuild it. While they might once have risked occupying“residual” spaces, such as the banks of watercourses orsteep hillsides, modern urban planning now forbids themto settle there for reasons they perhaps cannot evenunderstand. The “safe” and legal land of the city is nowoccupied or reserved for other ends, or for those who canpay for it. Urban services—water, sewage, electricity,mobility—do not reach the remote or forbidden placeswhere they have had to settle, and they can be moved outof those places at any time if they lack legal entitlementto the land they occupy.

The most widespread physical expression of a precarioushuman habitat is the slum. Such settlements, whosenames and characteristics vary, are beset by deficiencies,whether jointly or in isolation, such as uncertainpermanence, a lack of basic services, small dwellings ofpoor quality, and overpopulation and crowding. One outof every three inhabitants of cities in the developingworld lives in a slum. The proportion of people in slumshas diminished with the advance of urbanization, but thesame is not true of the volume of the population living insuch conditions. More and more inhabitants will have tolive, or at least survive, without a minimum degree ofcomfort, health and safety.

20 s .m.a . r. t .


From the point of view of habitation, then, the panoramais not improving but growing steadily more dramatic. Notonly do the slum dwellers already living there have to berehoused in better conditions, but allowances also have tobe made for the rapid formation of new dwellings. Sinceefforts so far to reduce the housing shortage, or at least toprevent it from worsening, do not appear to have beenespecially effective, it is worth wondering whether weshould accept that a dwelling is a privilege reserved for afew, while a large proportion of mankind is condemnednever to have one. Or are we perhaps understanding andhandling the matter wrongly?

Mass Production of Dwellings

From a conventional point of view, a significant increase inthe production of dwellings has so far been the only—or atleast the principal—way to confront the phenomenon ofprecarious habitats. Unlike other social policies, publichousing has preferred to focus on what can or should bedone from the supply side rather than tackling the issue onthe basis of the inhabitants’ needs. Governments andconstruction firms agree to build massed housing, whichthey believe to be a suitable and definitive solution to theproblem. For the purpose, they have consolidated aninstitutional, entrepreneurial, professional and financialapparatus “specialized” in the production of cheapdwellings, and they have instituted procedures, norms,prohibitions, permits, strategies and programs to thiseffect. The client—or beneficiary, if the dwelling isadjudicated or subsidized—has little choice in the matter,since it is believed that the client’s intervention would onlycomplicate and delay a task that should be left to thespecialists to accomplish.

Precarious or Informal?

Given the modest results obtained with the application ofthis conventional focus, we propose to open a discussionon its validity. To begin with, it does not seem right toequate precariousness with the existence of slums, or toascertain its dimensions on the basis of the populationliving in these settlements. Not every aspect of precariousliving is expressed by slums, which are otherwise sodiverse in their potential for development that we cannotaffirm that all are necessarily precarious, or will continueto be so. Further, it is debatable that such negativeconnotations should be ascribed to the only answer thepoor have been able to give to a need that theorganizations of the housing sector have been incapable

of meeting. When seen from this perspective, the figure ofone in three inhabitants of the cities of the south living inslums appears to highlight the formidable success of thepoor in confronting their lack of habitation.

From the conventional camp, it is argued that what“informal” builders construct are not dwellings but shackswith no material value, which merely aggravates theproblem. For the poor, however, the material is only oneaspect of a home. They attach more importance toopportunity, since finding accommodation is not an optionthat can be postponed until a dwelling is given to them,but has to be solved on a day-to-day basis. They alsoappreciate a well-located dwelling, near sources of incomeor adjacent to those of family and friends, in order to havesupport and construct social capital. They agree on theimportance of access to basic services, but will reserve theright not to have them installed in their dwellings “for thetime being,” or perhaps to share them with neighbors. Ifwe insist on the deficient materiality of informal housing,they will tell us that their home is rather small or flimsy“for the time being,” but that they will do it up in time andenlarge it as much as their possibilities allow. For them, adwelling is “the place they are living in,” here and now, andnot merely the inhabited building. By combining hardcomponents, such as walls, floors, ceilings, courtyards andstreets, with a range of “soft” components, such asproceedings, actions, experiences, opportunities, acquiredknowledge and collaborations, according to theirparticular dreams, priorities and motivations, they create,improve and broaden their domestic environment fromone day to the next.

Product and Process

The process of conditioning that goes under the misnomerof informal therefore has nothing precarious about it. It iscomplex, dynamic and efficient given the scant resourcesand the limitations within which it is accomplished. It is aprocess that contributes to urban sustainability because itcarefully faces up to events with a view to responding tothem in the best possible way. Indeed, in most slums theinhabitants attach value to dwellings the formal sectorwould probably ignore. A house may be cheap and badlybuilt, but it is never worth nothing.

When dwellings are regarded from the point of view of theprocesses of habitation developed by their inhabitantsrather than the product we obstinately try to impose onthem, various routes open up that are very different fromthose followed by conventional social housing programs.

THE SOCIAL DIMENSION OF SUSTAINABILITY 21


First of all, it is possible to measure the existing shortagesand deficiencies in a different way. If a dwelling is “a placewhere someone is living,” then there are many moredwellings than those reflected in official figures. We mightventure to say that save for a few exceptions, everyone hasa dwelling, even if it is no more than a few cardboardboxes in the street or a fragile shack built on a hazardousspot. We ought to recognize that the inhabitants of a cityare not polarized into those who have and those who donot have a dwelling, or those who live “properly” andthose who are sunk in precarious living conditions. Thepicture is a more complex one, full of nuances, whereshortages need to be tackled with focalized and specificinterventions, rather as public health policies confront thedifferent maladies of their objective population. Above all,however, the inhabitants should no longer be regarded asmere receivers of goods and services provided by others. Itmust be accepted that the city is built shoulder to shoulderwith them.

Social Production of Habitat

Popular movements have been accumulating valuableexperience in this field for many years, and they couldshare the strategies and instruments now at their disposalwith those urban planning and housing policies which optto confront the problems of cities from this renewedperspective. In the 1970s, the concept of “socialproduction of habitat” was coined in Latin America torefer to the important contribution of urban communitiesto city construction. After prolonged periods ofexacerbated poverty and interrupted democracy in manycountries, and the later introduction of models of housingsubsidy based on demand that turned dwellings into goodsbought and sold on the market, the social production ofhabitat all but disappeared from the region. New versionshave emerged, however, especially in Asian and Africancities, not only demonstrating great vitality but alsoincorporating novel perspectives and components withwhich to confront the enormous challenges faced by thecity of the twenty-first century.

For example, it is worth singling out the way in which theyhave confronted the scale of the housing problems thataffect a large volume of the poor inhabitants of hundredsof urban centers. These city builders have managed totransform a contingent weakness, the widespreadpresence of poverty and slums in cities, into a formidableadvantage for political interlocution at the urban level byagglutinating themselves into community organizationsthat now form networks with a regional scope. They have

22 s .m.a . r. t .

The generation anddiffusion of knowledge andskills from within the localarea is giving rise to avibrant process of learning,and so fueling themodernizing potentialdemonstrated by the socialproduction of habitat


thus acquired enough political and strategic power to betaken into account by the other players in the urbanscenario. Two examples are Slum Dwellers Int (SDI),which groups communities from 478 cities in thirty-threecountries, mainly in Africa, and the Asian Coalition forCommunity Action (ACCA), a regional initiative sustainedby organizations from 165 cities in nineteen Asiancountries. Under the auspices of powerful federations,they promote a multitude of local initiatives in which eachcommunity responds to its particular problems accordingto the priorities, capabilities and resources of its members.Up to now, large-scale operation has not prevented theresponses from being specific to each case, somethingwhich unfortunately cannot be said for the uniform andrepetitive solutions conventionally adopted for attendingto large volumes of housing.

New Strategies

In a context where competition and permanent conflictsbetween sectors with contrary interests are an intrinsicpart of urban life today, the social production of habitatsuggests that other paths are there to be explored. Toface up to the enormous difficulties that arise when theytry to implement their projects in a potentially hostileurban atmosphere, the popular organizations have to actwith firmness and determination. Even so, experiencehas taught them that blind confrontation can have a highcost, and that success is more likely to come withproposals in which everyone has something to gain, or atleast in which the costs that have to be paid by others arereduced. Realism has led them to prefer strategies thatmerge actions to achieve their own objectives withcomponents that could prove attractive to the otherplayers, either in the government or in the private sector.They have also recognized that having financialresources at their disposal gives them the power to takedecisions and allows them to negotiate better. Even whenresources are generally scarce, they therefore makeefforts to save regularly and build up funds that willallow their projects to be supported or cofinanced to acertain degree. They have also assumed the task ofdocumenting their reality in order to have a relativelysolid information base and so develop better proposals. Itis above all the women and young people of the slumswho have acquired the ability to make censuses, profilesand maps of a reality that is largely unknown to the restof the city, mingling simple door-to-door interviewmethods with more complex procedures involving theelectronic collation and manipulation of data.

These organizations surprise us with a strategic maturityacquired in the course of a development fraught with risksand obstacles to their purposes, a strategy that is not foundin other more powerful and “qualified” players within theurban scenario. Their desire is to be not merelybeneficiaries but also partners in habitat policies, ready tocollaborate with the other players if this will make it easierfor them to achieve their aims.

The abyss we have described between the approach to cityconstruction of the inhabitants of popular neighborhoodsand that of conventional agents partly explains whyspecialized training and research centers have not so fargenerated the knowledge and technology needed by thesocial builders to perfect their techniques. That is whythey have had to resort to their own successes and failures,drawing ideas and practices from them in order toconstruct and improve their habitat. There is an incessantexchange of experiences in today’s networks, mostlythrough face-to-face meetings but also, thanks to thetechnology now available, at a distance. The generationand diffusion of knowledge and skills from within the localarea is giving rise to a vibrant process of learning, and sofueling the modernizing potential demonstrated by thesocial production of habitat in cities of the south.

* * *

In the popular neighborhoods of our cities, an extremeprecariousness of habitat affecting numerous communitiestends to coexist with the sustained and sometimes heroicefforts of these groups to attenuate the effects of thatprecariousness and create better living conditions. Habitatpolicies have until now largely ignored the importance ofthis effort in the belief that housing and urban problemscan only be adequately solved from the outside. However,the limitations of this approach, with its failure to achievesufficient goals to cope with the general shortage ofhousing and urban infrastructures, suggest that the socialproduction of habitat might profitably be restored to acentral place in urban and housing development strategies.The results achieved by popular builders show that this isan effective path that could gain importance if it were giventhe recognition and support due to it. It remains to be seenwhether housing policies will rise to the challenge and leada process toward complementary resources and intereststhat will allow more equitable and sustainable cities to bebuilt. To this end, they should start by recognizing once andfor all that if the urban habitat is to be well managed, it isnot the construction and real estate firms but theinhabitants who should be their main interlocutors.



Employment and Sustainability

Marek Harsdorff

Marek Harsdorff, economist specialized in cooperationand the environment, currently works as an economicresearcher on the International Labour Organization’sGreen Jobs Programme.

Former President Barak Obama has said that the definingchallenge faced by his successor is achieving economicgrowth that is equally shared and truly sustainable(Obama 2016). Tackling these two key issues—socialjustice and environmental sustainability—is not only animmense task but, in addition, one that is often perceivedto necessitate a trade-off. This chapter argues thatemployment and sustainability actually reinforce eachother. A job-led green growth strategy delivers moreequal results than conventional and capital-led growth.Thus, a strategy that focuses on green employment hasthe potential to achieve both objectives.

First, this chapter discusses the conceptual link betweenemployment and the environment and the physicalinteraction between jobs, natural resources,environmental destruction and social justice inparticular. Second, the nascent green structuraltransformation driven by business, consumer and policyshifts is analyzed under the lens of employment andinequality. The chapter ends with some policyconclusions to promote a just transition toenvironmentally friendly job-rich economies wherebenefits are more equally shared and growthenvironmentally sustainable.

Beneficial Physical Interaction between Labor and Nature

“There are no jobs on a dead planet,” read a campaignslogan adopted by the labor movement in the run-up tothe historic Climate Change Agreement in 2015, whichcaptured the essence of the link between theenvironment and employment: Economies andbusinesses depend on the natural environment to grow,create and sustain jobs. At the same time, unsustainableeconomic growth destroys the natural environmentwhich, in turn, has negative consequences on economiesand jobs. Borrowing a term from biology, symbiosis—defined by the German mycologist Heinrich Anton deBary as “the living together of unlike organisms”—canhelp us understand the close and long-term interaction ofmutual dependency there is between employment andthe environment. The climate’s regulatory function iscritical for the food production system on Earth.Agriculture provides employment to 1.3 billion people,which is close to 40 percent of the global workforce andis the world’s largest provider of jobs. But nature not onlyprovides the climate necessary for agriculture, it alsoprovides construction materials, wind, water and solarenergy for renewable energy jobs, medicinal plants forhealth services and cultural value for tourism jobs

24 s .m.a . r. t .


(Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). However,despite providing employment at first, fossil-fuel-basedeconomic growth, environmental destruction, anddeforestation are resulting in a changing climate andnatural environment, which in turn are having a negativeimpact on most jobs worldwide (see figure 1).

An important dimension of the link between employmentand the environment is that of inequality and poverty.Indeed, it is the poor who disproportionally depend onnatural resources for their jobs and income. Studies fromBrazil, India and Indonesia indicate that whileagriculture, forestry and fishery make up less than 10percent of the national GDP, for the poor, natural-resource-based activities and income make up more than75 percent of their GDP (TEEB 2010).

Outsourced Externalities: Worrisome Global Trend

At a global level, two worrying trends can be observed:the deterioration of employment and inequality, and thesimultaneous deterioration of the environment. Usingthe proxy of vulnerable employment and materialefficiency for the environment, both indicators showworsening trends.1

Global material use is a good proxy for environmentalsustainability because the more material is used byeconomic activity the higher the environmental impactin terms of material extraction and pollution stemmingfrom processing, using and discarding materials.Achieving economic growth with less material use—relative decoupling—means economies become more

sustainable. However, from 2000 to 2010 global materialuse increased from 7.9 tons to 10.1 tons per capita,growing faster than the global GDP. Actually, while at anational level relative decoupling is observed in mosteconomies, globally, material efficiency declined. In2000, 1.2 kg of materials were required to produce oneUSD of GDP, rising to 1.4 kg per USD in 2010. The reasonfor the increase in material intensity at a global level is ashift of global production away from highly material-efficient economies—Europe, the US, Japan and SouthKorea—to less efficient economies such as China, India,Brazil and South Africa (see table 1).

Coupled with this deteriorating environmental trend,the incidence of vulnerable employment is increasing. In 2000, close to 1.4 billion workers were in vulnerableemployment, increasing to around 1.5 billion in 2015 (see table 2).

Vulnerable employment not only limits access tocontributory social protection schemes, but is alsoassociated with low productivity and low and volatileearnings. This has led to a global decline of the laborshare in national income. Again, one of the reasons is therelocation of production to labor-abundant countrieswith lower pay and labor standards. This global wage-moderating factor was accompanied by an increase indecent-work deficits in emerging economies (ILO2015b). Both trends have a social justice dimension. Notonly are the poor most impacted by environmentalpollution and degradation, but the declining labor sharesare associated with more income inequality becausecapital ownership is more concentrated than laborendowments. Income increased by 20 percent for the top


EMPLOYMENTDEPENDS ON, BUT POTENTIALLY

DESTROYS, ENVIRONMENT

SUPPORTS

IMPACTS

ENVIRONMETSUPPORTS, BUT POTENTIALLY

NEGATIVELLY IMPACTS, EMPLOYMENT

Figure 1: The link between employment and sustainability

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

Table 1: Global material intensity in kg per USD 1970-2010

Source: UNEP 2016.

1.8

1.6

1.4

1.2

1.0

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0.0

12

10

8

6

4

2

0


1 percent of income earners, who own most of the capital,over the past twenty years. At the same time, the laborincome share for the bottom 99 percent of incomeearners diminished (OECD 2012) (see table 3).

The redistribution from labor to capital coincides withthe externalization of environmental costs. Partly, thereason is the relocation of production to locations withlower environmental and social standards, thereby alsoputting pressure on locations with higher standards.While there is no proof of causality, the ownership ofcapital becomes more concentrated (Piketty 2014). At thesame time, capital, as a production factor, generally relieson more resource and material use and has, therefore, ahigher impact on the environment. Inequality, resourceextraction, and pollution often move hand in hand.

Taking the example of China, in 1990 it produced lessthan 3 percent of global manufacturing output by value.In 2015, due to a shift in global production, close to 25percent of manufactured goods were produced in China.Its economic rise, which has seen its GDP grow onaverage 10 percent each year for more than a decade,makes the country’s industrialization not unlike those ofthe industrial revolution of the nineteenth century.However, due to its sheer size, China’s environmentaland social footprint is far greater than that of any othercountry in history and has come at the expense ofsignificant social and environmental wellbeing, andpublic health. The rapid economic growth liftedhundreds of millions of people out of poverty. However,the relocation of millions of workers from rural to urbancontexts in relative low-pay and highly pollutingindustries has made of China one of the most unequalcountries in the world. The poorest 25 percent ofChinese households own just 1 percent of the country’stotal wealth. According to the Financial Times (January14, 2016) China’s Gini coefficient for income was 0.49 in2012, far greater than the US at 0.41. Today, Chinaaccounts for 30 percent of global carbon emissions, beingthe biggest emitter in the world (Oliver et al. 2015).China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection estimatedthe cost of pollution at around USD 227 billion, 3.5percent of the country’s GDP. Life expectancy north ofthe Huai River is 5.5 years lower than in the south, due toair pollution (Chen et al. 2013).

The environmental and social crisis in China ismanifested by a rapid increase in social unrest andprotests, known as “mass incidents.” The number of suchmass incidents has increased from 8,700 in 1993 to morethan 120,000 by 2008. While official numbers of massincidents were not published, cases of various forms of

“violations of social order” rose from 3.2 million in 1995to 13.9 million in 2012. The Chinese Academy of SocialSciences and China’s official trade union federationidentify, among others, unemployment, poor laborrelations, wage disputes and environmental pollution asthe major causes of unrest.2

Global Negative Feedbacks Jeopardize Jobs and ForceMigration, Notably of the Poor

The Stern Review (2006) suggests that in a business-as-usual scenario long-term climate change will reducewelfare by an amount equivalent to a reduction inconsumption per capita of between 5 percent and 20percent globally. For example, water availability and cropyields are expected to decline by 20 percent, with a 2°Cincrease in global temperatures hitting hardest thepoorest jobs in non-irrigated agriculture, notably inAfrica. Moreover, reductions in labor productivity of upto half of “normal levels” are reported in developingcountries with high heat exposure, notably in outdoorwork such as construction. Even worse, an estimated 12.6million people died as a result of living or working in anunhealthy environ ment in 2012—nearly one in four oftotal global deaths. This has severe impacts on labormarkets and raises the question of social justice, since thepoorest are the most affected (Prüss-Üstün et al. 2016).

Disasters induced by climate change have an even moredirect impact on jobs. The World Bank estimates the lossof lives and property due to global flood to increase from$6 billion in 2005 to $52 billion per year by 2050.According to the 2013 US Geological Survey report onsea-level rise, 1 billion people live and work in low-lyingflood-prone areas directly affected by the phenomenon(Taketawa et al. 2013). In 2014, Typhoon Hagupit hit thePhilippines, affecting 800,000 workers. The 2011 droughtin East Africa affected 13 million people, most of themfarmers and pastoralists. In 2008, 20 million personswere displaced globally by extreme weather events,compared to 4.6 million displaced by conflict andviolence. Future forecasts predict between 25 million and1 billion environmental migrants by 2050, the single mostimportant cause for migration. This large amount ofmigrant workers will put a strain on labor marketseverywhere (IOM 2015).

While climate change is probably the biggestenvironmental threat, the loss of biodiversity anddegradation of ecosystems will also have seriousimplications for jobs and inequality. Some 58.3 million

26 s .m.a . r. t .


people, a large proportion of them small-scale and poorfishers, were engaged in the capture of fisheries andaquaculture in 2012. With more than 50 percent oftoday’s capture fish being overexploited, the trendsindicate that global fisheries may collapse by 2050—andwith it employment (FAO 2014).

A Green Structural Transformation Is Underway, YieldingEnvironmental Benefits and Creating Decent Jobs

As a response to the present environmental and socialrisks of unsustainable economic growth, changes inpolicy, business models, and the behavior of investorsand consumers have led to the first signs of a structuraltransformation towards greener economies.

The Paris Agreement on Climate Change committed 195countries to keep global average temperature rise below2°C, while adapting to the changes. To achieve the target,renewable energies need to grow to 80 percent of thetotal energy mix by 2050, with a near total phasing out offossil fuels by 2100. The Sustainable Development Goalscall for a socially and environmentally integratedsustainable development path. At the national level,China’s thirteenth Five-Year Plan for 2016-2020 seeks toachieve 18 percent less carbon intensity by 2020compared to levels recorded in 2015. This is in line withmany countries’ realization: decoupling growth frompollution is possible with positive employment andthereby social equality effects.

Investments in renewable energies reached USD 285billion in 2015, surpassing investments in oil, gas and coal

for the first time (REN21 2016). Energy efficiencyinvestments, the so-called hidden fuel, were even higher,amounting to USD 300 billion (IEA 2013). It is estimatedthat 8.1 million people were employed worldwide in therenewable energy sector, with an even higher numberengaged in energy efficiency jobs (IRENA 2016). In theUnited States alone, it is estimated that by 2050 a net 1.3to 1.9 million jobs will be created in energy efficiencyindustries (ACEEE 2015). Jobs in the renewable energyand energy efficiency sectors largely outpace the 9.8million jobs still linked to fossil fuels, notably coal (Teske,Sawyer and Schäfer 2015). The rapidly falling costs inrenewables drove growth in the industry, while highextraction cost, notably for coal, led to decreasinginvestment and jobs in that sector. The gap is set to growfurther, with jobs in solar and wind energy sourcesgrowing over 20 percent, while oil and gas jobs fell by 18percent as the fossil fuel industry struggled with lowprices. China employs 3.5 million people in therenewable sector, whereas just 2.6 million are employedin oil and gas activities. Doubling the global share ofrenewable energy by 2030 could lead to 24 million netnew jobs (IRENA 2016).

While investment in renewables is rapidly growing, in2015 the Norwegian parliament confirmed a major coaldivestment by its USD 900 billion sovereign wealth fund,the largest fossil fuel divestment to date, which affects122 companies across the world. Investors are beginningto realize that fossil fuel investments might becomestranded assets.

The reason for the positive labor market outcomes ofrenewable energies lies mainly in the fact that on average


2001 2005 2010 2015 2020

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

Table 2: Global vulnerable employment

Source: ILO Global Trends 2015.

Billi

ons

2.0

1.8

1.6

1.4

1.2

1.0

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0.0

Unemployment

Own-account workers and contributing family members

Unemployment rate

Own-account workers and contributing family members %

1991 1996 2001 2006 2011

65%

60%

55%

50%

45%

40%

Table 3: Labor shares in national income of selected G20 countries

Source: ILO, based on main national accounts from UNdata (www.data.un.org) for selected group of countries.

Unadjusted labour shares (11 countries + EU)

Adjusted labour shares (11 countries + EU)


fossil-fuel-based industries are more capital-intensivethan renewable industries. Construction, operation andmaintenance of renewable technology creates moredirect jobs per unit of energy generated. In addition,renewable energy, harvested locally, has longer valuechains which require more indirect jobs in supplyingindustries. Decentralized systems create an even highernumber of jobs in operation and maintenance, as thosehave to be locally serviced (see table 4).

For example, a recent study in the United Statesconsidered the economy-wide effects of reducingemissions by 40 percent by 2030 through a mix of cleanenergy and energy efficiency. The assumption is that aUSD 200 billion investment per year would be necessaryfor achieving the target, which would result in a net gainof about 4 million jobs. The net effect takes intoconsideration the loss of 1.5 million jobs in fossil- andenergy-intensive sectors as well as the creation of 4.2million jobs in environmental goods and service sectorsand their supply chains. In addition, the study assumesthat savings derived from energy efficiency and lowerenergy costs would be reinvested, creating an additional1.2 to 1.8 million jobs. The net gains of about 4 millionjobs would reduce the unemployment rate by 1.5percentage points, thereby reducing inequality (Pollin et al. 2014).

Increased Material Efficiency: A Future Source ofProductivity Growth in a Circular Economy

Businesses have come to realize that gains can be madenot only in clean energy technology but in the space of acircular production system which yields a less resource-intensive economy. Global companies are adoptingcircular production systems, moving away from produce-use-discard dynamics in favor of produce-use-reuse onesand circular service systems. Moving from lineareconomies, which are manufacturing-driven, towardscircular systems, which are service-driven, will createnet new jobs due to the simple fact that service is morelabor-intensive than manufacturing. McKinsey estimatesthat a circular-economy scenario would result in a 7percent increase in Europe's GDP by 2030, as opposed toa business-as-usual scenario. The scenario adoptsavailable technology for a circular production system infood, mobility and housing (Ellen MacArthur Foundationand McKinsey 2015). Additionally, employment effectsare estimated to be positive. In Europe, every percentagepoint reduction in resource use is estimated to lead to100,000–200,000 new jobs (Council of the European

28 s .m.a . r. t .

Unsustainable economicgrowth destroys thenatural environmentwhich, in turn, has negativeconsequences oneconomies and jobs


Union 2014). Today, material efficiency, which as shownabove has been sluggish and even reversing in the lastyears, is seen as an untapped source of futureproductivity growth—unlike the trend of the past fiftyyears, whereby the main source of labor productivity hasbeen the replacement of labor with capital (see table 5).

An energy and material-efficiency scenario was built forfive European countries reducing emissions by morethan 75 percent. In such a circular-economy scenario thenumber of additional net jobs are estimated at 1.3 million(Wijkman and Skånberg 2016). Increasing the recyclingrate of key materials in the European Union to 70 percentcould create an additional 560,000 new jobs by 2025,notably in reach of poorer households (Friends of theEarth 2010). Further to manufacturing and service jobs,green economy creates employment, notably for the lessskilled, in conserving biodiversity and managing andrestoring the natural environment, which in Europestands at 14.6 million jobs (Nunes et al. 2011).

The Right Policy Mix

A win-win-win scenario for the environment, jobs andthe economy will not happen by default. It requires theright mix of employment-led green policies as a lever toclimate-resilient economic growth. The overall positiveeffect of greener economies on employment and equalityis not unfolding by default, and must be analyzed in thecontext of declining industries, regional and globalproduction and consumption shifts, changing businessmodels, material and labor productivity, and

technological innovation. Working conditions willchange: new jobs will be created, others will transform,and some will disappear, whilst income and capitaldistribution and equality will be altered. Resource-dependent countries and extractive industries facedownsizing, while jobs and industries in climaticallyvulnerable countries continue to be affected. More thanone million jobs have been lost in coal mining in Chinaover the last few years, while millions of jobs wereaffected and destroyed by the impacts of climate changein developing countries. This calls for social justice and ajust transition as per the mandate of the InternationalLabour Organization (ILO). Member states of the ILOadopted the Just Transition Guidelines to buffer thesocial consequences of climate change and promotedecent work in a green economic restructuring (ILO2008 and 2015a). To achieve job-led economic growthwhich is equally shared and is truly sustainable three keyissues must be addressed:

Green Macro-Economic Fiscal Policy Reform

Key to the future is the implementation of anenvironmentally friendly labor tax reform, such as afiscal-neutral eco-tax that shifts the burden from laborto pollution and the use of resources. The ILO’s GlobalEconomic Linkages (GEL) model indicates that if aneco-tax is combined with measures in support ofemployment multi-factor productivity would be 5percent higher by 2050 than if green taxes are not usedto support employment. The OECD’s EnvironmentalLinkages model indicates that if revenues from an eco-tax are used to lower labor taxes, employment gains ofnearly 2 percent are possible by 2030, as compared to a


8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

Source: ILO 2012 Meta Study Employment and Renewable Energy.

Jobs

per

GW

h

Table 4: Average number of Jobs per GWh in Construction, Operation and Maintenance in renewable and conventional energy production systems

BIO

MA

SS (

TOTA

L)

GEO

THER

MA

L

SOLA

R TH

ERM

AL

WIN

D

HYD

ROPO

WER

(TO

TAL)

NU

CLE

AR

GA

S A

ND

OIL

(TO

TAL)

CO

AL

(TO

TAL)

ENER

GY

EFFI

CIE

NC

Y

SUM

MA

RY

SOLA

R PV

Source: Author’s calculation based on data from The Conference Board Total EconomyDatabase, May 2016, http://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/(converted to 2015 price level with updated 2011 PPPs).

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2016

Table 5: Global labor productivity per person employed in 2015 US$


business-as-usual scenario (OECD 2011). At a globallevel, if a tax on CO2 emissions were imposed and theresulting revenues were used to cut labor taxes, then upto 14 million net new jobs could be created (ILO 2009).Tools and models for macro-economic employmentassessments and projections are key for policy planningto guide economic diversification, climate resilience andstructural change.

Investing into Equal Opportunities, Human Capital andEnterprises for Greener Economies

Putting in place social and labor market policies isessential to enable a transition to climate-resilient andgreener economies which are also socially inclusive forwomen and men. Investing in skills, education,enterprise development and entrepreneurship tofacilitate the transition and improve employability iscritical because without skilled workers and competententerprises the shift to a climate-resilient and greenereconomy will be neither technically feasible noreconomically viable. The ILO’s Skills for Green Jobsreport highlights the existing skills gap, and indicatesthat the main holding-back factor is the shortage of greenhuman capital (ILO 2011). Social protection schemes arecentral and need to be linked to job-search assistance andmatching through employment services. Making socialprotection work alleviates social, economic andenvironmental crises, while enabling structural changetowards climate-resilient and greener economies.

Place Social Dialogue at the Center of Policy Making

Effective dialogue can help resolve crucial socio-economic and environmental issues and improveeconomic performance. Given that the transition towardsa greener and climate-resilient economy will entailprofound changes in production processes andtechnologies, as well as the reallocation of jobs, closecooperation between governments and social partners iscentral to the success of this transformation. Theprogram of renovation of buildings for energy efficiencyin Germany has mobilized about ¤100 billion over thepast decade, making it the largest such programworldwide. It was originally proposed to the governmentby the German trade unions and employers’ organizationas a “pact for the environment and employment,”creating and sustaining more than 300,000 jobs per yearsince its inception (BMVBS 2012). Effective socialdialogue is necessary to ensure that policies are coherentand that change is adopted and long-lasting (ILO 2012).

Notes

1. Vulnerable employment refers to own-account work and contribut-ing family employment. Material efficiency is the total use of materialnecessary to produce one unit of output and includes fossil fuels aswell as renewable resources.

2. Stability in China: Lessons Learned from Tiananmen and Implica-tions for the United States, Hearing Before the U.S.-China Economicand Security Review Commission, 113th Cong. (May 15, 2014) (Testi-mony of Murray Scot Tanner, Senior Research Scientist China Stud-ies Division CNA).

References

ACEEE (American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy). 2015.Jobs in Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. Washington: ACEEE.

BMVBS (Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Bau und Stadtentwick-lung). 2012. “CO2 Gebaeudesanierung – Energieeffizient Bauen undSanieren: Die Fakten.” https://www.bundesregierung.de/Webs/Breg/DE/Themen/Energiewende/Energiesparen/CO2-Gebaeudesanierung/_node.html.

Chen, Yuyu, Avraham Ebensteinb, Michael Greenstonec, and Hong-bin Lie. 2013. “Evidence on the Impact of Sustained Exposure to AirPollution on Life Expectancy from China’s Huai River Policy,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 110, no. 32.http://www.pnas.org/content/110/32/12936.full.

Council of the European Union. 2014. European Resource EfficiencyPlatform (EREP). Brussels: European Commission. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/resource_efficiency/documents/erep_manifesto_and_policy_recommendations_31-03-2014.pdf.

Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey Center for Business andEnvironment. 2015. Growth Within: A Circular Economy Vision for aCompetitive Europe. Cowes, UK: Ellen MacArthur Foundation andMcKinsey Center for Business and Environment. https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/assets/downloads/publications/El-lenMacArthurFoundation_Growth-Within_July15.pdf.

FAO (Fisheries and Aquaculture Organization). The State of WorldFisheries and Aquaculture. Rome: FAO. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3720e. pdf.

Friends of the Earth. 2010. More Jobs, Less Waste. London: Friends of the Earth. https://www.foe.co.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/jobs_recycling.pdf.

IEA (International Energy Agency). 2013. Energy Efficiency MarketReport 2013. Paris: IEA Publications. https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/EEMR2013_free.pdf.

ILO (International Labour Organization). 2008. Declaration on SocialJustice for a Fair Globalization. Geneva: International Institute forLabour Studies.

ILO. 2009. Green Policies and Jobs. A Double Dividend? Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies.

ILO. 2011. Skills for Green Jobs – A Global Review. Geneva: Interna-tional Institute for Labour Studies.

ILO. 2012. Social Dialogue for Sustainable Development. Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies.

ILO. 2013. Methodologies for Assessing Green Jobs: Policy Brief.http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_emp/---emp_ent/documents/publication/wcms_176462.pdf

A30 s .m.a . r. t .


ILO. 2015a. Guidelines for a Just Transition Towards EnvironmentallySustainable Economies and Societies for All. Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies.

ILO. 2015b. World Employment and Social Outlook. Trends 2015.Geneva: International Institute for Labour Studies.

IOM (International Organization for Migration). 2015. Migration, Climate Change and the Environment: Policy Brief Series 1, no. 2. https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/policy_brief_series_issue2 .pdf.

IRENA (International Renewable Energy Agency). 2016. RenewableEnergy and Jobs: Annual Review 2016. Abu Dhabi: IRENA. http://www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/Publications.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 2005. Ecosystems and HumanWell-being: Synthesis. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Nunes, Paulo A. L. D., Helen Ding, Benjiamin Boteler, Patrick tenBrink, Eden Cottee-Jones, McKenna Davis, Andrea Ghermand, TimoKaphengst, Manuel Lago, Andrew J. McConville, Sandra Naumann,Mavourneen Pieterse, Matt Rayment, Adarsh Varma. 2011. The SocialDimension of Biodiversity Policy: Final Report. Venice and Brussels:Publications Office of the European Union. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/enveco /biodiversity/pdf/Social%20Dimension%20of% 20Biodiversity.pdf.

Obama, Barack. 2016. “The Way Ahead.” The Economist, October 8,2016. http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21708216-americas-president-writes-us-about-four-crucial-areas-unfinished-business-economic.

OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development).2011. Towards Green Growth. Paris: OECD Publishing. doi:10.1787/9789264111318-en.

OECD. 2012. OECD Employment Outlook 2012. Paris: OECD Publish-ing. doi: 10.1.1787/empl_outlook-2012-en.

Oliver, Jos G. J., Greet Janssens-Maenhout, Marilena Muntean,Jeroen A. H. W. Peters. 2015. Trends in Global CO2 Emissions: 2015 Report. The Hague: PBL Publishers. http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/news_docs/jrc-2015-trends-in-global-co2-emissions-2015-report-98184.pdf.

Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. London:Belknap Press.

Pollin, Robert, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz, and Bracken Hen-dricks. 2014. Green Growth: A U.S. Program for Controlling ClimateChange and Expanding Job Opportunities. Washington and Amherst:Center for American Progress and Political Economy Research Insti-tute (PERI). http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/Green_Growth_2014/GreenGrowthReport-PERI-Sept2014.pdf.

Prüss-Üstün, Annette, J. Wolf, C. Corvalán, Robert Bos and M. Neira.2016. Preventing Disease through Healthy Environments: A Global As-sessment of the Burden of Disease from Environmental Risks. Geneva:WHO Press. http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/204585/1/9789241565196_eng.pdf.

REN21. 2016. Global Status Report Renewables 2016. Paris: Ren21 Secretariat. http://www.ren21.net/status-of-renewables/global-sta-tus-report/.

TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity). 2010. Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature: A Synthesis of the Approach,Conclusions and Recommendations of TEEB. Geneva: TEEB.

Takekawa, John Y., Karen M. Thorne, Kevin J. Buffington, Kyle A.Spragens, Kathleen M. Swanson, Judith Z. Drexler, David H. Schoell-hamer, Cory T. Overton, and Michael L. Casazza. 2013. Final Report

for Sea-level Rise Response Modeling for San Francisco Bay EstuaryTidal Marshes. Reston, Virginia: U.S. Geological Survey. http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2013/1081/pdf/ofr20131081.pdf.

Teske, Sven, Steven Sawyer and Oliver Schäfer. 2015. Energy [R]evolu-tion. A Sustainable World Energy Outlook 2015. Amsterdam, Hamburgand Brussels: Greenpeace International, Global Wind Energy Counciland Solar Power Europe. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/climate/2015/Energy-Revolu-tion-2015-Full.pdf.

UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme). 2016. Global Ma-terial Flows and Resource Productivity. Paris: United Nations Environ-ment Programme. http://unep.org/documents/irp/16-00169_LW_GlobalMaterialFlowsUNEReport_FINAL_160701.pdf.

Wijkman, Anders and Kristian Skånberg. 2016. The Circular Economyand Benefits for Society. Winterthur: The Club of Rome. http://www.clubofrome.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/The-Circular-Economy-and-Benefits-for-Society.pdf.



Food and Development

Paolo Bifani

Paolo Bifani is an expert on environmentalsustainability and development. He has held variouspositions at the UN, and has also acted as consultantand adviser to the Inter-American Development Bank,the European Commission, and the EconomicCommission for Latin America and the Caribbean(ECLAC).

Goal Two of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Developmentadopted by the United Nations is to end hunger, to achievefood security and improved nutrition by promotingsustainable agriculture. The challenge arises not only fromthe need to overcome current deficiencies but also from thefact that by 2030 the world's population will haveincreased by 14 percent to 8.5 billion people, which amountsto a hike of 1.1 billion inhabitants.

Science magazine pointed out that one of the greatestscientific and technological achievements of the lastcentury was that food production rates since the end ofthe Second World War have always been kept higherthan the rate of expansion of the population. Much ofthis achievement was due to increases in productivity perarea cultivated and per worker employed. Until theSecond World War, productivity had increased owing tomechanization and the expansion of farmed areas. Oncethe cycle of conventional technological innovations hadmatured and it was impossible for agricultural land toexpand further, increased productivity now became amatter of biological innovation. The hybridization thatbegan to be used in the mid 1930s became generalizedbetween 1945 and 1960 with the green revolution, whichspread hybrids of maize, wheat and rice developed at theCGIAR centers (CIMMYT and IRRI). The greenrevolution has also had negative effects, such as theconcentration of agricultural property and the increasingconcentration of culture in few varieties, with loss ofdiversity, greater vulnerability to plagues and diseases,and an increase in the use of agrochemicals.

Like every technological innovation, the green revolutionreached maturity and the rates of increase inproductivity thereafter gradually started to decline,falling from 3.2 percent in 1960 to 1.5 percent in 2000.

Since the late 1980s, increased agricultural productionand productivity has been boosted by molecular biologyand genetic engineering. These scientific advances havespawned controversy owing to the spread of transgenicvarieties. New scientific and technological prospects forfood production have been opened up by syntheticmolecular biology since 2000, and by genomic editing,CRISPR-Cas9, from 2011–2012.

More than fifty thousand edible plants are known, butonly fifteen of them provide 90 percent of all foodconsumed. Three cereals—rice, wheat and maize—account for more than two thirds of that consumption,representing 42.5 percent of total calories and more than

32 s .m.a . r. t .


94 percent of the total consumption of cereals. The worldproduction of rice more than tripled between 1961 and2010, with an average annual growth of 2.24 percentmade up of a 1.74 percent increase in yield (51.1 kg/ha perannum in absolute terms) and a 0.49 percent expansionof cultivated area. By the mid 1990s, however, increasesin productivity were lower than the rate of populationgrowth, leading to imbalances between supply anddemand and to rising prices, which increased between2001 and 2007, for example, by 67 percent. There werevarious causes for this: the potential of high-yieldvarieties has been almost totally exploited, rice fieldswere moved to land of poorer quality to make room formore economically profitable crops, and agrochemicalinput became more costly while resistance to it grew.

High-yield cultivars with resistance to disease haveallowed wheat production to grow. Average yields were 1ton/ha in 1951 and 2.5 ton/ha in 1995. In the same period,the yield in India went from 1 ton/ha to 2.1 ton/ha, and inChina from 1.4 ton/ha to 4.6 ton/ha. The averageworldwide yield is currently 3.3 ton/ha, with the highestfigure, 9.1 ton/ha, in New Zealand, which has maximumyields of up to 15 ton/ha.

In 2013, 1,016 million tons of maize were produced. Up to68 percent of the area sown with this crop is in developingcountries, yet these contribute only 46 percent of worldproduction, a reflection of a considerable gap between therespective productivities of developed countries (8ton/ha) and developing countries (less than 3 ton/ha). Theparticular agroecological and social characteristics ofmaize explain this divergence. More than 90 percent of thearea sown with maize in developed countries lies intemperate zones, while this is true of only 25 percent ofthe area in developing countries (Argentina and China).Maize is very sensitive to the natural limiting factorstypical of tropical zones. Moreover, less than 50 percent ofthe maize-growing area in developing countries iscultivated with high-yield varieties (HYV). In developingcountries, those who grow maize are small landownerswho are unable to access HYV, which partly explains theirlow productivity. Reducing this gap requires effectivemechanisms for the diffusion of technological change andthe integration of poor and subsistence-level ruralcommunities in the market.

Average world productivity of wheat and rice is close tothe technological frontier, and so tending to stabilize.This is not the case with maize. Maize is a crop with twomajor peculiarities. The first is that it is an open-pollinated plant, meaning that the genetic material for itsreproduction comes from exchange with neighboring

plants. Rice and wheat are self-pollinated, meaning theyare fertilized by pollen from the plant itself. When maizeis self-pollinated, the resulting progeny yields less and itsfruits are of lower quality. Open pollinization allows anatural process of hybridization that gives the plantheterosis, or hybrid vigor, generating a more vigorousand uniform progeny with higher yield. The poorcommunities already know this. In Chiapas, therefore, asmany as six different varieties of maize were grown in asingle milpa, or agricultural plot. R&D is searching formore efficient cultivars of higher quality, resistance andtolerance through carefully controlled cross-fertilization.

Hybrids of greater productivity for tropical andsubtropical regions, developed at CIMMYT, range from 5ton/ha to 8–10 ton/ha respectively. Unfortunately, thesevarieties are beyond the reach of poor rural communities.

In tropical and subtropical zones, maize has to contendwith abiotic and biotic obstacles such as drought, acidicand infertile soil, plagues, diseases and insects. R&D isaiming to reduce the vulnerability of maize to drought,which has historically caused losses of between 15 and 60percent, by exploring such possibilities as the creation ofearly maturing germplasm, which would enable themaize to avoid drought. These varieties are available inMexico, Kenya and Colombia. Regrettably, their yield isrelatively low. Another alternative is to identify the genesresponsible for tolerance to drought in sorghum, which isa C4 plant that shares many properties with maize, andactivate them in maize germplasm.

The second peculiarity of maize is that it is a C4 plant,meaning it has four carbon molecules. This makes for veryefficient photosynthesis, with a synthesization of carbondioxide and water that stores solar energy in carbohydratemolecules. Rice and wheat are C3 plants, with only threecarbon molecules and relatively inefficient photosynthesis,and they moreover expend up to 25 percent of their energyon phototranspiration. The peculiar anatomy of the leavesof C4 plants prevents phototranspiration, so the energythat would have been spent on it goes instead to theformation of carbohydrates, resulting in an efficientconversion of solar energy. If rice were a C4, itsproductivity would increase by more than 50 percent. Thisis the objective of the IRRI’s Rice C4 project, whichreceives a contribution of US$14 million from the Bill andMelinda Gates Foundation.

Intercropping and integrated agricultural systems aresustainable, increase the range of food available andimprove its quality. Intercropping of maize with beans,pumpkin (common in milpas), soya, peas and chickpeas,



all practiced since antiquity in poor and subsistence-levelcommunities, increase the maize yield by 25 percent.Legumes fix nitrogen, and when sown with wheat satisfyfrom 20 to 40 percent of its nitrogen requirement,resulting in a higher yield and protein content.

Integrated systems of rice cultivation and fish breedingare sustainable and contribute to an improved diet owingto a greater supply of animal protein, and to an increasein family income in rural communities. They improve thefertility of the soil by contributing nitrogen andpotassium, and they reduce plagues and diseases becausethe fish eat insects, larvae, snails, algae and weeds wheremosquitoes and other insects nest. They also aid theaeration of the water and the control of aquatic weeds.This agricultural practice, first promoted as a componentof integrated plague control systems, results in an 8 to 15percent increase in the rice yield. In Bangladesh, 40percent of the fish is consumed by the producer and therest is sold, generating an additional source of income.

Losses after harvesting and during consumption arecalculated at 1.3 thousand million tons per year,equivalent to between 30 and 50 percent of total foodproduction. The greatest losses, 95 to 115 kg per personper annum, occur during consumption in the developedcountries, and are inherent to a wasteful lifestyle. In sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, the figure rangesfrom 6 to 11 kg per person per annum. In developingcountries, the losses occur during post-harvestoperations, storage, transportation and distribution, andare the result of a lack of product management practicesand technologies in the value chain. Food loss also bringsexternal diseconomies. For example, it originates from 6to 10 percent of anthropic emissions of greenhouse gases,basically methane.

Among the goals for development is that of improvingnutritional quality. The undernourished population nownumbers 868 million people, and 2,000 million sufferfrom some from of micronutrient deficiency. As much as26 percent of children under five suffer from retardedgrowth, and 31 percent from vitamin A deficiency.

Improved food is generally a function of an increase inthe population’s income and purchasing power. As theincome per capita increases, the consumption ofvegetable protein is replaced by that of animal protein.From 1960 to 2010, the consumption per capita of milk indeveloping countries doubled, that of meat more thantripled, and that of eggs quintupled. This was madepossible by the expansion of livestock production in mostcountries, especially China and Brazil, and the growing

use of cereals as forage, which absorbs 33 to 35 percent ofthe world cereal production.

The new varieties also help to improve nutritionalquality. Those of the green revolution met greaternutritional demands as well as offering higher yields. Thebio-fortification achieved through hybridization enrichesnutritional plant contents with micronutrients. Amongthe varieties being disseminated by the CGIAR is avariety of sweet potato, the Orange Fleshed Sweet Potato(OFSP), which is rich in vitamin A thanks to the insertionof two genes obtained from daffodil and the bacteriaErwinia uredovora that synthesize beta-carotene in theedible part of the plant. It is resistant to disease andtolerant to drought and acidic soil. Similar varieties existfor cassava and maize, and varieties with high ironcontent have been made widely available for beans, rice,wheat and millet. The Opaque2 variety of the CIMMYT’sQuality Protein Maize (QPM) contains twice as muchprotein as normal maize, but it unfortunately suffersfrom relatively low productivity and it is vulnerable todisease and to losses during storage. The greatestexpectations are focused on golden rice, a variety of ricerich in vitamin A thanks to the biosynthesis of beta-carotene in the edible part of the plant. This IRRI projectis financially supported by the Helen Keller and Bill andMelinda Gates Foundations.

Food production can increase, diversify and improvewith the incorporation of species that have fallen intodisuse. Nearly 150 plants are used for food in India, and200 in Ghana. The consumption of amaranth, which wasextinguished by the Spanish, is now making a comeback,as is that of quinoa, oca and teff. These products areappreciated in developed countries because they aregluten free with high protein content. Amaranth is alsobeing studied for its resistance to round-up andglyphosate.

The achievement of Goal Two of the United Nations does not depend only on scientific and technologicalalternatives, on an enlarged range of utilizable resources, oron changes in consumption patterns. The materializationof these possibilities is subject also to sociopolitical andeconomic structures.

Scientific and technological advances have beenassociated with profound transformations in theunderlying institutionality of the economic, scientific andtechnological structure. Until the molecular biology andgenetic engineering revolution, agricultural R&D and itsdiffusion were the responsibility of public institutions,universities, or government R&D centers. The

34 s .m.a . r. t .


characteristics of biotechnological innovations permittheir appropriation, which has a decisive influence onchanges in intellectual property systems and theirinternationalization. At the same time, they have led to arevaluation of the genetic material or germplasm presentin nature, giving rise to a process of commoditization andprivate appropriation of genetic resources throughpatents or plant breeders rights (PBR). The traffic ingermplasm and its transformation into goods for privategain has historically been characterized by free andunlimited appropriation. Biopiracy perpetuates thisperverse appropriation of the germplasm for centuries.The large number of current applications forbiotechnological patents, together with the use of cross-licensing, has allowed intellectual property rights toaccumulate in a small group of transnationals, whileacquisitions and mergers lead to the concentration ofchemical, pharmaceutical, food and agriculture,biotechnology and seed companies in a powerfulgenome-based oligopoly.

Success in achieving Goal Two of the United Nations isconditioned by the socioeconomic situation, economicgrowth, the defeat of poverty and a more equitabledistribution of income. The population in extremepoverty was reduced by 50 percent between 1999 and2011, but despite this one in every five people in thedeveloping world still lives beneath the poverty line ofUS$1.90 per day. The relations between economic growth,poverty and inequality are extremely complex. There is anegative correlation between growth of income per capitaand poverty: growth of income per capita only reducespoverty if it does not increase inequality. The reduction ofinequality is generally associated with the reduction ofpoverty. In its turn, the rate of reduction of povertydepends on the existing level of development andequality. Greater equality accelerates the reduction ofpoverty. Studies on income elasticity of poverty show thatan average increase of 1 percent in GDP per capita oughtto reduce poverty per capita by 1.5 percent. Economicgrowth, no matter how rapid, is not enough in itself toreduce poverty. Not only must it avoid creating inequality,but it must also be accompanied by policies that reduceinequality and redistribute income. The sectorialstructure of production affects equality, the redistributionof income, and consequently poverty. The expansion oflabor-intensive activities has been an important factor inthe reduction of poverty in the countries of SoutheastAsia, particularly when accompanied by absorption oftechnology, increased productivity, and wage rises inaccordance with productivity increases. For example,Vietnam, with a Gini coefficient of 0.30 and 50 percent of

its activity in labor-intensive sectors, and with heavyinvestment in education, health and infrastructure and asolid social safety net, displays impressive achievementsin the reduction of poverty, malnutrition and hunger. Onthe other hand, countries rich in natural resources, witheconomic activities predominantly in the highly capital-intensive energy or mining sectors, tend to have a muchweaker relationship between growth of GDP per capitaand reduction of poverty, particularly if those sectorsmaterialize as enclaves with scant technological spillovertoward the rest of the economy.

Ultimately, the accomplishment of Goal Two of theUnited Nations is dependent upon the achievements ofothers. In the meantime, it will also be conditioned by theeffects of climate change on food production. An analysisof this falls outside the scope of these brief reflections.

References

Alexandratos, Nikos, and Jelle Bruinsma. 2012. World AgricultureTowards 2030/2050: the 2012 Revision. Rome: FAO.

Bifani, Paolo. 2015. Economic and Trade Implications of the NagoyaProtocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair Equitable Sharingof Benefits Arising from Their Utilization. Geneva: UNCTAD.

FAO. 2011. Global Food Losses and Food Waste. Extent, Causes andPrevention. Rome: FAO.

IRRI. 2015. The C4 Rice Project. Manila: IRRI.

Pingali, Prabhu L., ed. 2001. 1999/2000 World Maize Facts and Trends.Meeting World Maize Needs. Mexico City: CIMMYT.

The State of Food and Agriculture, issues from 2000 to 2015. Rome:FAO.

The State of Food Insecurity in the World, issues from 2000 to 2015.Rome, FAO.



In the words of Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong (Mexico, 1970), thehorizon in its most basic form is not only the line where skyand earth meet, it is also the most distant point reached by thegaze, and the limit of what we know. It separates and at thesame time connects “acquaintances and strangers, relativesand foreigners, the near and the far.” Born of these reflections,Horizons is a series of photographs that form part of acontinuous landscape running from the ghats of Varanasi andthe steel and glass skyline of Seoul to the urban sprawl ofAmman and the Andean peaks of Quito. It is the landscape of aplanet that “floats in a space with no known limits.”

HorizonsSzeTsung Nicolás Leong


Dubai I, 2007


Han-Gang, Seoul, 2008


Ganga (Ganges) I, Varanasi, 2008


Lake Michigan, 2012


Amman, 2007


Mexico City, 2009


Quito, 2010


Old Havana II, 2010


2.Hardware versusSoftware and Mindware

Urban planning which creates morecompact, mixed andwalkable neighborhoodsenhance our security and spirit

Todd Litman

The provision of housingfor the increasedpopulation in 2050 willdemand of the constructionsector all the greenhousegas emissions that will beadmissible that year

Albert Cuchí


Mobility and Innovation. The New TransportationParadigm

Todd Litman

Todd Litman is the founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an independent research organization in Canadadedicated to developing innovative solutions totransport problems.

Where is our flying car? When can I fly by supersonicjet? Where is my jetpack?

If you look at predictions made a few decades ago, thetwenty-first century transportation system was supposedto include flying cars that eliminate traffic congestion,supersonic airline travel to exotic destinations, andjetpacks eliminating the need to walk.

The reality is more modest. We live in a period of greatinnovation, but most twenty-first century transportimprovements do not make travel faster (maximumcommercial aviation speeds declined after the Concordesupersonic jet service was grounded in 2003) or replacenon-motorized with motorized travel (many cities areimproving walking and cycling conditions, resulting inmore use of these modes). Recent innovations thatimprove everyday urban transport include wheeledluggage, electronic navigation systems, and bike lanes:innovations that increase travel convenience andcomfort, not speed.

These are important but often underrated innovations.The human experience is increasingly urban. Cities are,by definition, places where many people and activitieslocate close together. This proximity facilitates positiveinteractions, both planned (accessing shops, services,jobs and entertainment) and unplanned (encounteringold friends while walking on the street or riding in a bus,or seeing interesting products in a store window). As aresult, urban living tends to increase our productivityand creativity, a phenomenon known as economies ofagglomeration. Scientific studies find that, all else beingequal, people’s economic success and ability to innovatetend to increase with the size and urban density of thecities in which they live.

However, proximity can also create problems, includingtraffic and parking congestion, high costs forinfrastructure such as roads and parking facilities, plusnoise and air pollution. These impacts can spoil thebenefits of cities, making them inefficient andunpleasant. But these problems are not inevitable, theyare caused by motor vehicles, not people, and so can besolved by taming excessive automobile travel.

Automobiles are resource-intensive, they require farmore space than other urban travel modes. Because theyare large and fast, automobile travel requires far moreroad space per passenger-kilometer, and each vehiclerequires several parking spaces at destinations (home,work, shops, and so on). As a result, to be convenient andsafe, each urban automobile requires 100 to 400 square

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meters of land for roads and parking facilities, more thanten times as much as the space required to travel by foot,bike or public transit, and two or three times as muchland as a typical urban resident needs for housing andworkspace. Consequently, the number of people who cancomfortably live in an urban area declines rapidly asvehicle ownership increases.

Automobile travel imposes other costs. Owning andoperating a car costs thousands of dollars annually,which is unaffordable for many households. Automobileaccidents are a major cause of injury and death, andmotor vehicles are the primary source of noise and airpollution in most cities. Automobile travel imposescongestion delays on other vehicles, and wider roads andincreased vehicle traffic creates the so-called barriereffect, degrading conditions for active modes of transport(walking and cycling). This reduces mobility for non-drivers, and by discouraging walking and cycling,hampers public fitness and health.

An efficient and equitable transportation system must bediverse in order to serve different users and purposes.This allows each mode to be used for what it does best:convenient walking and cycling for local errands,efficient public transit for passenger transport on majorurban corridors, and automobile travel when it is trulyoptimal. Most communities include people who cannotor should not drive due to disability, low incomes or age,and even those who could drive often prefer transit travel

if it allows them to relax or work en route, and activemodes for the sake of health and enjoyment.

This is not to suggest that motor vehicles are “bad” andshould be forbidden, but automobile travel is far morecostly than most people realize, considering all impacts.Therefore, an effective city limits automobile travelregulation must be mindful both of what the road systemand parking facilities can efficiently accommodate, andof what is needed to protect walking, cycling and publictransit conditions. My research indicates that,considering all benefits and costs, socially optimalvehicle ownership rates range from 100 automobiles perone thousand residents in central city neighborhoods upto 350 vehicles per one thousand residents in lower-density urban-fringe areas. Similarly, optimal automobilemode share (the portion of trips made by that mode)range from 10 percent in central areas up to 35 percent atthe urban fringe; beyond these levels transport systemperformance declines, making everybody worse off.Achieving these targets requires a conservation ethic—that is, an emphasis on efficient resource consumption,using transportation demand management (TDM)strategies to encourage travelers to use the best optionfor each trip.

Conventional urban transportation planning assumesthat our goal is to maximize mobility (physicalmovement), and so assumes that automobile travel isbetter than slower modes. This justifies planningdecisions that favor automobile travel, often to the

HARDWARE VERSUS SOFTWARE AND MINDWARE 57

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TRANSPORT NETWORKCONNECTIVITY

GEOGRAPHIC PROXIMITY(LAND USE DENSITY AND MIX)

MOBILITY SUBSTITUTES(TELECOMMUNICATIONSAND DELIVERY SERVICES)

Various factors affect accessibility, including mobility, transport system diversity, transport network connectivity, geographic proximity, and mobility substitutes such astelecommunications and delivery services. The new transport planning paradigm considers all of these factors.


detriment of other modes, for example, roadwaywidening that degrades walking and cycling conditions,parking requirements that stimulate sprawl, andinadequate investment of road space and money intopublic transit, resulting in poor quality service.

A new urban-planning paradigm is more comprehensiveand integrated. It emphasizes that mobility is seldom anend in itself: the ultimate goal of most travel activity isaccess to desired services and activities. Several factorsaffect accessibility, including mobility (travel speed anddistance), transport system diversity (the quality oftravel options available), transport network connectivity,geographic proximity (land-use density and mix, andtherefore the distances people must travel to reachservices and activities), and mobility substitutes(telecommunications and delivery services), asillustrated below.

Conventional planning, which results in wide roads andlarge parking facility requirements, contributes to a self-reinforcing cycle that results in automobile dependencyand sprawl, as illustrated in figure 3. The new paradigmrecognizes that “smart growth” policies which createmore compact, connected and multi-modal communitiestend to increase overall accessibility. This results in“urban villages,” which are neighborhoods that containthe combination of services and facilities most often usedby residents—restaurants and cafés, well-stocked grocerystores, pharmacies, barbers and hair dressers, banks,schools, parks, gyms, doctors and dentists—withinwalking distance of most homes. Even if vehicle trafficspeeds are lower, the distances that must be traveled toreach destinations are also shorter. Residents of suchcommunities tend to own fewer cars, drive less, relymore on active and public transport modes, spend less ontransport, be safer and healthier, and require lessspending on roads and parking than they would if theylived in more automobile-dependent areas.

One of the most important and effective ways ofimproving accessibility is to ensure that any household,including those with low income, can find suitablehousing in central, walkable neighborhoods. Cheaphousing is not truly affordable if located in inaccessibleareas where residents must devote excessive amounts oftime and money to reach common destinations. Thismeans that public housing cannot be confined toperipheral zones, and that government policies shouldencourage private developers to build lower-pricedhousing in accessible areas.

58 s .m.a . r. t .

Socially optimal vehicleownership rates rangefrom 100 automobiles perone thousand residents incentral city neighborhoodsup to 350 vehicles per onethousand residents inlower-density urban-fringeareas


Some technological innovations can improve urbantransportation, including better user information, moreconvenient payment systems, and better ways to sharevehicles and parking facilities. More efficient andalternative fuels can reduce environmental impacts, andself-driving cars may someday improve mobility optionsfor non-drivers, although by making driving cheaper andeasier they might also increase total vehicle traffic andassociated problems. As a result, such technologies maydegrade urban transport conditions overall, unless theyare implemented with appropriate incentives, such asmore efficient pricing.

We have a rich vocabulary to describe overpricing—wesay that we are gouged, gypped and cheated—butunderpricing is equally harmful. When roads, parkingfacilities, and fuel are too cheap, we overuse them,resulting in congestion, accidents and pollutionproblems. Motorists generally prefer “free” rather thanpay roads and parking, but these are never really free: thechoice is between financing them directly, through tollsand user fees, or indirectly through general taxes (to payfor roads) and rents (to pay for free off-street parkingfacilities). Paying directly is preferable because it canration the use of these scarce resources, avoiding trafficand parking congestion, and it prevents people who driveless than average from subsidizing facilities for peoplewho drive more than average.

The new planning paradigm recognizes the unique andimportant roles that walking, cycling and public transit

play in an efficient and equitable transportation system,and so applies a sustainable transportation hierarchywhich ensures that, when resources (road space, landand money) are constrained, policies favor resource-efficient over resource-intensive modes. This is the keyto creating sustainable transportation systems.

The new urban-planning paradigm considers a widerrange of planning objectives and transportation-improvement options. This helps identify truly optionaltransport improvements, sometimes called win-winsolutions, such as congestion reduction strategies thatalso reduce parking problems, increase affordability,improve mobility options for non-drivers, and increasepublic fitness and health. For example, expandingroadways may reduce traffic congestion, at least in theshort run, and more efficient and alternative fuel vehicleshelp conserve energy and reduce pollution emissions, butprovide no other benefits. In contrast, improvingresource-efficient travel modes (walking, cycling,ridesharing, public transit, and delivery services) anddeveloping policies that favor smart growth help achievenumerous planning objectives, as illustrated in the tablebelow. Although these strategies are not necessarily themost effective way to achieve any single objective, theyare often the most cost-effective option overall to improvetransportation, considering all benefits and costs.

These new approaches are being applied around theworld. They are particularly important in developingcountries, where money is limited and most households


This figure illustrates the self-reinforcing cycle of increased automobile dependency and sprawl.

Figure 3: Cycle of automobile dependency and sprawl

INCREASEDVEHICLE OWNERSHIP

INCREASED PARKINGSUPPLY

AUTO-ORIENTED LANDUSE PLANNING

DISPERSED DEVELOPMENTPATTERNS

REDUCED TRAVELOPTIONS

ALTERNATIVE MODESSTIGMATISED

AUTOMOBILE-ORIENTEDTRANSPORT PLANNING

SUBURBANIZATIONAND DEGRADED CITIES

Figure 4: Sustainable transport hierarchy

WALKING

BICYCLE

PUBLIC TRANSPORT

TAXIS

CARPOOLS

CAR

Source: Wikipedia.org.

Transport systems are major emitters of greenhouse gases, responsible for 23% of world energy-related GHG enissions in 2004, with about three quarters coming from road vehicles.Currently 95% of transport energy comes from petroleum. Energy is consumedin the manufacture as well as the use of vehicles, and is embadied in transportinfrastructure.


cannot afford automobiles. In such conditions, active andpublic transport improvements tend to provide more totalbenefits, and have an impact on a wider range of residentsthan expanding urban roadways and parking facilities.

Although many cities are implementing some of thesepolicy innovations, none are implementing all that arejustified, considering all objectives. These reforms can bechallenging. In most cities prominent groups, such aspowerful politicians, respected professionals, andsuccessful business people, generally rely on automobilesthemselves, and so tend to favor automobile-orientedimprovements. However, we can now demonstrate, usingexamples from some of the world’s most successful andlivable cities, such as Hong Kong, London, Seoul,Singapore and Stockholm, that a more diverse andefficient transport system benefits everybody, includingdrivers, who experience less traffic and parkingcongestion, and reduced chauffeuring burdens.

Urban-planning debates often reflect our prejudicesabout the overall goodness of humanity. Many peoplehave a negative opinion of their fellow human beings—they would rather live in isolated suburban compoundsand travel in private cars in order to minimize theirinteractions with other people. Urban living, walking,cycling and public transit demand more involvementwith others, and so reflect a more positive opinion abouthumanity. People occasionally do have conflicts, butoverall, most people are good and conscientious, andgiven the opportunity can live and travel together withconsideration and respect. A neighborhood becomessafer as more responsible (non-criminal) people live,work and travel there, providing “eyes on the street” thatincrease security. As a result, urban planning whichcreates more compact, mixed and walkableneighborhoods enhance our security and spirit. In fact,considering all risks, including crime, traffic accidentsand health impacts, urban living is usually safer andhealthier than living in automobile-dependent suburbs.

The old transport-planning paradigm evaluated theefficiency of transport systems based on the movement ofvehicles. The new paradigm focuses on moving people,and so is concerned with the travel experience,particularly for resource-efficient modes: walking,cycling and public transit. Under positive conditions weenjoy urban travel—walking down a street or having afriendly conversation with a stranger on a bus or train—and under poor conditions—inadequate sidewalks anddangerous road crossings, noisy, dirty and crowdedtrains—transport can be the worst experience of ourweek. When we ask travelers what they want, improving

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In most cities prominentgroups generally rely onautomobiles themselves,and so tend to favorautomobile-orientedimprovements


comfort and convenience are often more important thanincreasing travel speed, which means that much of thefunding currently devoted to expanding roads would bebetter spent improving sidewalks, reducing public transitcrowding, and providing better user information fornavigating around a city. These improvements are a greatgift to the people who live and work in a community.

Not only can innovation create more efficienttransportation systems, better transport policies canfoster innovation in a community. Innovation increaseswhen diverse people and industries locate close together,creating opportunities for collaboration (those economiesof agglomeration), which is why cities exist and whyproductivity and innovation tend to increase with urbansize and diversity. Innovation also requires affordability,the ability to live well on a modest income, and thereforethe freedom to take financial risks. For every successfultechnology company, a city must incubate dozens of little

start-ups; and for every famous and wealthy artist, thereare hundreds who struggle in poverty. Innovationrequires cheap office and studio space, as well asaffordable housing and transport for workers, plus plentyof social space, such as coffee shops and pubs, andopportunities for walking to inspire great ideas.

We live in a critical moment in human history—the typesof cities we create now will determine the economicsuccess and quality of life of more than half the world’sfuture population. It’s time to think big about small,positive changes. How can your neighborhood become agreat place to walk? What could help residents takeadvantage of the efficiencies of cycling? How can yourbus ride become the high point of your day? Byanswering these questions we can help create paradiseon Earth.


( : Achieve objectives) Roadway expansion and more fuel efficient vehicles provide few benefits. Win-win solutions improve travel options and encourage more efficient travel patterns, which helps achieve many planning objectives.

Table 1: Identifying win-win solutions

Planning Objective

Roadway Expansion

Improving Resource-Efficient Modes and Smart Growth

Efficient and AlternativeFuel Vehicles

Congestion reduction

Roadway cost savings

Parking cost savings

Consumer cost savings

Increased traffic safety

Improved mobility options

Energy conservation

Pollution reduction

Physical fitness and health

Land use objectives


Sustainable Rehabilitation

Albert Cuchí

Albert Cuchí, architect, is a full-time lecturer at theDepartment of Architectural Technology of the VallèsSchool of Architecture, Universitat Politècnica deCatalunya-BarcelonaTech (UPC), where he studies the relations between architecture and the need forsustainability.

Last year, we set a very unusual exercise for myarchitecture students in Sicily: combining the subjects ofurban design and restauro (restoration, rehabilitation), itattempted to explore the choice of the best perspectivefrom which to intervene in the rehabilitation of buildingswithin the urban area, the most comprehensive scale for the relevant current concerns to manifest themselvesin their full magnitude, and the challenges to beconfronted and for which an answer must—also—befound in architecture.

The undergraduate program in architecture at the KoreUniversity of Enna in Sicily, which these students arecurrently taking, organizes its learning around theparadigm that the city must be interpreted as the resultof the social metabolism. That is, of the relations ofsociety with its environment, and the mechanismsthrough which society obtains the resources it needs toperpetuate itself and reproduce. Such a metabolism maybe regarded as a fundamental part of any culture, by nomeans unrelated to the organization of society itself.

In this way, the different urban models can beinterpreted as reflections of different living proposalssupported by different social metabolisms. Thetraditional city thus becomes a product of cultureswhose resources are based on management of theterritory, from which its social resources are obtained.The periphery of that traditional city, itself a product ofindustrial culture, has been forged on the basis of urbanmodels proposed by the city planners of the modernarchitecture. These proposals for new cities tried torespond to the problems of the new industrial societywith the resources that this new culture placed in ourhands. The urban sprawl became the final expression ofan advanced industrial society, with infrastructures toensure mobility and communications on a scaleunthinkable some decades ago.

However, in addition to the idea of the city as theexpression of its social metabolism, the problem putforward by the program is how to transform our currentindustrial metabolism, which has turned out to beunsustainable, into a new non-polluting metabolismbased on renewable resources, a sustainable metabolismthat would preserve the quality of the environment. Theproblem is also how to use urban habitation andintervention to assist in that transformation of the socialmetabolism. The courses for the program thus dwell onan analysis of the ways of life proposed in each urbanmodel. This reveals the social metabolism that supportsthem and contrasts it with the demand for sustainability,and also leads to proposals to transform it, re-inhabiting

62 s .m.a . r. t .


and rehabilitating our cities, and helping with the task ofachieving a sustainable social metabolism.

This year, we are working on the traditional city. This isa city based on a necessarily sustainable socialmetabolism, since traditional society depends on themaintenance of the productive capacity of the territory,and on the availability of resources within a closed cyclewhere waste must be returned to the environment in themost suitable way for it to maintain its productivity.Such a metabolism requires an intricate management ofthe territory, configuring landscapes whose differentelements—forest, fields, meadows, kitchen gardens, farmbuildings, etc.—are interlaced in complex strategies forobtaining resources while maintaining fertility.

We invited our students to select a series of materialsfrom historic buildings and to try to recognize thelandscape from which they came. They had to try toreconstruct the landscapes that produced thosematerials and generated the architecture, and to saywhere they were and how much influence they had had.The exercise was then to be completed with theselection of another series of materials, this time modernand industrial, in order to ascertain which landscapeproduces these new materials, and what kind ofinfluence it has.

As a trial exercise, we worked in the first workshop ofthe course on the façades of the historic center ofCatania, the second largest city in Sicily, selecting themost frequent materials, the ones which left the greatestmark upon the urban environment. We discovered thatthese materials were directly linked to two of the mostmemorable episodes in the history of Catania. The firstwas the eruption of the volcano Etna in 1669, when thecity was approached by a massive tongue of lava that wasdiverted away from the town and towards the sea thanksonly to the city walls. The second was the completedestruction of the city a few years later, in 1693, by anearthquake, and the subsequent reconstruction of thesettecento historic center we see today.

The students discovered that lava stone, the cold andsolidified residue of the volcanic lava that had menacedthe city, formed an essential part of the material withwhich Catania was rebuilt. Together with whatremained of the city that stood before the earthquake,the hard stones from the lava that reached the city in theeruption of 1669 were used for paving and for thebuildings’ walls. The softer and more porous stones fromthe eruption were used to make sand for facing walls,giving the intonaco (plaster) of the urban façades of the

historic center their characteristically grey color.Furthermore, the clay from the countryside around thecity, baked by the burning tongue of lava during theeruption, originated a building material ofcharacteristics similar to the Roman puzzolana, whichwas obtained by excavating the clay from underneaththe crust of solidified lava. The pink facing on manywalls was produced with that material, and even todaythe black of lava and the grays and pinks of the façadesare the specific colors of Catania, used also in modernconstructions as a sign of identity although nowobtained from other materials.

My students must next work on their own city of Enna,in the center of Sicily, and select the materials that wereused to construct some of its historic buildings and makethem inhabitable. They will discover that the city,located on a mountain like so many others in Sicily, grewby excavating the materials for its walls from the rockitself. They will wonder about the forests that producedthe wood to build the ceilings. Where are the forests ofSicily today? And what was their relationship with cropfarming, and with the famous Sicilian wheat that used tosupply Rome? And with the wood used for baking lime?And for heating? They will also wonder about the water,including both the water drunk by the inhabitants andthe rain water that fell on the roofs. And on the streets ofthe city, which formed stream beds organized to manageand take advantage of the water they drained away.

By looking at such things, they will have already noticedthat the streets of Enna, their own city, are paved withlava stone from Catania. How and when did it get here,eighty kilometers away from the volcano? It arrived withthe railway, when the industrial revolution madecommunications easier and allowed heavier and cheapermaterials to be transported over longer distances,enlarging the landscapes from which cities wereconstructed and broadening the mark of their socialmetabolism, up to the point where it has now becomeglobal. This, however, was made possible by burning coalto fuel the railway, thus reducing transportation costs byexternalizing other costs, which we are now starting topay in the form of climate change.

When my students analyze the landscapes that built thehistoric city, they will discover some that were close athand, and will see how closely intertwined the differentelements of those landscapes were with the differentresources society obtained from them. They willunderstand how closely imbricated the production ofarchitecture was with the fulfillment of other social



needs, and to what point the urban metabolism wasconnected with its own territory.

And also how distant are the landscapes which containtoday’s construction materials, like cement and steel.How far off in space and time—eons since theirformation—are the fossil energy resources used toproduce them, just as the effects they will have on theclimate will reach the farthest limits of time and space.And it is the same energy as is used to make thebuildings comfortable, or to bring water to people’sdwellings, or to activate the infrastructures that supportour urban metabolism. How remote and tremendous arethe landscapes formed by the bauxite mining thatsupplies the aluminum for our windows. It is no longerunder our own feet, nor does it organize our lives oractivities, but it does affect other lives of which no newsreaches us. We must recover the space and time of ourway of life. That is sustainability.

Half the world’s population now lives in cities. Fromnow until 2050, the population is expected to grow bythe equivalent of the current populations of China andIndia. This growth will occur in cities, and mainly incities that already exist and are going to expand andbecome transformed. These cities are the reflection andthe result of the ways of life that have created and usedthem, of society’s relationship with the environment,and of their social metabolism.

The challenge will make it obligatory to transform cities,re-habilitate them (that is, restore their habilitas, orability) to take in people who have mostly emigratedfrom the countryside to the city, or have formed part ofthe great migratory processes that are shaking the worldand are largely due to the transformations brought aboutby our unsustainable industrial system of production,now globalized. These cities, then, must be culturalcrucibles, confronting their challenges with the socialand human capital of these people from differentcultures who have been forged by very diverselandscapes, and who forge them in their turn.

At the same time, such cities must undergo the challengeof transforming their social metabolism. As the space ofour global culture, cities are going to be the setting,indeed the battlefield, where the change in productionmodels toward sustainability will take place. This is sobecause they are high-density nodes of our socialmetabolism, and because they are the places where theconscience of the citizenry has the best perception ofwhat is happening in the public space within them.

64 s .m.a . r. t .

The different urban modelscan be interpreted asreflections of differentliving proposals supportedby different socialmetabolisms


The challenge of sustainability has strong urbanexpression in all the areas that define the city. Obviously,this includes building. For example, if we do not bringabout a much more profound change than we are nowdoing in the way we construct buildings and keep theminhabitable, the provision of housing for the increasedpopulation in 2050 will demand of the constructionsector all the greenhouse gas emissions that will beadmissible that year if we are to keep the rise in theplanet’s global temperature below two degrees Celsius.This is a giant challenge, and all the more so if weconsider that it is one that also faces mobility, food,education, and many other goods and services necessaryfor living with dignity.

The increase in urban population over the next 35 yearsfrom today’s 3.6 billion to 6 billion will not onlyengender an urban crisis, but must also be accompaniedby the necessary change toward the sustainability of theproduction model.

It is for this reason that the understanding of a city as aproduct of the social metabolism, as the expression of aproductive landscape where society’s relationship to theenvironment is visible, has so much value today.Remaking cities to cope with exceptional growth, anddoing so while transforming our model of productiontoward sustainability, requires networks that relate cityand productive model, and resources with which toweave and unweave those networks. These are culturalresources which largely arrive with the new urbanpopulation. They come with them, entwined in tanglesof knowledge which have to be wound into new frameswith a new way of re-habilitating and reinhabiting cities.

Perhaps the image of Catania threatened by the lava ofEtna in 1669 is a good analogy for the situation of citiestoday. Confronted with a huge challenge—that ofemigration toward the cities, which seems about todestroy them—they may find that it actually permits thereconstruction that is so badly needed to face a stillgreater challenge.

For their last paper of the year, my students have topropose rehabilitation projects for the buildings they havebeen working on. They have to propose uses, andobviously, they must suggest strategies so that those useswill be suitably and sustainably implemented, withrenewable resources and integration in a non-pollutingsocial metabolism. They must be aware, however, thatthey are contributing with those resources to theconstruction of a new landscape, one in which theirbuilding resource strategies must link up with other

resource strategies (food, mobility, etc.), and that theirtask, and the work they will have to carry out in the futureas architects, is none other than the construction of a newlandscape, the product of a new social metabolism.

Believe me, I am anxiously awaiting the results of their work.



James Mollison (Kenya, 1973) confirms that “play isincredibly universal” in Playground, a photographicseries that shows scenes of school playgrounds indifferent parts of the world. Emphatically generalthough these views are, it is the details that show upthe disparities between the socioeconomic andpolitical environments of the playgrounds, but also thelittle difference there is in the behavior of childrenwhen the bell rings for the break.

PlaygroundJames Mollison


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Efficiency is thus reallybetter described as “morewith less.” There are verysimple steps to achieveefficiency, both at home andin businesses and industries,such as updating or replacingseparate systems orappliances that will save both money and energy

Sven Teske

Management therefore needs to evolve toward anunderstanding thatecosystems and natural water supply networks arenot competing with it for the resource, but are itsclosest ally when it comes tocapturing, storing, channelingand purifying water

Yolanda Kakabadse


3.Water, RenewableEnergy andInfrastructures

Individuals and societiesinscribe their values,beliefs, ideas, andidentity in thelandscapes they create,leaving a legacy ofstories told and readthrough a language oflandscape

Anne Whiston Spirn

The cities at theforefront of thepromotion ofbiodiversity in urbanareas have aresponsibility to sharetheir experience withother cities in the world

Ahmed Djoghlaf


Caring for Natural WaterSupply Networks

Yolanda Kakabadse

Renowned environmentalist Yolanda Kakabadse is the president of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). In 1979 she founded the Fundación Natura, a majorNGO in Ecuador. She has also been president of theInternational Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

We are living through extraordinary times. For the firsttime in history, humanity has started not only to becomeaware of its ability to transform life on Earth, but also toreflect seriously on the enormous possibilities and benefitsof constructing a new economic ecosystem that will takepeople and their planet into account.

This is today one of the great priorities of the organizationI preside: to help create an economic model based on anew way of measuring prosperity and success in whichsocial welfare and natural capital will be indicators of animportance equal to or greater than income orconsumption, which we currently use to measure the levelof development.

We are therefore working all over the world for therecognition of the importance of biodiversity andecosystems as the guarantee of a prosperous future thatwill provide food, water and energy for the nearly tenthousand million people who will be sharing our planet in 2050.

These are enormous challenges, and although majorprogress has been achieved, we know it is not enough andwe can do a great deal more, especially if we manage tojoin forces and create alliances with governments,businesses and civil society, which is already mobilizing instrength around the planet. The key at this moment inhistory is to keep adding to these forces, and this hasbecome the central focus of the WWF’s work for the nextfew years.

Fortunately, things are changing and we are promotingand supporting positive experiences around the world thatshow it is possible to satisfy requirements for such vitalnatural resource as water while preserving the health ofthe rivers, wetlands and lakes it comes from.

To be able to manage resources without destroying themand take the right decisions for improving our quality oflife, we need more precise knowledge of their location andtheir evolution under our ecological footprint. At WWF,we have therefore been presenting the biannual LivingPlanet Report for nearly two decades, with data intendedto help all of society, but especially political leaders,managements and businesses, to take more informed andresponsible decisions on our environment.

The eleventh edition of this prestigious report wasrecently presented throughout the world. It contains anexhaustive scientific analysis carried out, as with theprevious reports, in conjunction with the Global FootprintNetwork and the London Zoological Society, which

86 s .m.a . r. t .


permits us to measure the evolution of the planet’s healthand natural riches.

With this report, we try to present an overall view of thestate of nature throughout the world. To obtain this, weexamine the tendencies of nearly 15,000 populations ofover 3,700 species, which also allows us to display areliable image of the state of the ecosystems they live inand the impacts caused by human beings.

Unfortunately, the conclusions cannot be more alarming.The world populations of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birdsand mammals diminished by nearly 58 percent between1970 and 2012, and by 2020, if the current trend continues,they will foreseeably have diminished by up to 67 percent,the principal causes being the loss and degradation ofhabitats and the over-exploitation of species. This isendangering the basis of the natural resources and servicesthat ecosystems offer us.

The most recent data on our ecological footprint also showthat we are asphyxiating the planet for the first time inhistory, since in order to satisfy our current needs,humanity is consuming a quantity of natural resourcesequivalent to 1.6 planets. If we continue at this rate, weshall need 2.5 planets by 2050 to meet human demands.

There is no doubt that humanity’s relationship with natureand the planet has already changed profoundly, and thatwe have entered the Anthropocene era, an epoch markedby grand transformations on a planetary scale, noticeablewithin a single generation and unforeseeable in theirconsequences.

One of the most disturbing and striking conclusions of oursurvey of nature is that there is a dramatic and alarmingdescent in populations of freshwater vertebrates, whichhave fallen by 81 percent, while populations of terrestrialspecies have diminished by 38 percent, and of marinespecies by 36 percent. This clearly shows the profounddegradation of aquifers, rivers, lakes and wetlands aroundthe world.

On this occasion, we have placed the emphasis of theLiving Planet Report on the impact of the current foodsystem on nature, showing it once again to be clearlyunsustainable. Agriculture already occupies a third of thesurface area of land on the planet, and is responsible for 69percent of fresh water extractions. Together with the restof the food system, it generates nearly a third ofgreenhouse gas emissions. We can state without questionthat we produce badly and eat worse, and that we wasteour food in spite of its cost, since a third of it ends up in the garbage.

The intensive use of water for agriculture, pollution, and the construction of massive infrastructures that aretransforming and fragmenting rivers are the principalcauses of the disappearance of biodiversity and theprofound degradation of the freshwater ecosystems thatare vital for our economy and well-being.

However, the Living Planet Report also presents realsolutions and alternatives within the reach of all to ensurethere will be enough water for our needs while preservingthe health of the rivers, lakes and wetlands it comes from.Examples include the application of more efficient andintelligent irrigation systems, or improving the planningand governance of water with greater participation by allthe agents involved so that river basins will be managed as the complex and hugely diverse living systems they are.

When we talk of “water supply networks” we traditionallyrefer to the set of infrastructures—dams, canals, pipelines,reservoirs, water treatment plants—that make it possiblefor drinking water to reach our cities and homes, nearlyalways forgetting that water does not come from a tap. Itcomes from ecosystems, and from nature.

Forests, rivers and wetlands are essential components ofliving networks, which are much more complex thanartificial ones, and make it possible for human beings tohave water available for drinking, irrigation ormanufacture, and even for inspiration, enjoyment orprayer. Healthy aquatic ecosystems are the sole guaranteefor possessing water resources of sufficient quality andquantity for current uses and those of future generations.

While water supply networks formed by concreteinfrastructures are faced with the challenge ofmodernization in order to reduce losses and profit betterfrom the resource, the water supply networks of naturehave to cope with increasing pressure from human beings,who mistreat them as badly as they need them.

Throughout their history, humans have intervened at willin the natural water cycle with the aim of better usingresources. The courses of rivers have been modified andfragmented by large infrastructures in order to accumulatetheir water and place it at the disposal of demandwhenever necessary. Nearly half the volume of water ofthe world’s rivers has been altered by regulation work.When this is not enough, we transfer water from onehydrographic basin to another, perpetuating unsustainablemodels, instead of adapting development to endogenouscapacities. And we pump water from deeper and deeperaquifers, exhausting fossil resources to satisfyunsustainable demands. Some rivers no longer reach the

WATER, RENEWABLE ENERGY AND INFRASTRUCTURES 87


sea because their water resources are completelyexhausted along their course. In other cases, the watersare so polluted that few species can survive.

According to the World Economic Forum, the water crisisis one of the greatest risks facing humanity on a globalscale. The growing scarcity of water in more and moreareas of the planet is not a problem of the quantity ofwater but a reflection of the imbalance between demandand available resources. While there were thirty countriesin 1992 that suffered from water shortage or stress, thefigure had climbed to fifty by 2014. Guaranteeingaffordable water for all, free of pollution and sustainablymanaged, is in fact one of the key points on the globalagenda and the new Sustainable Development Goalsadopted by the United Nations.

Moreover, as our Living Planet Report shows, we havepropitiated and spread a model of production of energy,food and other goods that demands more and moreinvestment in infrastructures. Products irrigated withlocal water are consumed in a global market, but theimpact on hydro resources and the energy footprint isseldom internalized in the real cost of these resources, nordoes it find reflection in the final price of the products.

The “cheap” consumer goods enjoyed by the mostdeveloped countries are in fact very expensive, since thenon-inclusion of negative production externalitiesstimulates the continual construction of newinfrastructures to supply water or produce energy, and sobackfeeds a perverse system. A mirage of free and infinitewater is created, allowing and fostering an unsustainablegrowth of its consumption around the world, and causingshortages that eventually affect the population inproducing countries.

The planet does not have as much water as can be storedor transferred by artificial infrastructures, but as much asnature can give us. We have to agree on limits forextracting it which will allow the hydrological cycle to bemaintained in healthy and functional conditions, withwater of sufficient quantity and quality in drainage basinsand aquifers. Such agreement on limitations is vitalbecause it is the water maintained in nature that will allowthe ecosystem to keep functioning, and so permit theresource to be managed suitably.

We humans demand water from nature without stoppingto think how essential it is for the quality and degree of theconservation of the biodiversity and ecosystems thatproduce, purify and transport it. But we have caused suchsevere impacts on aquatic ecosystems that it is

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Agriculture alreadyoccupies a third of thesurface area of land on theplanet, and is responsiblefor 69 percent of freshwater extractions.Together with the rest of the food system, itgenerates nearly a third ofgreenhouse gas emissions


increasingly difficult to obtain enough water to satisfy ourbasic needs.

Investment in the ecological restoration of natural waternetworks and green infrastructures should be a priorityfor all water-related public and private sectors, since whenthey function correctly, they provide high-quality water,prevent serious natural catastrophes like floods, andreduce damage and maintenance costs for artificialinfrastructures and networks.

It is unfortunately not always possible to restore nature toits original state, but many of the wounds caused byhuman activity can be healed. Thus, degraded and evendestroyed river ecosystems can be revived. However, mostinvestment is still aimed at the construction of artificialnetworks, and only a marginal effort is currently beingmade to preserve and recover natural infrastructures.

We are already experiencing the first impacts of climatechange, one of whose most serious manifestations will bethe modification of the water cycle in many parts of theplanet, with variations in precipitation patterns,evaporation and water temperature that will have graveconsequences for ecosystems, biodiversity and thesubsistence of hundreds of millions of people whose lives,in one way or another, are closely linked to water.

In the face of this threat, the solution currently proposedis to pour the scant available resources into theconstruction of new infrastructure. If all the damscurrently planned or under construction forhydroelectric power or irrigation were finished, wewould lose 93 percent of the natural volume of water ofthe world’s rivers.

From our point of view, the chief investment should bededicated precisely to a massive deployment of renewableenergies, a reduction in water consumption throughinnovation in more sustainable forms of production, andthe restoration of degraded ecosystems in order toincrease their resilience to climate change and allow themto continue to provide their services as naturally aspossible. Investment in infrastructures and artificialnetworks should be left for those cases where they areaccredited as necessary to ensure supply or treat waste.

Finally, it is vital to change the current perspective of mostpublic administrations and of the private sector, whichapparently still believe that the water in our rivers shouldbe used up to the last drop, on the grounds that it oughtnot be allowed to be “wasted in the sea,” instead ofaccepting the necessity of leaving enough water fornatural processes and biodiversity to complete their cycle.

At the same time, it is essential to make progress in theeffective conservation of drainage basins, making firmefforts to create new protected areas where the collectionand purification of water will be guaranteed throughoutthe system, and also to provide other services contributedby the ecosystems. Management therefore needs to evolvetoward an understanding that ecosystems and naturalwater supply networks are not competing with it for theresource, but are its closest ally when it comes tocapturing, storing, channeling and purifying water, andthat there are other vital objectives to be fulfilled, such asthe transport of sediments and the connectivity andmobility of the species that give the river its life.

When one lives in a city like mine, Quito, where the supplyof something as vital as water is closely dependent on thehealth of an ecosystem as fragile as the plateaus thatcapture water from the atmosphere and act as hydraulicregulators that stabilize the water volume of rivers, it iseasy to appreciate the importance of viewing natural watersupply networks from an integral perspective, preservingthem so that they can fulfill their function as “waterfactories,” and tackling the wide range of threats they face,climate change included.

Fortunately, there is for the first time a consensus amonggovernments, the private sector and society as a whole onthe need for change, and this is permitting progress thatwas unthinkable only a short time ago. Examples includethe Paris Agreement on climate change; the approval ofthe Sustainable Development Goals, which for the firsttime bring together the economic, social andenvironmental agendas; and the New Urban Agenda, theresult of the Habitat III summit held in Quito. They willprove enormously important for improving themanagement of water across the planet.

An evolution away from our current unsustainable use ofwater is the responsibility of all, and our success willdepend on whether we are able to change quickly and inunison towards a model of development respectful of thenature and ecosystems which maintain our society andeconomy. Only by giving top priority to the care andrestoration of the ecosystems that form natural watersupply networks will our children and grandchildren be asfortunate as we are in continuing to enjoy the so-called“blue gold” of the twenty-first century.



The Future of Renewable Energies

Sven Teske

Sven Teske is director of research of the Institute forSustainable Futures (ISF) at the University ofTechnology Sidney and former director of RenewableEnergies for Greenpeace.

Over the past decades significant progress has been madein the development of renewable energies, andtechnologies are now mature. Especially wind and solarphotovoltaic power have achieved economies of scalethrough a combination of market support programs,technology improvements and mass production; therenewable energy industry has successfully moved into themainstream. However, compared to the vast globalpotential of all renewable energy sources, the currentmarket volume shows only a glimpse of what it could be inthe future. While wind and solar photovoltaic powerdominate the discussion around renewables, there is ahuge variety of different technologies available, and eachtechnology has a specific area of application.

Towards a Global Share of 100 Percent Renewable Energy Supply

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)published in 2012 the most comprehensive data collectionreport about renewable energy currently available—theSpecial Report on Renewable Energy (Edenhofer et al.2012). According to this survey, renewable energytechnologies available today could supply two and a halftimes the present total energy demand from China orEurope, while Africa could generate two hundred times itsenergy demand with renewable energy. Thus, renewableenergy potential is not a limiting factor to achieve fullglobal supply.

Despite the Huge Renewable Energy Potential, Less Is More

Using energy efficiently is cheaper than producing newenergy from scratch, and often has many other benefits.An efficient washing machine or dishwasher, for example,uses less power and saves water too. Efficiency inbuildings doesn’t mean going without comfort—on thecontrary, it should provide a higher level of comfort. Forexample, a well-insulated house will feel warmer in thewinter, cooler in the summer and be healthier to live in. Anefficient refrigerator is quieter, has no frost inside orcondensation outside, and will probably last longer.Efficient lighting offers more light where you need it.Efficiency is thus really better described as “more withless.” There are very simple steps to achieve efficiency,both at home and in businesses and industries, such asupdating or replacing separate systems or appliances thatwill save both money and energy. The biggest savings,however, don’t come from incremental steps but fromrethinking the whole concept—the whole house, the

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whole car or even the whole transport system. In this way,energy needs can often be cut back by a factor of four toten. Energy efficiency is based on the following pillars:

— The implementation of best practice technologies and acertain share of emerging technologies, observingenergy efficiency standards.

— Behavioral changes, e.g. reducing the average roomtemperature.

— Structural changes, such as shifts from individual fossil-fuel cars towards electric public transport.

— Updating equipment and installations, replacing them atthe end of their (economic) lifetime, e.g. switching toLED lighting.

Thus energy efficiency is not a homogenous sector, andinvolves a large number of technologies and measures.While the renewable energy markets can be clearlydefined with a small amount of technical and financialparameters, measuring the development of energyefficiency is complex. Without energy efficiency, theglobal demand would be 826 EJ/a – 251 EJ/a higher thantoday. In other words, the energy efficiency measures ofthe past twenty-five years saved the equivalent to China,India and Europe’s energy demand combined. Between1990 and 2014 global primary energy intensity droppedcontinuously for more than two decades by an averageannual rate of 1.5 percent. In 2015 energy intensity wasmore than 30 percent lower than in 1990. Nonetheless,global economic growth has been far greater, resulting insteady net growth in energy demand, which increased by56 percent between 1990 and 2014 with an average annualgrowth rate of 1.9 percent.

Sectorial Changes

Within the energy industry, the power sector experiencedthe most rapid changes over the past decade. Wind poweris now among the cheapest new power plant technologies,and solar photovoltaic systems achieved grid parity inmany countries. In 2015, every second newly built powerplant was based on renewable energy technologies. Thedevelopment of wind and solar photovoltaic power hasbeen outstanding, and it already has significantly changedthe way utilities operate.

In 2015, about half of the total world final energyconsumption was used to generate heat (REN21 2016).The overall global consumption of heat energy over thepast decade, however, only grew at an average annual rate

of less than 1 percent. While cooling demand continues toincrease as a result of improved energy access—manly indeveloping countries with warm climate and risingaverage global temperatures—the proliferation of highlyenergy-efficient buildings and passive solar architecturecontributes to reduce heat demand. In the building sector,biomass and solar thermal energy account for the vastmajority of modern renewable heat. By contrast, in thepower sector the available statistical data for heatingconsumption is incomplete. Bioenergy dominatesrenewable heat production in the industry sector witharound 10 percent of total demand.

While renewable power generation continues to enjoydouble-digit growth rates, renewable heating and coolingtechnologies have grown at a much slower rate. This ispartly due to the small-scale nature of this sector, as wellas the multiple decision-making processes encounteredprimarily at the customer level. More complex, andtherefore fewer, renewable energy support policies havealso hindered growth in this sector.

But the greatest challenges in the switch from fossil fuelsto renewables are found in the transport sector. There arethree main entry points for renewable energy in thissector: the use of 100 percent liquid biofuels or biofuelsblended with conventional fuels; the growing role ofnatural gas vehicles and infrastructure that can bepowered with gaseous biofuels; and the increasingelectrification of transportation.

A transition towards 100 percent renewable energy startswith a technical and modal shift. Three main measuresmust be adopted in order to develop a more energy-efficient and sustainable transport system in the future,with a focus on:

— Reducing transport demand.

— Shifting transport modes from high to low energyintensity.

— Improving energy efficiency through the developmentof technology.

The remaining energy demand will have to be fulfilledusing sustainable biomass and by replacing combustionengines for electric drives in multiple vehicles. However,the shipping and aviation sector in particular, but alsoheavy-duty trucks and construction vehicles, cannot beelectrified with the technologies currently available. Thus,fossil fuels must be replaced with synfuels, hydrogen andrenewable methane produced from renewables. Electricityis required to produce these fuels, which will significantly



increase future electricity demand. The EuropeanEnvironment Agency (EEA) commissioned an assessmentthat calculated the future impacts of greater electricvehicle use on Europe’s energy system, and associatedemissions from the road transport and energy sectors(EEA 2016). Should the share of electric vehicles inEurope rise to 80 percent by 2050 the electricity demandwill rise significantly. According to the research, the shareof Europe’s total electricity consumption from electricvehicles will increase from approximately 0.03 percent in2014 to around 4–5 percent by 2030 and 9.5 percent by2050. By 2050, an additional power plant capacity of150GW would be needed in order to charge all the electriccars of the European Union. Furthermore, this additionalenergy needs to be integrated into the grid infrastructureacross Europe. The critical matters raised by thisassessment are therefore how much electricity will beneeded to cope with Europe’s added demand, what type ofgeneration is used to cover this additional electricitydemand, and how could charging peaks be managed.

Balance Variable Wind and Solar Generation with Inter-Sectorial Management and Storage

Currently, the power, transport and heating sectors are toa large extent separate, due to the different energysources and infrastructures relevant to each of them.While the power sector is limited to the power grid, theheating sector depends largely on gas grids and—in somecases—district heating pipeline systems. The transportsector is currently disconnected from both the power andheating sectors, with its infrastructure primarily focusedon the distribution of oil via tankers, pipelines and fillingstations. Public transport, on the other hand, does alreadyhave links to the power sector, as the electricity used intrains, trams and the metro systems originates from thepower sector.

With increased electrification, the power sector willprogressively merge with the heating and transportsectors. At the same time, renewables do not need fuel,which will have a significant influence on oil, gas and coalmining companies. Finally renewable power generation—especially solar photovoltaic energy—may move closer toconsumers and, if decentralized renewables continue togrow, may generate electricity in small units on the side ofdemand. Should this be the case, the capacity of a singlecentralized conventional power plant would bedistributed across several thousand locations, whichwould require a significant change in the business modelof traditional utilities.

Technology Trends for Renewable Power Management

Increased market share of renewable energies in thepower sector necessitates more infrastructural changesand new power grid management. However the task ofintegrating renewable energy technologies into existingpower systems is similar in all power systems around theworld, whether they are large, centralized systems orisland ones. Thorough forward planning is needed toensure that the available production can match demand at all times. In addition to balancing supply and demand atall times, the power system must also be able to fulfilldefined power quality standards such as voltage andfrequency stability, which may require additional technicalequipment in the power system and support from differentancillary services. Furthermore, power systems must beable to cope with extreme situations such as suddeninterruptions of supply in case of a fault at a generationunit or interruption of the transmission system.

The integration of renewable energy into a smart gridchanges the need for base load power. In countries such asSpain, Denmark and Germany as well as in SouthAustralia, wind and solar power plants already providemore than 30 percent of daily demand on certain days.This redefines the need for base load power. Instead, theload has to be followed in the daytime and the night by acombination of flexible energy providers, such as solarphotovoltaic systems complemented by gas, geothermaland wind sources, and demand management. Such a mixof different technologies can form a resilient power supply,but requires a significant change in the business model ofutility companies.

Storage Technologies: The Cascade Approach

Once the share of electricity from variable renewablesources exceeds 30–35 percent, energy storage isnecessary in order to compensate for generation shortagesor to store potential surplus electricity generated duringwindy and sunny periods. Today, storage technology isavailable for different stages of development, scales ofprojects, and for meeting both short- and long-term energystorage needs. Short-term storage technologies cancompensate for output fluctuations that last only a fewhours, whereas longer term or seasonal storagetechnologies can bridge the gap over several weeks. Thereis no one-size-fits-all technology for storage. Along theentire supply and demand chain, different storagetechnologies are required to cover the exact needs inregard to storage time—from second reserve for frequency

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stability to seasonal storage of several months. A cascadeof different storage technologies is required to support thelocal integration of power generation from variablerenewable energy (VRE) in distribution networks, supportthe grid infrastructure to balance VRE power generation,and support self-generation and self-consumption of VREby customers.

Generation Side Management for 24/7 Supply

Load varies over time and additional flexible powergenerating resources are required to provide the rightamount of power. For rural areas, typical technologies arecombined-cycle gas turbines (CCGT) or hydropowerstations with a sufficient storage capacity to follow thedaily load variations. The impact of adding renewablepower generation to a conventionally centralized powersystem will affect the way in which a conventionallydesigned electricity system runs. The level of impactdepends on the renewable energy technology (Teske et al.2014). Biomass-, geothermal-, concentrated solar powerplants (CSP) and hydropower with storage can regulatepower output and can supply both, base and peak loads.Meanwhile solar photovoltaic, wind power and hydropower plants without storage depend on available naturalresources, so the power output is variable. Sometimesthese renewable energy sources are described as“intermittent” power sources; however, this terminology isnot correct as intermittent stands for uncontrollable andnon-dispatchable. In fact, the power output of thesegeneration plants can already be forecasted with a highdegree on certainty and power output can be reduced,hence they can be dispatched.

The Energy System of the Future Uses Cross-SectorialDemand and Supply Management

New (battery) storage capacity is still expensive andunable to provide long-term seasonal storage; the mostefficient hydro pump storage facilities cannot be expandedeverywhere. Therefore, the interconnection of power gridswith district heating pipelines, gas pipelines (for power-to-gas) and railway power lines offers a vast range of newpossibilities. Storage of “surplus” wind and solar power inthe form of heat via heat pumps or gas via electrolysis or inthe batteries of electric vehicles, as well as demandmanagement of numerous applications help to integratemore variable power generation capacity. The futureenergy system uses the full range of technologies across allenergy sectors to distribute generation and manage

demand. A utility company will therefore develop newbusiness concepts and related support policies. The realchallenge might not be the technologies, but a stable andconsistent policy framework, which requires long-termthinking. The interconnection of systems offers newbusiness opportunities and will most likely lead to a moreresilient energy supply.

References

Edenhofer, Ottmar, Rafael Pichs-Madruga, Youba Sokona, KristinSeyboth, Patrick Matschoss, Susanne Kadner, Timm Zwickel, PatrickEickemeier, Gerrit Hansen, Steffen Schlömer and Christoph vonStechow, eds. 2012. Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation. Cambridge: University Press.http://www.ipcc.ch/report/srren/.

EEA (European Environmental Agency). 2016. “Electric Vehicles and the Energy Sector - Impacts on Europe’s Future Emissions.”http://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/transport/electric-vehicles/electric-vehicles-and-energy/.

REN21. 2016. Global Status Report Renewables 2016. Paris: Ren21Secretariat. http://www.ren21.net/status-of-renewables/global-status-report/.

Teske, Sven, Tom Brown, Eckehard Tröster, Peter-Philipp Schierhornand Thomas Ackermann. 2014. powE[R] 2030. Hamburg: Greenpeace.http://www.greenpeace.de/files/publications/201402-power-grid-report.pdf.



Landscape Literacy and Design for EcologicalDemocracy

Anne Whiston Spirn

Anne Whiston Spirn is a landscape architect. Her work is devoted principally to the promotion ofcommunities of sustainable life. Since 2000 she hastaught landscape architecture and planning at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and shewon the International Cosmos Prize in 2001.

Nature is the word Raymond Williams called “perhapsthe most complex word in the [English] language”(Williams 1983, 219). It originally described a quality—theessential character of something. Nature is an abstraction,writes Williams, a set of ideas for which many cultureshave no one name. The abstraction of the word itselfconceals radical differences in definition from culture toculture, even among individuals within the same culture(Spirn 1997).1

For me, nature is not a place, like a park or a wilderness,and not a particular feature, like a tree or a river. For me,nature consists of the creative and life-sustainingprocesses that connect everything in the biological worldand the physical universe, including humans. Thesechemical, physical, and biological processes interact withsocial, economic, political, and cultural processes, overtime, to produce landscapes. I use the word landscape asfreely as I use nature sparingly, for I hope to recover theoriginal meanings of the word in Old English and Nordiclanguages: the mutual shaping of people and place (Olwig1996; Spirn 1998). Landscape, in its original sense, is notmere scenery. It encompasses both the population of aplace and its physical features: its topography, water flow,and plant life; its infrastructure of streets and sewers; itsbuildings and open spaces.

Individuals and societies inscribe their values, beliefs,ideas, and identity in the landscapes they create, leaving alegacy of stories told and read through a language oflandscape with its own elements, pragmatics, and poetics(Spirn 1998). The language of landscape is a powerful tool.It permits people to perceive pasts they cannot otherwiseexperience, to anticipate the possible, to envision, choose,and shape the future landscape.

Since 1987, West Philadelphia’s Mill Creek watershed andneighborhood (among the poorest in Philadelphia) hasbeen my laboratory to test and generate ideas about thelandscape language, landscape literacy, the “three E’s” ofsustainable development (environment, economics, andequity), and what Randolph Hester has called “ecologicaldemocracy,” or how to restore urban ecosystems andrebuild community in synergistic ways (Spirn 1998; Hester2010).2 Landscape literacy enabled Mill Creek residents toread the environmental, social, economic, and politicalstories embedded in their local landscape and gave them away to formulate new stories, to envision how totransform their neighborhood, to both challenge and workwith public officials.3

Reading the Landscape of Mill Creek

The landscape of West Philadelphia’s Mill Creekneighborhood is a catalogue of the failures of twentieth-

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century urban policy, planning, and design.4 The USFederal Housing Administration’s guidelines forunderwriters, first spelled out in the 1930s, included therace of a neighborhood’s population and the age of itsbuildings; these guidelines contributed to redlining, thebanking practice of refusing to grant loans for thepurchase of properties on the basis of location (Hillier2003). Urban renewal projects of the 1950s, such as thepublic housing towers inserted into this neighborhood ofsmall-scale rowhouses, had devastating effects on theplace they sought to improve and contributed to the racialsegregation of a neighborhood where blacks and whiteshad lived next door to one another, in identical rowhouses,for at least a century. New parks, playgrounds, andstreetscapes built in the 1960s cracked and subsidedwithin a few decades of construction, and a public housingproject built in the 1950s was demolished recently.

Mill Creek is among the poorest neighborhoods inPhiladelphia, yet it is home to many well-educated,middle-class residents, almost all African-American.Boarded-up storefronts speak of failed ventures, but otherinstitutions, like the numerous community gardens,flourish. Blocks of vacant land and wasted structuresborder blocks of well-tended houses and gardens. Thereare patterns to how and where abandonment occurs. Suchpatterns reveal the nature of Mill Creek and are key to itsfuture (Spirn, Pollio and Cameron 1991).

The single feature of the Mill Creek landscape that hashad the most significant, persistent, and devastating effectis the least recognized: the buried floodplain of the formercreek (from which the neighborhood takes its name) andthe hydrological processes that continue to shape it.

The Mill Creek once drained about two-thirds of WestPhiladelphia, and its sewer still does. The creek itself onceflowed above ground, the water’s erosive force in mainchannel and tributaries cut valleys from its tributaries inthe north to its mouth at the Schuylkill River.

By the late nineteenth century, the creek was pollutedby wastes from slaughterhouses, tanneries, andhouseholds. In the 1880s, it was buried in a sewer, itsfloodplain filled in and built upon, but it still drains thestorm water and carries all the wastes from half of WestPhiladelphia and from suburbs upstream. Each newsuburb built in the watershed poured more sewage andstorm water into the sewer. The size of the pipe—abouttwenty feet in diameter—is now too small for thequantity of combined sewage and storm water it mustconvey after major rainstorms.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the ground fellin, here and there, along the line of the sewer. The creekundermined buildings and streets and slashed meandering

diagonals of shifting foundations and vacant land acrossthe urban landscape.

In 1945 Pennsylvania enacted enabling legislation forfederally-funded redevelopment under the UrbanRedevelopment Law. Three years later, the city designatedthe Mill Creek neighborhood as a redevelopment area andhired architect Louis Kahn to produce a plan. In 1950,following a sewer collapse near 47th and FairmountStreets, Kahn was also commissioned to design the MillCreek Housing Project on several square blocks near thecave-in. The public housing was built, as were play fieldsand ball courts on other blocks that had fallen in. Landdirectly over the sewer pipe was maintained as open lawnor parking lots, but much of the public housing was builton the buried floodplain. There have been no major cave-ins in recent years, but sinking streets, playgrounds, andparking lots and shifting building foundations continue toplague the area. Between 1950 and 1970, the overallpopulation of the Mill Creek neighborhood declined by 27percent. Given the outward flow of population and capitaland the inward flow of sewage and groundwater, theabundance of vacant land and deteriorating or abandonedproperties in Mill Creek, by the 1980s, was not surprising.

The West Philadelphia Landscape Project

For nearly thirty years I have worked in and studied MillCreek, both the neighborhood and the larger watershed:first, from 1987 to 1991, as part of a larger landscape planand “greening” project for West Philadelphia; then, since1994, as the primary focus of my research. By the end ofthe first phase of the West Philadelphia LandscapeProject in 1991, my students, colleagues, and I had madeproposals for the strategic reuse of vacant urban land inthe Mill Creek watershed and had designed dozens ofgardens (Spirn and Pollio 1990; Spirn, Pollio and Cameron1991, Spirn 1991). During the first phase of the project(1987–1991), and for years following, I had hoped toconvince the City Planning Commission and thePhiladelphia Water Department that the buried creek wasboth a force to be reckoned with and a resource to beexploited, but, when the city’s Plan for West Philadelphiawas published in 1994, it failed to mention the buriedfloodplain and the hazards it posed. That same year, thecity donated a large parcel of vacant land for theconstruction of subsidized housing for first-time, low-income homeowners. This latter project was especiallytroubling, for the site was on the buried floodplain.

When the West Philadelphia Landscape Project began in1987, I did not intend a long-term involvement. However,the City Planning Commission’s disregard for the health,safety, and welfare of Mill Creek residents renewed my



commitment. It also prompted new realizations that bothsharpened and enlarged the questions my research soughtto answer. Confronted with skepticism about theexistence and dangers of the buried floodplain, I began tounderstand this resistance as a form of illiteracy—aninability on the part of public officials, developers, and even Mill Creek residents themselves to read the landscape.

I organized my teaching and research to explore theseissues. From 1994 to 2001, students in my classes at theUniversity of Pennsylvania and at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology analyzed the urban watershed,demonstrated how storm water could be collected inlandscape projects that are also stormwater detentionfacilities, and created designs for wetlands, water gardens,and environmental study areas on vacant land in the MillCreek neighborhood. When the West PhiladelphiaLandscape Project website was launched in early 1996, itfeatured the database, reports, and projects built from 1987to 1991. Since then, it has been a showcase for ongoingwork (www.wplp.net).

To reach a broad spectrum of the Mill Creek population,my students and I launched a program with a publicschool in the Mill Creek neighborhood. What began as acommunity-based, environmental education programorganized around the urban watershed grew into aprogram on landscape literacy and communitydevelopment. From 1996 to 2001, hundreds of children atSulzberger and students at the University of Pennsylvanialearned to read the neighborhood’s landscape; they tracedits past, deciphered its stories, and told their stories aboutits future, some of which were built. The tools they usedwere their own eyes and imagination, the place itself, andhistorical documents such as maps, photographs,newspaper articles, census tables, and redevelopmentplans. The program had four parts: reading landscape,proposing landscape change, building landscapeimprovements, and documenting these proposals andaccomplishments. The first two parts were incorporatedinto university and middle-school curricula during theacademic year; all four were integrated in a four-weeksummer program.

I was warned that Sulzberger was shunned by manyteachers in the Philadelphia School District; itsreputation seemed to stem from the students’ weakperformance on standardized tests (among the worst ofmiddle schools in the city) and by the fact that theneighborhood had a dangerous reputation. Like theresidents of Mill Creek, all the students (and mostteachers) were African American. At the start of the firstyear of the expanded program in fall 1996, a Sulzbergerteacher told me that her students called their

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There is an even greaterinjustice than inequitableexposure to harsh conditions:the internalization of shamefor one’s neighborhood


neighborhood “The Bottom.” So they already know it’s ina floodplain? “No, they mean it’s at the bottom.” Bothmeanings of the word can be read in the area around theSulzberger Middle School: standing water after rain;slumping streets and sidewalks; vacant house lots,rubble-strewn; whole square blocks of abandoned land,men standing around street corners on a workdayafternoon, jobless.

To change the teachers’ and students’ perceptions thatthe Mill Creek landscape was divorced from the naturalworld was quite a challenge. It was equally hard topersuade students that the neighborhood had ever beendifferent or that it might be changed. When my studentsspoke of designs for change, the children told them allthe reasons the proposals would fail. “It won’t happen.”“Someone will wreck it.” Studying the history of theneighborhood proved to be the key that unlocked thestudents’ imagination.

“You mean, there really was a creek!?” a thirteen-year-oldexclaimed in April 1997 as she examined a photographfrom 1880 showing a stream, a mill, workmen dwarfed bythe huge sewer they were building, and new rowhouses inthe distance. The idea was to encourage the children toform the habit of looking for significant detail, framingquestions, and reasoning out possible answers. The goalwas that, after reading these documents describing thehistory of their neighborhood, the students would transferthis process to the reading of the landscape itself.

Landscape literacy entails more than reading, it meansshaping landscape also. Each student made a proposal forhow the creek might be transformed from a liability into aneighborhood asset. The essays and drawings werepublished at the end of the school year in a booklet withone-sentence reviews by the mayor of Philadelphia andcity councilmen, among others.5 At the end of April, theSulzberger students, together with their Penn mentors,gave a public presentation on the history of Mill Creek,illustrated with slides and posters, at a symposium held atthe University of Pennsylvania.

At the beginning of the semester, Sulzberger studentsdescribed their neighborhood in negative terms and saidthey would not live in Mill Creek if they had a choice.Only one student said she planned to attend college. Twomonths later, all but one student said they planned toattend college. The teacher reported that his students’performance in all subjects had improved dramatically.He attributed this to the Mill Creek Project: to the waythat primary materials challenged and made history realfor the children and to their growing perception of howtheir own lives and landscape were related to the largercity, region, and nation.

From 1998, Sulzberger Middle School and the Mill CreekProject received increasing local, national, andinternational recognition. The Sulzberger portion of theWest Philadelphia Landscape Project website ledPennsylvania’s governor to invite students fromSulzberger to make a five-minute presentation as part ofhis 1998 Budget Speech to the State Legislature. Later thatyear, the Philadelphia School District named Sulzberger“School of the Month” and produced a televisiondocumentary on the Mill Creek Project and the school’sinnovations. In 1999 Sulzberger was the subject of a reporton NBC Evening News, a national television program. In2000, President Bill Clinton visited the school.

Recognition for the Mill Creek Project and for Sulzbergerteachers and students opened doors to othercollaborations. In 2001, the Philadelphia WaterDepartment, Philadelphia Housing Authority, and thePhiladelphia City Planning Commission submitted aproposal for $34.8 million to the US Department ofHousing and Urban Development’s Hope VI Program inorder to redevelop Mill Creek Public Housing as ademonstration project that would provide anenvironmental study area for the school and integratestormwater management measures to reduce combinedsewer overflows. The proposal was successful, and thecity cleared the site in November 2002 and broke groundin August 2003 on the project.

I was confident that things were going well for MillCreek. Then the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania tookcontrol of the Philadelphia School District and grantedresponsibility for the management of Sulzberger, amongother schools, to Edison, Inc., a corporationheadquartered in New York. In 2004, I learned that thewater department’s demonstration project in Mill Creekwould not be built as envisioned. New houses would bebuilt, but the program to integrate stormwatermanagement to improve water quality was curtailed aswas the collaboration with Sulzberger. Confronting thesefailures, I remembered the children’s initial skepticismabout prospects for change: “It won’t happen....Someonewill wreck it.”

Education, poverty, crime, transportation, housing:“There’s no money in America in the twenty-first centuryto deal with those things,” observed Howard Neukrug,who founded the Office of Watersheds in 1999 and wasappointed Philadelphia Water Commissioner in 2011.“But, there is this money that we’re spending to improvethe quality of water… For whatever reason, as a nation,we’ve prioritized combined sewer overflows.”6 With theUS Environmental Protection Agency threatening to levymajor fines on the city for polluting water, Neukrugpersuaded the Philadelphia Water Department to



embark on a visionary plan for reducing combined seweroverflows using green infrastructure: Green City, CleanWaters: Combined Sewer Long Term Control Plan Update(2009). Green City, Clean Waters is now recognized as anational landmark of policy, planning, and engineering. Itcalls for reducing impervious surfaces in the city by 30percent by 2020 in order to capture the first inch of rainto fall in a storm. If the plan works, it will save the citybillions of dollars and has the potential to provide manyother benefits, including jobs, education, andneighborhood development. But will it work (physically),and can it be done (economically, politically)?

To help test and refine Philadelphia’s plan, in 2010 and2011, my MIT students studied the ultra-urban MillCreek Watershed from the headwaters of Mill Creek toits mouth and found that mistakes of the past persisteven as this visionary plan is put forward. Ironically, overthe past decade, the City of Philadelphia built newhouses on former vacant land in the Mill Creekneighborhood, including many on the buried floodplainof Mill Creek. The strong pattern of vacant land on theburied floodplain is no longer as clear as it was, and theopportunities for addressing the city’s combined seweroverflow problem there have been diminished.Furthermore, few residents of the inner-cityneighborhoods along the buried creek know about GreenCity, Clean Waters, and they lack the former Sulzbergerstudents’ landscape literacy. They do not read theintertwined stories their landscape tells of buried creek,undermined foundations, abandoned houses, vacantland, and community gardens. Without grasping thosestories, it is difficult to envision how new landscapesmight rebuild the neighborhood while purifying thecity’s water.

My students and I continue to investigate how Green CityClean Waters can promote the three E’s of sustainabledevelopment. In fall 2015 and 2016, we worked on “FromGreen Schools to Neighborhood Transformation,” amodel program that integrates stormwater managementand environmental restoration with neighborhoodtransformation and with education and empowerment ofyouth (http://architecture.mit.edu/class/nature).

Landscape Literacy, Environmental Justice, and CityPlanning and Design

Mill Creek is shaped by all the processes at work ininner-city America. The correlation of a buried creekwith deteriorated buildings and vacant lands in inner-city neighborhoods is not unique to Philadelphia: similarsituations are found in Boston, New York, St. Louis, andmany other American cities (Spirn 1986 and 2000).

Twenty years ago, I thought that the worst effect oflandscape illiteracy was to produce environmentalinjustice in the form of physical hazards to health andsafety. The Sulzberger students showed me that there isan even greater injustice than inequitable exposure toharsh conditions: the internalization of shame for one’sneighborhood. Before the students at Sulzberger MiddleSchool learned to read their landscape more fully, theyread it partially. Without an understanding of how theneighborhood came to be, many believed that the poorconditions were the fault of those who lived there, aproduct of either incompetence or lack of care. Learningthat there were other reasons sparked a sense of relief.Once they had the knowledge and skill to read thelandscape’s history, they began to see their home in amore positive light. They came to consider the possibilityof alternative futures and brimmed with ideas. Secure intheir knowledge and their ability to reason, theychallenged public officials with confidence andimpressed them with articulate proposals. To read andshape landscape is to learn and teach: to know the world,to express ideas and to influence others.

Verbal literacy—the ability to read and write—iscommonly acknowledged as an essential skill for thecitizen to participate fully and effectively in a democraticsociety. Teaching literacy became a cornerstone of theAmerican civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.The “Citizenship School,” which began as a means toincrease voter registration through the promotion ofliteracy, evolved into a forum for discussion and catalystfor political action (Horton and Freire 1990). When, in1999, I first read about Myles Horton’s work with civilrights activists and Paolo Freire’s with adult literacyprograms in Brazil, I was struck by the many parallels tomy experience with landscape literacy in Mill Creek.

Like verbal literacy, landscape literacy is a culturalpractice that entails both understanding the world andtransforming it. One difference between verbal literacyand landscape literacy, however, is that manyprofessionals responsible for planning, designing, andbuilding the city are not landscape literate. After sixweeks’ investigation into the history of theirneighborhood, the children were more literate thanmany professionals, and some of their proposals for theneighborhood were more astute. To be literate is torecognize both the problems in a place and its resources,to understand how they came about, by what means theyare sustained, and how they are related.

Landscape literacy should be a cornerstone ofcommunity development and of urban planning anddesign. To plan prudently is to transform problems intoopportunities and liabilities into resources, and to

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intervene at an appropriate scale. To design wisely is toread ongoing dialogues in a place, to distinguish enduringstories from ephemeral ones, and to imagine how to jointhe conversation. The stakes are high for those who mustlive in the places professionals help create. Like literacy,urban planning and design are cultural practices that caneither serve to perpetuate the inequities of existing socialstructures or to enable and promote democratic change.

Notes

1. For nearly thirty years, I have asked my students (the majority areNorth American, with many others from South America, Asia,Europe, and the Middle East) for their personal definition of nature.Their responses have included the following. Nature was given as atrust to humans by God. Nature is trees and rocks, everything excepthumans and the things humans make. Nature is a place where onecannot see the hand of humans, a place to be alone. Nature consistsof creative and life-sustaining processes which connect everythingin the physical and biological worlds, including humans. Nature is acultural construct with no meaning or existence outside humansociety. Nature is something that cannot be known. Nature is sacred.Nature is God.

2. Ecological democracy, as defined by Hester, combinesparticipatory and ecological approaches to design with the goal ofcreating places that are memorable, healthy, equitable, and welladapted to their natural environment (Hester 2010).

3. The idea of landscape literacy builds upon, but is distinctlydifferent from the idea of environmental legibility as developed byKevin Lynch (1964 and 1981) and others. It also differs from ideas ofenvironmental or ecological literacy (Orr 1992), primarily in itsemphasis on human as well as natural history, on landscape languageas a medium of action and expression, and its relevance to otherissues beyond sustainability.

4. This chapter draws from twenty-seven years of fieldwork and ofscholarly and participatory action research associated with the WestPhiladelphia Landscape Project, which I have directed since 1987.Sources include: historical documents such as census records, maps,plans, photographs, and newspaper articles; GIS maps, including theoverlay of diverse data, such as topography, income, and vacant land;photographic documentation; interviews; direct observation. Giventhe scope of the project and the limited length of this essay, it isimpossible to cite the diverse evidence and many sources for thearguments made here. More detailed citations will be documented inmy book-in-progress, with the working title, Top-Down/Bottom-Up:Restoring Nature, Rebuilding Community, Empowering Youth.

5. Power of Place: Essays about Our Mill Creek Neighborhood. Thetexts and drawings of this report are on the WPLP website, as arethe reflections of Sulzberger teacher Glen Campbell:http://web.mit.edu /wplp/sms/pub.htm. The name of the course wasinspired by Dolores Hayden’s book Power of Place (1995), which wasrequired reading for the course.

6. Howard Neukrug, personal communication, August 8, 2012. SeeGreen City, Clean Waters at www.wplp.net/stories. The Clean WaterAct of 1972 (amended in 1977 and 1987) gave the US EnvironmentalProtection Agency the power to enforce water quality standards.

References

Hester, Randolph. 2010. Design for Ecological Democracy. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.

Hillier, A. E. 2003. “Spatial Analysis of the Historical Redlining: AMethodological Approach.” Journal of Housing Research 14, no. 1: 137–167.

Horton, Myles and Paulo Freire. 1990. We Make the Road by Walking:Conversations on Education and Social Change. Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press.

Lynch, Kevin. 1964. Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

———. 1981. A Theory of Good City Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Olwig, Kenneth. 1996. “Recovering the Substantive Nature ofLandscape.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86, no.4: 630–53.

Orr, David W. 1992. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition toa Postmodern World. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Spirn, Anne Whiston. 1986. “Landscape Planning and the City.”Landscape and Urban Planning 13: 433–41.

———. 1991. The West Philadelphia Landscape Plan: A Framework forAction. Philadelphia: Department of Landscape Architecture, Universityof Pennsylvania. http://www.annewhistonspirn.com/pdf/spirn-wplp-plan.pdf.

———. 1997. “The Authority of Nature.” In Nature and Ideology, editedby Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks.http://www.annewhistonspirn.com/pdf/nature.pdf.

———. 1998. The Language of Landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-sity Press.

———. 2000. “Reclaiming Common Ground: Water, Neighborhoods,and Public Spaces.” In The American Planning Tradition, edited byRobert Fishman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.http://www.annewhistonspirn.com/pdf/reclaiming-common-ground.pdf.

Spirn, Anne Whiston and Michelle Pollio. 1990. “This Garden Is aTown.” Philadelphia: Department of Landscape Architecture, Univer-sity of Pennsylvania. http://www.annewhistonspirn.com/pdf/spirn-wplp-garden_town.

Spirn, Anne Whiston, Michelle Pollio and Mark Cameron. 1991. VacantLand: A Resource for Reshaping Urban Neighborhoods. Philadelphia:Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania.http://www.annewhistonspirn.com/pdf/spirn-wplp-vacant_land.pdf.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press.



Biodiversity in an Urbanized World

Ahmed Djoghlaf

Ahmed Djoghlaf is a former executive secretary of theUnited Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

Feeding the ever growing world population, particularlyin developing countries, in a more and more urbanizedenvironment and a warmer planet is one of the mostimportant challenges facing mankind. “Biodiversity is life.Biodiversity is our life,” this was the slogan of theworldwide celebration in 2010 of the International Yearof Biodiversity.

Healthy ecosystems provide social, economic andecological benefits as well as goods and services thatunderpin the world economy and, thereby, human well-being. However, according to the Global BiodiversityOutlook during the last decades human beings havechanged ecosystems more rapidly and intensely than everbefore in the history of humanity. Biodiversity is being lostat an unprecedented rate, thus threatening the verycapacity of the ecosystems to continue providing theirvital goods and services.

A recently released study reveals that during the last twodecades our planet has lost 10 percent of its wildernessareas. Since 1990 more than 3 million square kilometers ofwild areas, amounting roughly to the size of India, havebeen lost.

This is occurring despite the international communityconvened at the Rio Summit committing, through theadoption of legally binding international treaties such asthe United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, toconserve and sustainably use biodiversity.

Until recently 47 percent of the Earth’s surface wascovered in forest. By now, however, forest cover hascompletely vanished in twenty-five countries, and only10 percent remains in twenty-nine others. Every year 13 million hectares of forests continue to disappear, theequivalent to an area three times larger than Belgium. It is a well-established fact that tropical forests are therichest ecosystems in the planet in terms of biodiversity.Although they only represent 7 percent of the world’ssurface, tropical forests currently house up to 80 percentof all identified living species. And yet, approximately 35 percent of all mangroves have been destroyed in thelast years.

The extinction of animal and plant species is now betweenone hundred and one thousand times higher than thenatural rate. As demonstrated by the MillenniumEcosystem Assessment, the pressures exerted on theplanet’s natural functions by human activity have reachedsuch destructive levels that the ecosystems’ ability to meetthe needs of future generations is now seriously, andperhaps irretrievably, compromised.

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Scientists are of the view that humanity is in the midst ofthe sixth global mass extinction of species. For manybiologists the fate of biological diversity for the next tenmillion years will almost certainly be determined duringthe next 50–100 years by the activities of a single species:Homo sapiens.

The accelerated urbanization of the developing world,particularly in Africa, compounded by the negative effectsof climate change, is among the root causes of theaccelerated loss of biodiversity we are experiencing.

Since 2007 the world has witnessed a paradigm shift. Forthe first time in the history of mankind the urbanpopulation has surpassed the rural population. Such anirreversible trend has ushered in a new age, “the Homourbanus era.” The twenty-first century will be a century ofcities. Such an unprecedented evolution will have far-reaching implications on the future of mankind and willshape modern society.

Urban population growth is one of the most dramaticrecent changes affecting humanity. Two centuries ago only3 percent of the world population lived in cities. Today,more than 50 percent does. Most of this growth isoccurring in developing countries, which host the largestpart of the planet’s biodiversity.

According to the United Nations Population Fund theworld’s population will reach 9.2 billion in 2050, jumpingby 2.2 billion people between now and then. Such anincrease amounts to the total world population asrecently back as 1950. During the last two centuries therehas been a sevenfold upswing in the number of peopleliving in the world. Such an expansion will continue totake place, mainly in developing countries in general, andin Africa in particular.

The thick of this surge will happen in cities. The urbanpopulation will increase by fifty million people every year,almost the entire population of Spain and Portugalcombined. Over the three decades to come the urbanpopulation will grow by 1.1 million people every ten days.

In 1820, only three cities had a population of more thanone million inhabitants—namely, Tokyo, Beijing andLondon. By 1900 that number had risen to sixteen, and by1950 to fifty-four. Today more than 411 cities have apopulation in excess of one million people. Within twodecades their number will rise to over one thousand. In1950, only New York and Tokyo had a population of morethan ten million inhabitants. Today there are more thantwenty-two megacities—and all of them, with the

exception of New York and Tokyo, are located indeveloping countries.

In India, the urban population has multiplied by six sinceits independence in 1947. According to some estimatesmore than seven hundred million rural residents, theequivalent to the entire population of Europe, will migrateto Indian cities between now and 2050. Meanwhile, inChina in 2000 there were 3.7 million villages. That numberhas shrunk since to 2.6 million. Indeed, three hundredvillages disappear in the country every day. Yet over thecourse of the next decade China will build 50,000 newskyscrapers, the size of ten New Yorks.

Before 2025 another 221 cities will reach the one-million-people threshold. Europe, however, only has thirty-fivesuch cities. Ninety-five percent of the world’s urbanpopulation will be found in developing countries. Every month the urban population of developingcountries will grow by five million people, and by 2050 itwill have doubled.

The African continent will witness the most dramaticallyaccelerated urbanization process in the world. A reportissued by UNICEF in August 2014 titled Africa: Generation2030 confirmed that the African population will continueto grow steadily until the end of the twenty-first century.In 1950 Africa represented 9 percent of the worldpopulation. In 2050 one quarter of all humanity will beAfrican, and one child out of three will be African. Thecurrent African population is estimated to be 1.2 billion. Itwill reach 2.4 billion in 2050 and 4.2 billion by the end ofthis century.

Over the past half century Africa’s urban population hasincreased by a factor of eleven. In 1950, 14 percent of theAfrican population was urban. Today 40 percent of thecontinent’s total population is found in cities and by 2050that proportion will grow to 60 percent. Presently morethan 350 million Africans live in urban areas. In 2050 theirnumber will reach 1.2 billion people.

In 1950 not a single African city had a population of morethan one million people. By 1960 only Johannesburg hadbroken through that threshold. Today the number hasincreased to more than forty. The population of Lagos inNigeria is expected to double by 2030, reaching twenty-four million inhabitants, and the population of Cairo willreach twenty-five million.

The rate of urbanization in industrialized countries hasreached 75 percent. However, these countries continue tolose large portions of their agricultural land, as well astheir animal and vegetal diversity. The twenty-eight



countries that form the European Union are losing 1,000square kilometers of fertile land every year. In France60,000 hectares are lost owing to urbanization. In Austria,about 12 to 15 hectares of agricultural land are beingerased from the map every day. Every day, Germanytransforms about 110 to 120 hectares of land into streets,houses and other buildings. Meanwhile the need foragricultural soil is increasing due to the rising population,which is growing by about eighty-five million annually.

In 2050 more than 75 percent of the world population willlive in cities. At the end of this century, 90 percent of theworld population will be urban. Come 2030 four out offive urban citizens of the world will live in developingcountries. Cities represent only 2 percent of the land ofour planet but consume 75 percent of its resources andgenerate 80 percent of the CO2 emitted in the world.Cities, however, have always shaped the world economyand influenced modern societies.

If mismanaged, the accelerated urbanization of developingcountries may have a dramatic impact on the future ofmankind. The lack of awareness by local leaders andpolicy makers in developing countries of the importance,value and services provided by nature counts among themajor causes for this unprecedented loss of biodiversity. Itis for this reason that the first of the twenty Aichi Targetscontained in the 2011–2020 strategic plan for biodiversityadopted in 2010 by the international community is toensure that “[b]y 2020, at the latest, people are aware ofthe values of biodiversity and the steps they can take toconserve and use it sustainably.”

Ill-conceived urbanization will greatly contribute to globalwarming. However sustainable and livable cities are partof the response to the challenges posed by climate change.The World Health Organization reports that in 2012around seven million deaths, one in eight of total globalfatalities, came as a result of air pollution exposure. Thisfinding confirms that air pollution is now the world’slargest single environmental health risk. Reducing airpollution could save millions of lives. Trees not onlyprovide oxygen, they also absorb air particles.

During the heat wave of the summer of 2003, which led tothe death of more than twenty thousand people in France,the area of the Bois de Boulogne, owing to its vegetal cover,recorded temperatures three degrees centigrade lowerthan all other areas in Paris. It has been demonstrated thata vegetal cover of 10 percent can reduce the energyconsumption of a city by 5 to 10 percent. It has also beendemonstrated that cities with a large percentage of vegetalcover exhibit limited levels of violence. Furthermore, cities

with a large number of public spaces promote the creationof strong social ties among their inhabitants.

Scientists in Montreal have demonstrated that the risk ofanxiety is 21 percent higher for urban citizens, who aresubject to 39 percent more mood swings. Meanwhile therisk of developing schizophrenia is twice as large forpeople born in cities than for rural dwellers.

To accommodate the increased urbanization of the world,we would need to build a new city of more than one millioninhabitants every week. It is the way these cities areconceived which will determine the future of mankind.

Urbanization is not the enemy of sustainable development.Cities are not the problem: they are part of the solution.The former mayor of Curitiba, Jaime Lerner, rightlystated, “Cities are not necessarily the problem. They arenecessarily part of the solution.”

Cities are not the enemy of nature. Paris has more than2,000 animal species and almost the same number ofvegetal species. While biodiversity is diminishing in ruralareas, it is increasing in Paris, which boasts 15 squaremeters of green areas per capita; London offers 45 squaremeters per capita and Brussels 59; Berlin is home to morethan 8,000 wild boars and 2,000 foxes. The vegetal coverof Singapore is more than 16 percent of the surface of thestate-city, which is emerging as a worldwide leader ofurban ecology. Montreal has more than 1.2 million publictrees; cities like Barcelona, Bilbao, Los Angeles, Miami andPhiladelphia have successfully reinvented themselves.

However, the loss of biodiversity is not a necessaryconsequence of human activity, nor are cities unavoidablydoomed to unsound urban management. Soundurbanization and environmentally well-managed citiescan and do exist. Nevertheless, the cities at the forefrontof the promotion of biodiversity in urban areas have aresponsibility to share their experience with other citiesin the world. Indeed, even if urbanization is irreversible, itis the way it unfolds which will determine the future ofour species.

It was against this backdrop, and guided by the motto ofthe 1992 Rio Summit on Environment and Development,“think globally and act locally,” that I took the initiative, inmy capacity as the executive secretary of the UnitedNations Convention on Biological Diversity, to convene inMarch 2007 in Curitiba, Brazil, a meeting on “Cities andBiodiversity: Achieving the 2010 Biodiversity Target.” Themayors of cities that have hosted meetings of theConference of the Parties (COP) to the United NationsConvention on Biological Diversity as well as mayors of

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cities hosting a United Nations chapter were invited toshare experiences regarding the protection of biodiversityand discuss the various possibilities for cities to enhancetheir engagement towards the achievement of the threeobjectives of the convention. The Curitiba Declaration onCities and Biodiversity was adopted by the representativesof the thirty-four cities which attended this meeting.

Parallel to the 9th meeting of the Conference of the Partiesto the Convention on Biological Diversity, I convened inMay 2008 in Bonn a meeting under the theme “LocalAction for Biodiversity” to highlight the importance ofurban biological diversity. The fifty mayors from thirtycountries, representing over one hundred million urbandwellers, who attended this meeting adopted the “BonnCall for Action on Biological Diversity.” This documentwas submitted to the high-level segment of theConference of the Parties to the Convention, held with theparticipation of heads of state and government and morethan one hundred ministers of the environment.

For the first time ever, for any United Nationsenvironmental convention, cities spoke at the highest-levelforum, thus setting a precedent for future meetings of theConference of the Parties to the Convention and otherrelated intergovernmental processes.

This initiative culminated with the convening of a citysummit on biological diversity held in October 2010 inNagoya, Japan in relation with the 10th Conference of theParties. More than five hundred mayors and municipalleaders attended this meeting. For the first time a plan ofaction on sub-national governments, cities and other localauthorities for biodiversity was adopted by the eighteenthousand participants representing the 183 parties to theconvention. The objective of this plan is to:

a) Increase the engagement of sub-national governmentsand local authorities, in support of their parties, in thesuccessful implementation of national biodiversitystrategies and action plans, the Strategic Plan forBiodiversity 2011–2020, the 2020 target and the programsof work under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

b) Improve regional and global coordination and exchangeof lessons learned between Parties to the Convention onBiological Diversity, regional and global organizations,United Nations and development agencies, academia, anddonors on ways and means to encourage and support localauthorities to manage biodiversity sustainably, provideecosystem services to citizens and incorporate biodiversityconcerns into urban planning and development.

c) Identify, enhance and disseminate policy tools,guidelines, and programs that facilitate local action onbiodiversity and build the capacity of local authorities tosupport their national governments in implementing theConvention on Biological Diversity.

d) Develop awareness-raising programs on biodiversityfor local residents (including major groups such asbusinesses, local administrators, non-governmentalorganizations, youth and indigenous and localcommunities) in line with communication, education and public awareness strategies.

As demonstrated by the Paris Summit, held with theparticipation of more than 150 heads of state andgovernment, climate change is one of the most importantchallenges facing mankind. As stated by the secretary ofstate of the United State of America Mr. John Kerry inFebruary 2014 while visiting Indonesia, “climate change isan arm of mass destruction.”

Indeed, climate change has been identified as one of themain drivers of the unprecedented loss of biodiversity.According to the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange (IPPC) up to 30 percent of all known species maydisappear before the end of this century as a result ofclimate change.

However, green cities are part of the solution to climatechanges. Green cities are ideal partners for the successfulimplementation of the historical Paris Agreement onclimate change.

Therefore, if the establishment of the climate and citiesprogram through the C40 and the designation by thesecretary general of the United Nations Organization of aspecial representative on “cities and climate change” is awelcomed initiative, a similar program on cities andbiodiversity is urgently required. The need to establish apermanent platform on cities and biodiversity with a viewto promoting best practices, lessons learned and exchangeof experiences in the context of both North–South andSouth–South cooperation is urgently needed.

Victor Hugo said, “The most powerful army in the world cannot stop an idea whose time has come.” The establishment of a permanent forum on cities andbiodiversity is precisely such an idea, and its time has come.



Boomoon

The photographs of Boomoon (South Korea, 1955)show large extensions of sea, sky and land with nohuman presence or references whatsoever. Infinite,intact and static, nature reveals her unpredictabilityand immeasurable scope at the moment the image iscaptured. Those precise instants are, in Boomoon’swords, “unconscious places,” culminating moments inhis relation with the world and the landscapes thatmake it up, which are dominated by order and chaos.


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Urban poverty has adistinctive gendereddimension, as it puts adisproportionate burdenon those members ofcommunities andhouseholds responsiblefor unpaid care-workpredominately women

Aisa Kirabo Kacyira


4.Dialogue between Generationsand Gender

Vernacular architecture has the potential to be anunlimited source ofconceptual solutions through which sustainabilitycan be rediscovered

Mariana Correia

With half of the world’spopulation under twenty-five years and one third ofit under fifteen, youngpeople hold more power toour world’s sustainablefuture than ever before

Siddharth Agarwal


The New Urban Agenda and the Roleof Women in Cities

Aisa Kirabo Kacyira

Aisa Kirabo is assistant secretary-general and deputyexecutive director of UN-Habitat.

Women and girls continue to face discrimination, povertyand violence within cities. Women in urban poorcommunities do not enjoy the same social and economicrights as men, including the right to adequate housing,clean water and sanitation. Urban women living inpoverty often experience a higher degree ofunemployment, as well as insecurity and vulnerability toviolence, as they are more likely than women from higherincome groups to become victims of violence both in thepublic space and within their own homes. Insensitiveurban policies contribute to barriers that prevent womenand girls from participation as both agents andbeneficiaries of urban development.

Yet evidence shows that very few countries have everachieved sustained economic growth, rapid socialdevelopment and gender equality without urbanizing.Urbanization has been a powerful driving force behindprofound social, cultural and political change, includingimportant advances in gender equality. It has long beenrecognized that the greater cultural diversity found inurban areas can provide an enabling environment todeconstruct social norms, entrenched gender stereotypesand traditions or customs that hold women and girls backand perpetuate discrimination against them. Herein liesthe gender equality potential of urbanization.

Women and Urbanization: Challenges and Opportunities

Cities are now the primary habitat of humanity. Atpresent, 54 percent of the world’s population resides inurban settlements; this is expected to rise to 66 percentby 2050 and surpass the six billion mark by 2045. At thesame time, urban populations are becoming increasinglyfemale and increasingly younger, with as much as 60percent of urban dwellers expected to be under the ageof eighteen by 2030. Cities represent an arena ofchallenges and opportunities for men and women withrespect to access to essential services, access to socialand economic rights such as education and health, aswell as access to varied forms of livelihoods.

Yet cities are also home to deep inequality,marginalization, discrimination and despair. Newmigrants or even current residents can only afford to livein life-threatening sprawling slums and informalsettlements. At present, 828 million people live in slumsand informal settlements and the numbers continue torise. These types of settlements are poorly connected topublic transport and other essential services, such asclean water, sanitation and solid waste disposal. In these

118 s .m.a . r. t .


conditions life is dangerous and unhealthy, with constantbarriers to a secure foothold in the urban economy.Furthermore, rapid urbanization is exerting pressure onfreshwater supplies, sewage, the living environment andpublic health. In spite of accounting for only 3 percent ofthe world’s surface, it is estimated that cities currentlycontribute between 37 and 49 percent of the world’s totalgreenhouse gas emissions and it is projected that by 2050cities will be responsible for more than 70 percent ofglobal greenhouse gas emissions.

Child marriage is prevalent in urban areas. One in threegirls in low- and middle-income countries (excludingChina) will marry before the age of eighteen. One in ninegirls will marry before their fifteenth birthday. In theleast developed countries the prevalence of childmarriage is even higher—nearly one in two. If presenttrends continue, the number of child marriages eachyear, 14.2 million in 2010, will be nearly 16.1 million by2030. Despite national laws and internationalagreements, child marriage remains a real and presentthreat to the human rights, lives and health of children,especially girls, in more than a hundred countries.

Migration is also greatly affecting the rate at whichurbanization grows and the shape it adopts. Between2000 and 2015 the number of international migrantsincreased by 41 percent to reach 244 million. Almost halfof them are women. So are half of the 19.6 millionrefugees worldwide. Addressing the unprecedented largemovements of refugees and migrants requires a morehumane and coordinated approach that all countries canendorse and implement.

The intersection between planned urbanization andmigration can be further observed in conflicts, forexample in Syria. So far, more than 100,000 people havebeen killed in the conflict. Cities and towns have beentargeted, and hundreds of thousands of homes have beendamaged or destroyed. As conditions continue todeteriorate, civilians are bearing the brunt of theviolence. The Syrian conflict is primarily being fought inurban areas where 57 percent of the population livedprior to the conflict. Population density in urban areas isgreatly increased by the massive inflows of internallydisplaced people (IDPs).

Another factor influencing urbanization is the agecomposition of the world population. This has changeddramatically in recent decades. Between 1950 and 2010,life expectancy worldwide rose from forty-six to sixty-eight years, and it is projected to increase to eighty-oneby the end of the century. For the first time in human

history, in 2050, there will be more persons aged oversixty than children in the world.

Urbanization has the potential to be a powerful tool forachieving sustainable and inclusive development. About6.25 billion people, 15% of them persons with disabilities,are predicted to be living in urban centers by 2050. Thecurrent lack of environmental accessibility faced bypeople with disabilities in particular in many cities in theworld presents both a major challenge and a strategicopportunity for promoting equity and inclusion.

For women, gender discrimination magnifies and adds tothe challenges and risks of cities. Why? Because genderinequality represents a structural discrimination anddisadvantage that permeates every challenge,opportunity and space in cities.

The challenges cities face can be overcome in ways thatallow them to continue to thrive and grow, whileimproving resource use and reducing inequality andpoverty. Therefore, cities and human settlements can besafe, prosperous, equitable places to live. But this isimpossible without the inclusion of every resident in theirsustainable development. In this vein, all elements ofurban governance and administration, urban legislation,urban finance, and urban planning need to actively embedgender equality measures. This is the position of the 2030Agenda for Sustainable Development and the soon-to-be-adopted New Urban Agenda (NUA): inclusion makes forsustainable development.

A Personal Testimony

Having served as the mayor of Kigali, I have seenfirsthand the positive power of urbanization. Today,Rwanda symbolizes the incredible resilience of thehuman spirit. When reflecting on the state of Rwanda in1994, President Paul Kagame said, “Has there ever been acountry more broken or more helpless?” It was deeplytrue, but cities are human constructs and can be plannedand developed for the benefit of the entire population.For sure, it requires tireless efforts, hard choices, avisionary leadership, listening and responding to theneeds of citizen and ensuring that they experience theirown right to the city. These elements drove my workboth as mayor and governor of Kigali Province. Thebenefits produced in Kigali have spilled over andtransformed lives in peri-urban and rural areas too.

One of the challenges I faced as mayor was to harness thefull potential of all the citizens, irrespective of income,

DIALOGUE BETWEEN GENERATIONS AND GENDER 119


gender and age, and with particular attention tovulnerable groups. To do so, I launched initiativesactively involving each citizen in building their rights tothe city. At a general level, I invested in infrastructure, inlearning, in education, in skills development and awillingness to embrace change while remaining true toour heritage. Interventions were also launched toupgrade slums and low-income housing, improvegarbage collection, ban plastics, improve publictransport, and beautify streets and pavements.Community involvement was a key element of theseefforts and promoting people’s participation in the localcity-planning decision-making process was a priority forme as mayor. For instance, through the Umuganda systemlocal communities in Kigali gathered together on the lastSaturday of the month and took part in unpaid communalwork to improve life in the community.

At UN-Habitat I have consistently stressed that a gender-sensitive approach is extremely important to build asustainable, prosperous and equitable city. Indeed, to doso, it needs to deal with the economic, educational andsociopolitical barriers that result in gender imbalancesand gains only for a few. Women represent adisproportionate percentage of the urban poor, but at thesame time, their contribution to economic developmentis tremendous. If women are empowered they become anextremely valuable resource for the development of theircommunity. That is to say, that urban sustainabledevelopment can be fully achieved only if everyonestrives to improve women’s rights, promote equalparticipation in decision-making, and develop servicesthat benefit women and men equally in all programs.Ensuring women’s human rights in sustainabledevelopment means, among other things, ensuring equalaccess to education, work opportunities and financialservices for women and men; integrating gender in lawsand policies on land, housing and property rights;enhancing women’s participation in decision-makingprocesses through inclusive governance; and ensuringwomen enjoy a decent level of safety and security.

2030 Agenda and the New Urban Agenda

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, togetherwith its Sustainable Development Goals, is a plan ofaction for people and the planet. Ultimately, it seeks tostrengthen universal peace by addressing the root causesof poverty and adopting bold transformative steps toeradicate it, thus setting the world on a sustainable andresilient path.

This century will see a substantial majority of the world’spopulation living in urban centers. At the recent HabitatIII Conference, the New Urban Agenda was adopted—anaction-oriented document which sets global standards ofachievement in sustainable urban development,rethinking the way we build, manage, and live in cities bygalvanizing action and cooperation among committedpartners, relevant stakeholders, and urban actors at alllevels of government as well as the private sector.

Today: Women in Cities

As mentioned earlier, urban populations are becomingincreasingly female and increasingly younger. This isparticularly evident among the urban poor. In fact, thereis a clear hiatus between the contribution women maketo the prosperity of cities—through their paid and unpaidlabor—and the benefits they derive from it in terms ofrepresentation in urban governance, equal access tolivelihoods and equal access to public space.

Urban poverty is strikingly different from rural poverty,since urban economies are heavily associated with thesecondary and tertiary sectors and therefore moredependent on cash incomes to meet essential needs. As aresult urban poverty has a distinctive gendereddimension, as it puts a disproportionate burden on thosemembers of communities and households responsible forunpaid care-work—predominately women. In addition,cash-based urban economies mean that poor women arecompelled, often from a very young age, to also engage inpaid activities, while at the same time undertakingunpaid care-work. Consequently, combined with unequalrights to adequate housing, to minimum economicwelfare, to voting and to freedom of movement in publicspaces, efforts to balance paid work and unpaid care-work take a particular toll on women, and in some case,even girls.

It is widely recognized that urban women are at greaterrisk of being victims of violence than rural women. Whilegender-based violence is largely determined by genderinequalities and cultural notions of femininity andmasculinity, it is also significantly linked to inadequatebasic infrastructure and access to services, whichincrease women’s vulnerability.

In sum, while the world’s cities are increasinglyaccommodating more women than men, there is a wideset of factors that hold women back as integral drivers ofsustainable urban development, including their unequalposition in the labor market, their limited ability to

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secure assets independently from male relatives, andtheir greater exposure to violence. Therefore genderequality policies and solutions must be integral tobringing women on-board as equal partners and assets inseeking participatory methods to enhance thesustainability and quality of life for all urban residents.

Message for the Future

Women and girls currently face a myriad of challenges inurban environments, but the future is not all bleak. Therehas been significant progress made in gender equalityacross the world. Today, women have better access tobasic services, improved participation in governance andmore knowledge of their rights than ever before.Although urbanization presents new challenges, it alsocreates new opportunities. Urban women are lesssubjected to discriminatory and dangerous traditionalpractices, have more ability to participate in the economyand are less reliant on marriage and men for their healthand safety. We must not give up the continuing fight forequality, but it is also important to acknowledge theprogress made in a relatively short period of time.

I envisage a future, perhaps in twenty years, but morelikely in fifty, where women, girls, men and boys willhave the same opportunities throughout their lives.Women and girls will have equal access to education, tojob opportunities, to control of their own bodies and livesand to representation in government and business. Urbancenters can drive these changes, through culturalchanges, innovation and education. Cities can becomethe beacon of hope for women, as long as we keep genderequality and urbanization high on the global agenda.

* * *

Women across the world are finding themselves in newand challenging situations. Many of their challenges areunique and different, but there are common themes.Female MPs and CEOs in London face gender-baseddiscrimination, just as a woman selling food in the slumsof Nairobi does. Women are now landowners, doctors,heads of households, migrants, ethnic minorities, lawyersand people living with disabilities. All of these groupsface difficulties in gaining equal opportunity. The globalspread of urbanization presents an exciting opportunityto change traditional gender roles and createopportunities for women. But in order to achieve this, wemust continue to put gender equality high on the agenda.The world has never seen such rapid urbanization andsuch a major shift in the way human beings are living.

Nor have we ever seen such a major cultural shift andbreak with tradition. These two phenomena must beharnessed and shaped to create a society that gives equalopportunity to all.

References

Chant, Sylvia, and Cathy McIlwaine. 2016. Cities, Slums and Gender in the Global South: Towards a Feminist Urban Future. London: Routledge.

Secretariat for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, UN-Habitat and DESA. 2015. Accessibility and DisabilityInclusion in Urban Development. http://www.un.org/disabilities/documents/2015/accessibility-urbandevelopment.pdf.

Tacoli, Cecilia. 2012. Urbanization, Gender and Urban Poverty: PaidWork and Unpaid Carework in the City. London and New York: IIEDand UNFPA. https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/resource-pdf/UEPI%207%20Tacoli%20Mar%202012.pdf.

UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Af-fairs). 2014. World Urbanization Prospects. New York: United Nations.

UNFPA (United Nations Fund for Population Activities). 2012. Marrying Too Young: End Child Marriage. New York: UNFPA. https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/MarryingTooYoung.pdf.

UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme). 2012.Cities of Youth, Cities of Prosperity. Nairobi: UN-Habitat.

UN-Habitat. 2013. State of Women in Cities 2012-2013: Gender and theProsperity of Cities. Nairobi: UN-Habitat.

UN-Habitat. 2014. “UN-Habitat in Syria.” UN-Habitat in Syria.http://mirror.unhabitat.org/content.asp?cid=12299&catid=822&typeid=24&subMenuId=0.

UN-Habitat. 2016. World Cities Report 2016 Urbanization and Development - Emerging Futures. Nairobi: UN-Habitat. http://wcr.unhabitat.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2016/05/WCR-%20Full-Report-2016.pdf.

United Nations. “Cities - United Nations Sustainable DevelopmentAction 2015.” UN News Center. http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/cities/.

United Nations. 2011. “Older Persons, Aging, Elderly, Health, Security,Independence, Participation, Care, Self-fulfilment, Dignity, Intergen-erational Support Systems, Pensions, Age Discrimination, Poverty.”UN News Center. http://www.un.org/en/events/olderpersonsday/background.shtml.

United Nations Chief Executives Board for Coordination. “Urbaniza-tion and Sustainable Development: A UN System Input to a New Ur-ban Agenda.” April 27, 2016.

UN Women. “In Focus: Women Refugees and Migrants.” WomenRefugees and Migrants. http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/women-refugees-and-migrants.

UN Women. 2016. Progress of the World’s Women 2015-16. New York:UN Women.



Youth and Poverty in the Population

Siddharth Agarwal

Siddharth Agarwal is the director of the Urban Health Resource Centre in New Delhi, a non-profit-making organization that works to improve the health,nutrition and welfare of the inhabitants ofunderprivileged urban zone.

The Role of Slum Children and Youth toward a BetterFuture in an Urbanizing World

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for SustainableDevelopment, along with a set of seventeen bold newSustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted bymember nations during the General Assembly held inNew York on September 2015, outlines specific focalareas for improving the status of vulnerable andimpoverished populations. This is reflected by theemphasis of many of the seventeen SDG targets onachieving inclusive development, among them targeteleven, which aims to make “cities and humansettlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”

With over half of the world’s population under twenty-five years of age and one third of it under the age offifteen, young people hold more keys and more power toour world’s sustainable future than ever before. While asubstantial proportion of urban youth is benefiting fromthe technology available and using different media toconnect with other young people across countries andcontinents, there is a large number of young people andchildren living in slums, informal settlements andsimilarly disadvantaged environments in the globalsouth. According to the United Nations about 1.8 billionpeople out of a world population of 7.3 billion are agedbetween ten and twenty-four years old (Das Gupta et al.2014). That is up from 721 million people in 1950, whenthe world’s population totaled 2.5 billion. Never beforehave there been so many young people globally, many ofthem living in developing countries. In fact, in theworld’s forty-eight least developed countries, childrenand adolescents make up the majority of the population.

Rapid urbanization is another defining feature of today’sworld, with nearly 55 percent of the global populationbeing urban in 2016. But fast-paced urban growth placestremendous strain on housing and serviced land. By2030, about three billion people, roughly 40 percent ofthe world’s population, are expected to need properhousing and access to basic infrastructure and servicessuch as water and sanitation systems. This translates intothe need to complete 96,150 housing units per day withserviced and documented land from now till 2030.

Deprivations and Challenges

The Global Report on Urban Health: Equitable, HealthierCities for Sustainable Development, published in 2016 bythe World Health Organization, states that the top sixhundred cities, which account for one fifth of the world’s

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population, produce 60 percent of the global GDP (WHO2016). At the same time, unplanned and unmanagedurbanization has led to increased inequality, the growthof slums and disastrous impacts on efforts towardssustainable development in today and tomorrow’s fast-growing cities. The urban youth population is steadilyincreasing, as is the proportion of this segment which ispresented with lesser opportunities to contribute ascitizens, as compared to children born into families withmore resources, who therefore have better access toeducation and other opportunities. This unequal accessto basic services along with extreme poverty, sub-optimalphysical living environments, weak access to governmententitlements and social benefits, discrimination, and lackof information hinder the potential of slum youth.Furthermore, slums and informal settlements, andconsequently slum youth, are often considered illegaleven in countries where constitutionally there is noconcept of illegality of human beings.

According to UN-Habitat, 85 percent of the world’syoung people live in developing countries, where theyoften comprise a large portion of their communities (UN-Habitat 2015). An increasing number of young peoplearound the world are growing up in cities—especially inthe fast-growing cities of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia andLatin America. In many cities across the Africancontinent, more than 70 percent of the population isunder the age of thirty. Yet these young people have fewresources available to improve their own livingenvironment. Today’s rapidly urbanizing world is full ofsocial, environmental and economic inequalities whichpresent important challenges for political and economicforces. Slum populations are facing spatial injusticeacross countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America inparticular, but also, to a lesser extent, in the Westernworld. Space in urban areas is becoming increasingly lessaccessible to those living in slums and othermarginalized sections of cities. Youth, children andwomen use public spaces the most, be it for recreationalpurposes, such as playing games and sports, smallneighborhood businesses or transportation. It isunfortunate that for urban slum communities and othersimilarly marginalized groups urban space is becomingincreasingly less accessible. In emerging economies, suchas the BRICS nations and other countries that arecatching up, slum children and youth remain largelyexcluded from the benefits of economic progress thatcome with urbanization. Owing to a series of factors,including the lack of exposure to career avenues and lowlevels of encouragement from parents, schools or othersources, slum youth and children often opt out of their

aspirations and fail to pursue paths that could fructifytheir potential. UN-Habitat estimates that young personsmake up 25 percent of the global working age population,but account for 43.7 percent of the unemployed. Thismeans that almost every other jobless person in theworld is between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four.

A World of Opportunities

Provided deliberate efforts are made to invest in theireducation and present them with better opportunities,these young people with tremendous energy andenthusiasm can not only build their lives as productivesocial beings, they can also contribute to their countries’development and positive transformation.

It is crucial to nurture and stimulate the potential ofurban disadvantaged youth in order to achieve equitableopportunities in an urbanizing world, particularly inlow- and middle-income countries. The waygovernments, civil society and other stakeholders workto cultivate and nourish the aspirations of this segmentof the young population and to address their needs willdefine our common future and the path towardssustainability. This segment represents a huge source ofpotential living in underprivileged communities whosecontribution is as important as that of more fortunateyoung populations. There is a need to expedite theprovision of opportunities towards socioeconomicdevelopment to slum children and youth as a meanstowards socially equitable society. There is vast potentialin the large numbers of young people who are yet to gaineducation and training, and who can subsequently beemployed as skilled, semi-skilled or highly skilledworkers in various sectors, from the service industry toinformation technology or manufacturing, contributingto the economic growth of the increasingly urbanizedeconomies of developing countries.

Actual Experience

Constructive efforts being undertaken in Spain to includemarginalized and excluded groups in public space and todemocratize urban planning have delivered promisingresults. ArchDaily explains that Factoria Joven (youthfactory), located in Merida, Spain, is a youth-inspiredbuilt space created from recycled materials. It holds askate park and offers resources that empower andencourage young people to participate in public spaceand community-building. The concept was first



introduced in 2006 by Carlos Javier Rodríguez Jiménez,a physical education teacher who studied thehumanization of urban spaces, and four collaborators.Architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano were inspired bythe forms and construction of Chinese dragons, andsingled out inexpensive building materials for theproject, including lightweight polycarbonate. In additionto outdoor sporting activities, art events and theatre, thebuilding houses a computer lab and a dance studio,meeting rooms and spaces used for street theater, videoprojections and electronic music. A piece in the onlinemagazine Architectism gives credit to the youth factoryfor attracting restless kids from the streets and providingthem with a place to cycle, skateboard, dance, climbrocks, create graffiti—activities they would otherwisehave to do in much more sinister surroundings(Architectism 2015). This demonstrates the need forpublic space, but also the resilience, creative energy, andperseverance of slum youth to create such space.

In Kenya, the Mathare Environmental ConservationYouth Group (MECYG), a social enterprise run byyoung people, undertook community cleanups andestablished a garbage collection service in MlangoKubwa, a community that houses about forty thousanddwellers and which had never had a similar service inthe past. In 1997 MECYG gathered resources to build ayouth center and a soccer field. The youth of MlangoKubwa have responded by using the soccer field andcommunity center every day, while violence in the areahas diminished and most residents are happier and more positive.

Mlango Kubwa lies on the periphery of Mathare, one ofNairobi’s biggest slum clusters. Like in most slums, youngpeople in Mathare face many challenges, from access tosafe spaces to access to resources and opportunities.What distinguishes them from others, though, is theirdrive, enthusiasm and willingness to strive for change.They take no chances and work together to make theircommunity a better place for all, but especially for thechildren and young people. This initiative highlights howthe indomitable spirit of the Mathare community, andthe desire, potential and talent of its youth inspired themto pursue sustainable urban development efforts thathave created lasting positive changes for all residents.

In India, They Take Charge of Wellbeing Processes

“Resolve, Zest and Flight” is a slum youth stimulationinitiative implemented by impoverished children across

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This segment represents a huge source of potentialliving in underprivilegedcommunities whosecontribution is as importantas that of more fortunateyoung populations


underprivileged communities in and around the cities ofIndore and Agra in India. Approximately 100,000 peoplelive in these communities and have access to theinitiative organized by the Indian non-profit entity UrbanHealth Resource Centre (UHRC). The approach involvesencouraging the formation of children and youth groupsin slums, mentored by slum women’s groups and UHRC’ssocial facilitators. The focal point of UHRC’s efforts isstimulation, motivation and capacity building.

Thirty children and youth groups with 450 members areactive in the slums of Agra and Indore. Child and youthdevelopment is fostered through avenues for self-expression, team-work, excelling in performance,reasoning with self and cultivating positive self-image.The result is that communication and leadership skillsare honed.

UHRC’s program facilitates the creation and use ofplatforms where youth and children can expressthemselves through oral and written communication,reciting poems and singing songs on themes such asdetermination and courage, which further contribute toincrease their self-confidence. They have also stagedstreet plays on preventing infections, the ill effects ofalcoholism and other socially important themes,including performing outside their city in Mumbai,which lends added self-worth and confidence. Pursuingactivities that they enjoy and gain knowledge and skillsfrom also reinforces their growing self-confidence, asnoted in earlier works (Payne 2008). These platforms areanalogous to the concept of place, which “does not refersimply to a geographic location but also to theopportunities that are available to create meaning withina place” (Wilson 1997). Opportunities-based pedagogiesas implemented by this program are effective infurthering learning and imparting knowledge and skills“which have some direct bearing on the well-being of thesocial and ecological places people actually inhabit”(Gruenewald 2003). The outcome of enhanced self-esteem and improved self-image among children andyouth reinforces self-confidence in their own abilities.Reasoning with oneself during planning and actionsessions develops thinking skills (Hwang and Nilsson2003). Social interaction with peers and elders, women’sgroup members, volunteers from different walks of life,elected municipal representatives, and the educationsystem helps young people to free themselves fromdifficult situations, focus towards the future, and acquirethe ability to influence it (Vygotsky 1978).

A central tenet of this program is that the slum childrenand youth groups mentored by the slum women’s groups

of the Urban Health Resource Centre should guide thedesign and implementation of the very program. As aproactive measure to foster gender equality every grouphas two leaders: one boy and one girl. Each group usuallyhas between ten and twenty members. Every membermust save a small amount, which is determined by theslum youth themselves and can vary from five to fiftyIndian rupees. Collective saving and the use of resourcesto help prevent interruptions in their education and toorganize activities such as sports days enable thechildren and youth to learn the importance of regularsaving and of collective efforts.

Slum children and youth group members identifyopportunity gaps, instances of inadequate stimulation,aspirations, ways to strengthen as groups, contribute tothe progressive evolution of the program, and facilitatethe creation of children and youth groups in neighboringslums. This program has been developing brick by brickover five years, with slum youth and children playing therole of experts and contributing to the continuousimprovement of the approaches over time. Children andyoung people are motivated to give careful thought tocertain key questions: “How can we collectively movetowards addressing a given problem;” “how can we findmore details on how to act to solve a problem;” “whichaspects can be tackled by our own collective efforts andfor which parts of the problem do we need to contact theauthorities?” A similar approach to stimulate anddevelop thinking skills among children and youth hasbeen stressed in earlier works (Devereux 2002).

Slum youth and children groups complement the effortsof slum women’s groups in identifying and implementingsolutions to the challenges faced. They write collectivepetitions to municipal corporations for the garbage to becleared and the drains to be cleaned; they fill upindividual applications for income certificates andpresent them to the relevant local ward-level electedrepresentatives and district offices in order to obtain thedocuments that make them eligible for the government’seducation scholarship. Slum children and youth groups,supported by women’s groups in their neighborhood,promote the education of young girls and women, andcould be central in efforts to reduce the gender inequalityprevalent in the male-dominated society they are part of.

Education is emerging as an embodiment of inclusion, asknowledge about the risks of exclusion becomeswidespread. Indeed, education is playing an importantrole in gradually, gently changing the long-standingsocial norms that perpetuate and reinforce socialinequalities. An increasing number of the young are



completing school education, and thereforecomplementing their family income; the social impactthrough improved gender sensitivity is visible; and otherbenefits of the program include improved hygiene andliving environments. These outcomes are the result ofpracticing thought and encouraging reasoning andlogical thinking. Recently, the need for computer literacyhas become evident, as a means to make the most ofaccess to the Internet and other digital tools. Thedevelopment of these skills will help underprivilegedcommunities access government schemes and servicesonline, thereby reducing access costs.

These actual experiences confirm that when presentedwith options and opportunities all human beings,including slum children and youth, would willinglyengage in activities that they recognize as beneficial totheir self-development and/or empowering when itcomes to facing the challenges that will allow them topositively transform their lives. The program also enablesthem to build greater recognition in their schools and intheir communities, which acts as an additionalmotivating factor for them to persevere with programefforts. Children and youth progressively strengthentheir faith in their growing ability to improve their futureand that of their neighborhood. Self-confidence, socialinteraction with peers and persons external to theirsocial milieu, and the development of collaborative skillsand leadership all contribute towards self-improvement.

What Is Crucial to Pursue

Our image of shanty towns results from what we observeas we drive past slums while comfortably ensconced inthe temperature-regulated interior of our cars. However,slum populations contribute significantly to maintainingcity life. The unequivocal and harsh reality that allcorporate bosses, political leaders, administrators and allsegments of reasonably affluent dwellers need to acceptis that without slums, the hardware, multi-sectorservices of urban spaces will break down miserably.

Lack of youth empowerment can lead to tokenism.Hence it is critical that inclusive efforts are implementedwith the sincerity necessary to ensure that marginalizedgroups are encompassed in their scope such that they canhave their say and contribute to society in equitable andmeaningful ways. Following years of intense lobbyingand stressful negotiations, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon declared that these new sustainable developmentgoals are “the people’s agenda” (Ki-moon 2016). While

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The unequivocal andharsh reality that allcorporate bosses, politicalleaders, administratorsand all segments ofreasonably affluentdwellers need to accept isthat without slums, thehardware, multi-sectorservices of urban spaceswill break down miserably


this gives hope, in order to achieve any sort of progresson the people’s agenda the people themselves must beequipped to lead the process of change.

A coordinated effort by government agencies, civilsociety organizations, associations of slum youth andadults, and socially sensitive citizens holds the potentialof improving physical and social living conditions on theground, enhancing education and skills building,promoting hygiene and sanitation behaviors, andfostering enhanced value in the role of women and girlsin their communities. This would go a long way towardnurturing slum youth and preparing them for greaterresponsibilities. Additionally, senior youths can mentorand enhance the education and confidence-buildingexperiences of younger youths and children in slums.

It is my hope that when senior officials of differentUnited Nations agencies, country government politicians,bureaucrats and others in positions of authorityparticipate in high-level UN and other global, regionaland national meetings, they spend at least eight to tenhours in slums at the location of the meeting. This willenable decision-makers to learn of solutions from thereal experts: the local slum residents, including energeticchildren and youth who live their challenging life 24/7,365 days of the year. This way, the resolutions andguidelines for nations, ministries and administrativeentities crafted by them would certainly be more realistic(even if they might seem difficult).

Facilitating ownership among young people from slumsand their families is critical, instead of the tokenistic“participation”—a word that for decades has been used topass off strategies as being pro-poor or being sensitivetowards marginalized people. When slum youth andother similarly disadvantaged groups take charge of theprocesses, that shifts the balance of power towards moreaccountable governance in our fast-growing cities, aswell as in rural areas. This can also get real action toactually be implemented in the interest of themarginalized, including women, girls, youth andchildren. The time is now to democratize urbandevelopment and create space for marginalizedpopulations, especially youth, to contribute their ideas inways that can produce lasting sustainable impact.

References

ArchDaily. 2011. “Merida Factory Youth Movement/Selgas Cano.”http://www.archdaily.com/148708/merida-factory-youth-movement-selgas-cano.

Architectism. 2015. “The Youth Factory or Factoría Joven in Merida,Spain.” Architectism. July 7, 2015. http://architectism.com/the-youth-factory-or-factoria-joven-in-merida-spain/.

Das Gupta, Monica, Robert Engelman, Jessica Levy, GretchenLuchsinger, Tom Merrick, and James E. Rosen. 2014. The Power of 1.8Billion: Adolescents, Youth and the Transformation of the Future. New York: UNFPA. http://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/EN-SWOP14-Report_FINAL-web.pdf.

Devereux, J. 2002. “Developing Thinking Skills through Scientificand Mathematical Experiences in the Early Years.” In Exploring EarlyYears Education and Care, edited by Linda Miller, Rose Drury andRobin Campbell. London: David Fulton.

Gruenewald, D. A. 2003. “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Peda-gogy of Place.” Educational Researcher 32, no. 4: 3–12.

Hwang, Philip and Bjorn Nilsson. 2003. Utvecklingspsykologi. Stock-holm: Natur och kultur. Quoted in Sandra Svensson. 2014. “Childrenand Youths in Dharavi´s Rise to Empowerment—from a NGO Perspective”, Bachelor dissertation. Halmstad University. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:729798/FULLTEXT01.pdf.

Ki-moon, Ban. 2016. “The People’s Agenda in SDGs: The People’sAgenda.” UNA-UK (The United Nations Association – UK).http://www.sustainablegoals.org.uk/the-peoples-agenda/.

Payne, Malcolm. 2008. Modern teoribildning i socialt arbete. Stock-holm: Natur och kultur. Quoted in Sandra Svensson. 2014. “Childrenand Youths in Dharavi´s Rise to Empowerment—from a NGO Perspective”, Bachelor dissertation. Halmstad University. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:729798/FULLTEXT01.pdf.

UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme). 2015.Youth and Their Needs within Public Space. Nairobi: UN-Habitat.

Vygotsky, Lev. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

WHO (World Health Organization). 2016. Global Report on UrbanHealth: Equitable Healthier Cities for Sustainable Development.Geneva: WHO Press. http://www.who.int/kobe_centre/measuring/urban-global-report/ugr_full_report.pdf.

Wilson, R. 1997. “A Sense of Place.” Early Childhood Education Journal 24, no. 3: 191–194.



Experiences from the Past for Today’s Challenges

Mariana Correia

Mariana Correia, architect, currently chairs the boardof the Escola Superior Gallaecia (ESC) in Portugal, and is an administrator of the Convento da OradaFoundation for the protection of cultural heritage, and of the Font de BedoyaFoundation for the protectionof vernacular architecture.

During the twentieth century technologicaldevelopment and the increase of mass production led toa progressive abandonment of traditional buildingtechniques and ways of life, especially in urbanizedregions pressured by rapid and unrestrained growth.From the seven billion people that today inhabit theplanet, the United Nations Human SettlementsProgramme estimates that four billion live in informalhouses, from which one billion of urban poor live inslums (UN-Habitat 2006). According to UN-Habitat, aslum is an urban area with a lack of basic services(sanitation, potable water, and electricity), substandardhousing, overcrowding, unhealthy and hazardouslocations, insecure tenure and social exclusion (UN-Habitat 2003). In a short time period, severalcommunities around the globe felt pressured to movefrom rural regions to urban areas located in the outskirtsof cities. In these urban substandard areas, rapidlygrowing to become part of megacities, construction isdeveloped using all sorts of materials and buildingpossibilities, following neither standard regulations, northe building-culture intelligence encompassed invernacular construction.

Meanwhile, the 3.1 billion people that live in rural areas(United Nations 2014), mostly have no access to Internet(ICT 2015), and a great number still lead traditionalways of life, with long-established customs and beliefsthat have passed from one generation to another. Inthese communities, vernacular architecture expressestheir adaptation to climatic and landscape contexts, theuse of local natural materials, and the embodiment oftheir empirical knowledge regarding construction know-how (Correia 2009).

Vernacular Architecture

Thus, what is vernacular architecture and why is itrelevant? According to Rapoport, the term refers tospecific dwellings built in a certain geographicalcontext, responding to the physical and culturalenvironment that surrounds it (Rapport 1972). Rudofskycalls vernacular the architecture without architects thatis anonymous, spontaneous, indigenous, or rural(Rudofsky 1990). For the Encyclopedia of VernacularArchitecture of the World, Oliver defines vernaculararchitecture as all the dwellings and buildings, eitherprivate or community-owned, which were built usingtraditional technologies (Oliver 1997). The OxfordDictionary (2016) defines vernacular architecture as thatwhich concerns domestic and functional rather than

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public or monumental buildings. Its designation andconceptual development is also discussed in “VernacularArchitecture?” (Carlos et al. 2015). Hence, vernaculararchitecture can clearly have different approaches,interpretations and meanings. The operationaldefinition for this framework will be the architecturethat has no formal planning, but holds an intrinsic built-in intelligent culture.

Nowadays, vernacular architecture is considered bymany in the Western world as a heritage to study,conserve and value, an “old” form of traditionalarchitecture, part of a region’s identity. Many others,mostly in rural areas of the undeveloped world, live withvernacular architecture on a daily basis, as traditionalbuilding systems are still employed in day-to-day life,using the resources available in their immediatesurroundings and the know-how associated with localbuilding culture. Using stone, earth and wood, bambooor reeds remains a common and intelligent way ofbuilding in harmony with the context. Severalcommunities continue to build in the same way as theirancestors used to, putting to use the local know-howand building culture passed to them from generation to generation.

Given the balance between energy saving, tradition,environment, and social commitment it can boast,vernacular architecture has the potential to be anunlimited source of conceptual solutions through whichsustainability can be rediscovered. The project VerSus:Lessons from Vernacular Heritage to SustainableArchitecture, coordinated by Escola Superior Gallaeciawith the cooperation of its European partners (Correia,Dipasquale and Mecca 2014), entailed the identificationof the principles embodied in vernacular knowledge,which are nowadays being applied throughout the worldin various efforts concerning traditional andcontemporary sustainable development.

Community Engagement

Furthermore, in vernacular architecture, know-how canonly be transferred if the community is still empoweredto optimize the use of local intangible resources,contributing towards the development of effectivestrategies for sustainable development. Thus,community engagement has contributed to integratepeople in society, to support traditional ways of life, andto keep social cohesion. This has been possible throughbalanced efforts directed to a more inclusive

enhancement of the communities’ approach towardsustainable development.

What can be observed around the world is an upsurge inthe value ascribed to community engagement andcapacity building, as they could have a positive impacton the transfer of local know-how and of intangibleknowledge. For instance, in Mali, local communities useself-organized craftsmanship associations to transfertheir know-how, encouraging traditional values andrespect for the empirical knowledge of the oldergeneration. This is evidenced for instance, in the annualfestival carried out at Djenné Mosque, a renownedWorld Heritage site in Mali. The entire community getstogether to participate in the ritual celebration of themosque’s maintenance, climbing the built-in scaffoldingto apply the traditional earthen plaster. Also inNicaragua, communities of workingwomen play aleading role in developing capacity-building skills amongthe younger generations, as all over the countryinspiring women committed to their communitiesimpart training on traditional building techniques toyoung unemployed people. By developing their buildingskills they give them the chance to live an independentyet integrated life.

Nowadays, community engagement is therefore mostrelevant, as it promotes the integration of people insociety, supports traditional ways of life, and maintainssocial cohesion, reinforcing sustained local values incommunities and emphasizing a sense of belonging.Engagement in communities becomes essential andconnects populations socially and culturally.

Collective Values

Several communities worldwide have createdsustainable systems for local development. They aim topromote an efficient and affordable use of localresources, techniques, and goods, sharing the know-howof the different individuals within the community inorder to enhance their collective values.

To survive harsh environments, isolated communitieslook for efficient ways to manage their few resources,mainly by communal systems. This is evident, forinstance, in desert climates, where systems are devisedto collect, distribute, and use water in an efficient way.Underground tunnels created by men carry water overlong distances in the desert, reaching the soil on thesurface and creating oases for populations to settle.These hydraulic systems supply drinking water, as well



as irrigation for agriculture. They are used across theMediterranean region and Middle East, and are knownas qanat in Iran; falaj in the United Arab Emirates;khettara in Morocco; or foggara in Algeria. Thiscollective use of water is only possible throughcommunity values shared by people who live in very dryclimate regions.

This sense of community self-help, currently at work indifferent regions of the world, is also evident in thecollective construction of houses or rural facilities inisolated regions. This system is known in South Americaas minga, and it brings together neighbors from the samecommunity on the basis of mutual aid to build dwellings.Minga is mainly used in rural areas and its practice isobserved at least in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, andParaguay, though it is also stipulated in other Latincountries, as revealed in the publication EarthenArchitecture in Latin America (Correia et al. 2016).

Local Knowledge

Working on heritage implies valuing local andtraditional knowledge, which for thousands of years waskey to fulfill humanity’s housing needs. Nowadays,heritage conservation also demands the preservation ofcraftsmanship skills. Viewed as a resourceful database oflocal building culture, this know-how is becomingwidely respected, as it is now considered part of theknowledge required for the maintenance of monuments,but also of vernacular heritage. In Japan, keeping alivetraditional craftsmanship skills is a way of preservingthe authenticity and integrity of their principles,especially among the most holly Shinto shrines andBuddhist temples classified as World Heritage sites.

Local know-how associated to intangible heritage isessential—the cornerstone, even—for conservation incontexts where social and cultural cohesion are at thecore of local sustainability. Safeguarding culturalheritage as well as the knowledge of intangible resourcesthrough capacity building therefore constitutes afundamental contribution for cultural diversity andhuman sustainable development.

Establishing relations that value the development ofstrategies to enhance local knowledge in differentcommunities takes time. One way of creating suchrelations, for instance, is through workshops. However, ifthe same workshop content is developed recurrently inmany different places then its impact will be the exactopposite. The main goal should be to identify the know-how

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Architecture should bewith the people and forthe people and shouldgenuinely contribute to the improvement ofsociety and the quality of people’s lives


of local building cultures, in order to establish strategiesto enhance them and value their conservation.Rediscovering their building tradition highlights theimportance of communities and their heritage, and thuscontributes to the local economy. This in turn helps toplace value on the identity of the community and itssustainable development. It could also improve the socialstability of the community and create the conditions for amore balanced approach toward the preservation ofheritage, as recommended by the internationalconservation charters and guidelines.

Life Cycle of Buildings

With the current emphasis on high-performanceconstruction, why is know-how of local building cultureimportant?

The building sector plays a key role in the consumptionof energy and resources in the world, as well as in theproduction of waste. According to UNEP-SBCI, it isestimated that at present buildings contribute as muchas one third of the total global greenhouse gas emissions(UNEP-SBCI 2009). This is mainly due to the use offossil fuels in their operational phase. However, thethree phases of energy consumption in the lifespan of abuilding should be considered (Evangelinos andZacharopoulos 2013). The first phase is themanufacturing-construction period: materials areextracted from the natural environment, processed ormanufactured (embodied energy relates to theproduction of the material; grey energy relates to thetransport of the material; and induced energy relates tothe energy needed for the construction of the building).The second phase is the useful life of the building, whichrelates to the energy needed for its maintenance(operating energy required for the building during itslifespan). Finally, the third and last phase is thebuilding’s post-life period (the energy needed for thedemolition of the building, recycling of the material, andthe reuse of any relevant component).

One of the key factors behind the present interest intraditional building techniques and local know-howrelates to the savings derived from the use of natural,ecologic and sustainable materials rather thanexcessively processed ones. Furthermore, this type oftraditional building exacts far lower levels of energyconsumption. Earthen architecture, for instance, somuch in fashion over the last decade, provides a perfectexample of this situation: embodied, grey and induced

energy requirements are reduced to a minimum; thematerial is available onsite, so no energy is consumed inprocessing or transporting it; and energy consumptionrequirements for its construction are minimal. Also, theoperating energy required for the maintenance of thebuilding can also be reduced if bioclimatic features areconsidered in the building’s design, for instance,through the incorporation of heating and coolingsystems to the passive design. Furthermore, the use ofnatural building materials reduces the chemical impacton the inhabitants, which contributes to a better qualityof life. Finally, the post-life building phase has anenormous potential, as the material can be recycled andreused in construction.

The Focus on Education

Students of architecture, engineering, planning, andconservation must be trained to value and enhance thelocal buildings cultures still prevalent around the world.In most architecture and engineering faculties studentsare taught about modern materials and contemporarybuilding systems. Most of the time these universitystudents are not sufficiently capacitated to understandand value traditional building knowledge, even if a greatpart of the world’s built heritage has been constructedusing local building cultures. As a result, and followingthe lessons they have been imparted, a good number ofarchitects and engineers engaged in heritageintervention opt to remove parts of the building’sinterior and replace them with new materials andcontemporary building systems. Indeed, at times thescope of the “rehabilitation” is overstretched andinterpreted as an actual “reconstruction,” with newmaterials and spatial typology.

But new contemporary architecture and heritageintervention could also incorporate community valuesand ascribe significance to knowledge of buildingtraditions. In this regard, curricula of schools andfaculties of architecture, engineering, urban design,planning and conservation should play a key role invaluing and enhancing traditional building systems, localknowledge and the uniqueness of the vernaculararchitecture of the different countries. Architectureshould be with the people and for the people and shouldgenuinely contribute to the improvement of society andthe quality of people’s lives.

Much of the world’s expected future urban growth willtake place in developing countries. As a result, these



countries will face numerous challenges in meeting theneeds of their growing urban populations (UnitedNations 2014). One way to balance this huge influx willbe to value the knowledge held by traditionalcommunities. Preserving and understanding human andsocial systems can have a major impact on the quality oflife of the different communities. Considering the greatdiversity found in local vernacular architecture, a singleand conventional international architecture will notadequately respond to all the intrinsically uniquecontexts of the world. Respect for diversity andempirical knowledge with critical thinking cancontribute to look at each context with a distinctlycreative and intelligent approach. Relying on localknowledge gives communities a chance to take part in amore balanced and ethical sustainable development.

If know-how of local building culture is integrated inthis new contemporary and participatory architecture,then the relevance of the social contribution made by allparties involved becomes a crucial aspect of qualitybuilding, which therefore also contributes to thesustainable development of communities.

* * *

It is no longer sufficient to lay the blame on politicians.It becomes the responsibility of citizens to demand butespecially to work toward the improvement of theirquality of life and that of the people and the societyaround them. As architects, engineers, planners,conservators, builders, artists, teachers, researchers,parents, citizens, we have a responsibility to identify thepriorities and criteria that make the transfer ofknowledge and know-how possible, significantlyboosting local communities; develop skills to integratelocal knowledge into projects, ensuring that they are intune with their environment and social community;engage with isolated and segregated communities toincorporate them into society in a open, balanced andrespectful way, because no culture should dominate overother cultures; and finally, contribute toward thecreation of a more socially responsible world.

We must all take more action and contribute towardsustainable development, community engagement,capacity building, and valuing of local knowledge withsocial responsibility. This can be achieved if we movebeyond our comfort zones, and endorse personalengagement, ethical work and responsible teamwork.

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The use of natural,ecologic and sustainablematerials, traditionalbuilding techniques andlocal know-how exact farlower levels of energyconsumption


References

Carlos, Gilberto D., Mariana Correia, Sandra Rocha and P. Frey. 2015.“Vernacular Architecture?” In Seismic Retrofitting: Learning fromVernacular Architecture, edited by Mariana Correia, Paulo B.Lourenço and Humberto Varum. London: Taylor and Francis Group:11–16.

Correia, Mariana. 2009. “Sustainability: Concept and Development.”In Renewable Energies. Porto: Atelier Nunes e Pã: 68–76.

Correia, Mariana, Letizia Dipasquale and Saverio Mecca. 2014. VER-SUS: Heritage for Tomorrow. Vernacular Knowledge for SustainableArchitecture. Florence: DIDA. http://www.fupress.com/archivio/pdf/2920_7032.pdf.

Correia, Mariana, Celia Neves, Luis Fernando Guerrero, and HugoPereira Gigogne. 2016. Arquitectura de Tierra en America Latina. Lis-bon: ARGUMENTUM and PROTERRA.

Evangelinos, Evangelos, and Elias Zacharopoulos. 2013. “SustainableDesign, Construction and Operation.” In Environmental Design of Urban Buildings: An Integrated Approach, edited by Mat Santamouris.London: Earthscan: 63–72.

ICT Data and Statistics Division. 2015. MDGs 2000 –2015: ICT Revolution and Remaining Gaps. Geneva: Telecommunication Development Bureau and International Telecommunication Union.https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2015.pdf.

Oliver, Paul. 1997. Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of theWorld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Oxford Dictionary. 2016. Oxford: Oxford University Press.https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/vernacular.

Rapoport, Amos. 1972. Vivienda y Cultura. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili.

Rudofsky, Bernard. 1990. Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture. Albuquerque: Universityof New Mexico Press.

United Nations. 2014. “World’s Population Increasingly Urban withMore than Half Living in Urban Areas.” http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html.

UNEP-SBCI (United Nations Environment Programme, SustainableBuildings and Climate Initiative). 2009. Buildings and ClimateChange: Summary for Decision-Makers. United Nations EnvironmentProgramme. Paris: UNEP-SBCI and UNEP-DTIE. http://www.unep.org/sbci/pdfs/SBCI-BCCSummary.pdf.

UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme). 2003.The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements. London:Earthscan Publications.

UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme).2006. The State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/2007. 30 Years ofShaping the Habitat Agenda. London: Earthscan and UN-Habitat.



Lime HillsNaoya Hatakeyama

With exhaustive work over many decades, NaoyaHatakeyama (Japan, 1958) has described thetransformation of limestone quarries into sophisticatedcities. Although these landscapes transmit a great senseof stillness, there is a constant and unstoppablemovement inside them. Hatakeyama thus offers a subtlemeditation on mankind’s impact on nature, which wemold, dominate and ceaselessly consume.


We shape our futurethough the things inwhich we invest. Thekinds of investments thattook us to where we arenow won’t take us towhere we need to get, so we urgently need tochange the mix

Mike Berners-Lee


5.How We Financethe Transition

Existing initiativesfrom around theglobe prove thatsustainableprocurementtransforms markets,boostsenvironmentallyfriendly industries,saves money,conserves naturalresources and fostersjob creation

Arab Hoballah

The notion of “net-positive”propositions andapproaches to buildingdesign practice has nowemerged wherein somebuildings may offer thepotential of collectingmore energy and waterthan they need tosupport theirrequirements

Raymond J. Cole


Disinvestment, Investment,Subsidies and Tax

Mike Berners-Lee

Mike Berners-Lee is a leading expert in carbonfootprinting, founder of Small World Consulting and an honorary researcher at Lancaster University.He has worked on energy and emissions with a widerange of corporate and public sector organizations.

A History of Energy Growth

Every year, for a very long time, we humans have grownthe economy. We have achieved this though afundamental positive feedback mechanism; the plowingback of a small proportion of our available energy intoan investment for the future. A few millennia ago thisprimarily took the form of holding back a smallproportion of our food for replanting. A couple ofcenturies ago it importantly included using some of ourcoal, not for our own consumption needs, but to drivethe pump engines that would drain the mines andenable the extraction of yet more coal. Since recordsbegan, in about 1850, our energy growth has been anincredibly steady and predictable process. We havemaintained a more or less constant energy growth of 2.4percent per year, with only small deviations—which areno more than random noise—from a mathematicallyexponential curve. And through our energy we haveenabled the entire economy.

A History of Emissions Growth

Since 1850, energy growth has come largely from fossilfuel and therefore it is no surprise to find that carbonemissions from human energy use have also grownexponentially, mirroring that of energy growth. The onlyreal difference in the trajectories of energy and carbonis that emissions have grown at only three quarters ofthe rate—1.8 percent—with the difference in growth

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rates being accounted for by a continuous carbonefficiency improvement of 0.6 percent per year.

A Historical Link between Carbon and Money

Since the growth of emissions and world GDP have gonehand in hand, some have called, radically, for an end toeconomic growth itself as the only and essential way tocut emissions. But, while it is true that we have to cutemissions, there are two, not one, logical possibilities:cut the economy or break the long-standing linkbetween the economy and fossil fuel.

A New Choice

It is clear that investment drives our growth, but whatwe also need to grasp is that the shape of our growth,what we grow into, is defined by what we invest in.Growth in energy and growth in carbon have gone handin hand for the last hundred and seventy years becausemost of our energy investment has gone into fossil fuels.We have invested in finding new reserves, working outhow to get them out of the ground efficiently, buildingpipelines, tankers, terminals, and filling stations todeliver them to anyone who wants them and can pay forthem. Additionally, we have invested in the productsthat burn them for a million different uses.

The form of our growth and the direction in which weexpand is determined by exactly what we invest in. Weowe a huge debt, mainly of gratitude, for everything thatfossil fuel has given us to date. However, thecircumstances have now changed. We need to investdifferently to steer a different course. Our investmentsdetermine our future.

While it is essential that we stop investing in fossil fuel,it is equally important that we start investing elsewhere.The good news is that money taken from one can amply fund the other. Subsidies can really be seen asjust state-funded investment, and taxes as the opposite:state-organized disinvestment.

So far I have described how the shape of our investmentdetermines our future—and how we have chosen a fossilfuel future through fuel investment. That wasappropriate in its day, but it is time for an urgent change.Next I am going to outline why it is so urgent to pull outof fossil fuels and why the liberated investment is sourgently needed.

The Urgency of Cutting Carbon Investment

At this point, a very quick tour of some key numbers isimportant. Much of the broad arguments that I skimover here first hit the popular press in 2011 with BillMcKibben’s famous “Do the Math” article in RollingStone magazine. Months later Duncan Clark and Ipublished our book The Burning Question, in which wealso drew strongly on papers by Andrew Jarvis atLancaster University and many helpful discussions.Similar analyses, sometimes with slightly varyingnumbers, can be found in the IPCC reports and a rangeof think tanks. The next three paragraphs are now welltrodden ground about which we need to be crystal clear.

Following the Paris summit of 2015, the world has atlong last agreed that temperature rise should be keptbelow two degrees and ideally below one and a halfdegrees. The science is clear that in the absence ofemerging and yet-to-emerge technologies for takinggreenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, this puts an all-time total budget on our carbon emissions. Furthermore,there is good consensus, at least in rough terms, abouthow much of that budget has been spent and how muchremains to stand a good chance (carefully defined by theIPPC as meaning a 66 percent chance) of limitingtemperature rise to two degrees. This can be used towork out how much fuel we can burn from now on. Thetotal fuel budget can be compared to estimates of thetotal fossil fuel reserves that exist. These estimates arenot exact, but reserves are described in different ways:“proven reserves” (95 percent probability of beingprofitable to extract with today’s technology andprices), “probable reserves” (50 percent chance) and“resources” (extractable, but not necessarily profitablewith current technology and today’s prices).

Figure 2 shows that we have far more fuel in the groundthan we can possibly burn to stay within two degrees.Considering this limit, we can’t burn more than a smallfraction of the oil and gas available, even if we were toleave all the coal in the ground. Our fossil fuel problemis one of abundance, not scarcity. In fact if only we had ascarcity problem, we might even be saved from havingto take effective deliberate action on climate change.And far from being drained by human usage, net fossilfuel reserves and resources are going up all the time.Powered by current investment, new reserves arecontinually being discovered and new technologies arebeing developed for extracting them profitably; fromthe Arctic, from shale, from tar sands, from the deep seaand so on.

HOW WE FINANCE THE TRANSITION 157


One thing is dazzlingly clear: we need fossil fuelinvestment like we need a hole in the head. Investmentin yet more coal, oil and gas either has to be written offor it will be used to take us into a future that the worldhas finally agreed is highly dangerous.

The Equal Urgency of Diverting that InvestmentElsewhere

The very good news is that by eliminating fossil fuelinvestment, cutting subsidies and imposing taxes onfossil fuel, enormous funds will be redirected from thecreation of a highly dangerous future to the enablementof a better future for us and our children. The worddivestment sounds inherently negative, but we mustremember that it comes with an equally and oppositepositive counterpart: the liberated opportunity to investelsewhere. In the same way tax is often talked about as negative, but it is essential to remember that the other side of the coin is the funding opportunity thattaxes generate.

So we know we need to divest and tax fossil fuel, and cutsubsidies. We know that this frees us to invest in adifferent kind of growth. The questions, then, are whatshall we choose in its place, and will it be good enoughto enable us to live well.

Critical Investments

1. Renewable Energy

Energy growth has been tremendously consistent sincerecords began, and probably since the pyramids werebuilt by hand, perhaps even well before that too. Thereare some who advocate breaking that long-standingtrend, and perhaps they are right in that we could andshould—but for now let us be conservative in ourthinking and assume that the “business-as-usual” long-term energy growth trend of 2.4 percent is eitherdesirable or inevitable or both. If this is the case we hadbetter substitute fossil fuel for renewables at speed.Luckily everything is set for a solar revolution. The onlything missing is the scale of investment to enable itsdomination of human energy supply. Global growthrates of solar power are in excess of 30 percent per year.Costs are starting to rival or beat fossil fuels and look tobe falling by about 10 percent every time total capacitydoubles. By ignoring rooftop installations, both BP andthe International Energy Agency grossly underestimate

total global solar power at around half of a percent ofworld energy, whereas in reality it is probably at leastdouble that. If growth rates could stay at their currentlevel, we would be awash of green power by 2030.Clearly, keeping the growth rate high as the scaleincreases is a challenge but there are no inherentbarriers to total capacity. There is no foreseeable landshortage and no shortage of raw materials to make thesolar panels. The most critical factor for the growth rateis the investment level.

While solar is the number one renewable energy goodnews story, not everywhere in the world is well placedfor solar power. Luckily, many of the less sunny placeshave great wind and wave potential. So, in the globalmix, these technologies are also of key importance. Theytoo are doing well and require investment.

2. Transport from Solar Energy

Liquid hydrocarbon fuel has the great advantage ofbeing a compact and lightweight energy store. For allthe pollution, noise and grime it produces, it hasenabled cars to travel hundreds of miles withoutrefueling and planes to fly halfway around the worldcarrying all their energy needs on board.

The low-carbon world needs to invest in the technologyand infrastructure necessary for the electric car toproduce similar results. The most critical element ofthis is probably battery technology: we needlightweight, durable, non-toxic storage for billions ofcars without trashing the world’s mineral resources.

For air transport, there is currently no alternative onthe horizon to liquid fuels, so we either need to makethem directly from solar energy, or grow them asbiofuel. The former requires the development ofemerging technology, while the latter requires smartinvestment in food and land systems in order to createthe capacity for biofuel without trashing biodiversity orcausing hunger, even as the population rises to tenbillion or more.

3. Infrastructure for Low-Energy Living

This includes smart urban design and the retrofitting ofenergy efficiency into old building stock, with thepriority to target the buildings that leak the most energy,such as the worst parts of the UK’s creaky old housingstock, along with retrofitting basic insulation and low-energy lighting. The urban design priorities are toenable life without daily car use. Towns and cities needto be compact rather than sprawling, so that life can be

158 s .m.a . r. t .


conducted comfortably on foot or by bike, with hugebenefits for wel-lbeing as well as carbon. We need todivest from sprawling suburban detached housingprojects so that we can invest instead in compact city centers.

4. Carbon Capture

Carbon capture matters hugely because all realisticscenarios for limiting temperature change to twodegrees or less depend on taking carbon back out of theair. At whatever level we finally cap our emissions, wewill still encounter some adverse effects of climaticchange, and so risk triggering more catastrophicchanges, perhaps of a kind that we don’t even yetenvisage. Taking a clear-eyed look at humankind’s lackof light-footedness so far on the climate changechallenge, it is highly likely that we overspend our twodegree budget, perhaps by a long way. Given all this, itmakes incredibly good sense to develop and deploytechnologies for sequestering carbon. Neither of thesewill take off without not-for-profit investment and/orsubsidies and taxes in place, because there is very littlesalable utility to be had from either of them. Carboncapture and storage from power plants simply adds tothe cost of electricity. To be clear, the free market issimply unable to support carbon capture.

Our divestment from fossil fuels and our emissions taxescan powerfully enable two types of carbon capture. Thefirst of these is the roll out of carbon capture and storageat the point of combustion. This technology is just about

ready to go whenever the funding arrives and is usefulwhile fossil fuel persists in the energy mix, even thoughit will only ever be capable of capturing a modestproportion of our emissions. The second is thedevelopment and deployment of technologies for theextraction of carbon from ambient air. Although this isin a much earlier stage of development, all theresponsible climate scenarios now rely upon itsdeployment to reduce atmospheric carbon from anunavoidably high peak. Four years ago I rememberwriting that it would be unwise to rely on such anuncertain emerging technology. Now I write thathowever uncomfortable this might be, we need to rollback the clock and undo damage that we will havecaused. When I hear speculation that this technologylooks to be decades away I can’t resist turning to theBritish wartime analogies that I was brought up with ofthe urgent development of radar, Spitfires, and codecracking machines at super-high speeds. It is verydifficult to say how fast development might be possible.Since we just don’t know, it is uncomfortable to rely onit, but given that in the best of cases it could be a game-changer, we should still push for it hard—throughinvestment.

5. Land and Food Investments

The global land and food system is in urgent need ofimprovement. While we grow more than twice theedible calories that we require, there are huge problemsin the journey from field to fork that result in noteveryone getting the nutrition they need. Meanwhile we


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Figure 2: What share of the proven reserves can we burn? How much of the probable reserves can we burn? What share of the recoverable resources can we burn?

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are trashing our biodiversity at an alarming rate andpouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere through our land use, to the extent that agriculture isresponsible for between a quarter and a third of allgreenhouse gasses.

Many of the necessary improvements should not requiremulti-billion dollar investments. The single mostimportant change will be an amazingly simple dietaryshift towards less meat and dairy consumption, with aparticular focus on reducing beef. This will markedlyreduce greenhouse gasses, improve the nutritionaloutput of our land and, by relieving land pressure, oughtto be pivotal in stemming deforestation. The netinfrastructure investment requirement should benothing—or perhaps even less than that! We also need tocut waste throughout the food chain but, here again, theinfrastructure requirements are not vast.

However, there are two critical areas for whichinvestment is required. The first is research. We don’tyet know nearly enough about the impact of differentarable practices on the environment and, in particular,what farming systems store or release carbon and inwhat quantities. Research is needed into how to growefficiently while encouraging biodiversity. There arepromising manufactured alternatives to meat that needfurther looking into. We also need to understand howland can be used to create the liquid hydrocarbons thatwe will almost certainly need if we are to continue withaviation in the low-carbon world.

The second area in which investment is neededconcerns farmers. We need to understand that the bestways of dealing with our land are not the cheapest. Todo a really good job of producing food, cutting emissionsand promoting biodiversity care and attention areneeded. It requires plenty of people. The good news isthat we have more of this resource than ever before, andwill soon have at least another couple of billion morestill. For the past couple of centuries we have beenlooking to minimize the number of people working onthe land. This is crazy, given the abundance of personpower. We should be looking to employ more people todo a better and more careful job of looking after our landand growing our food. We need to invest in farmers andsubsidize them to do the right things. The money forthis, of course, is made available by ceasing the deeplyunhelpful subsidy of fossil fuels, divesting from themand better still, applying serious taxes.

How much funding can divestment and the withdrawalof subsidies liberate? In 2013 global investment in fossil

160 s .m.a . r. t .

What we need to divestfrom, and what criticalinvestment opportunitiesthis will create, will allowus to deliver a future thatwe can look forward to forourselves and thegenerations to come


fuels stood at over a trillion dollars while investment inrenewables stood at just a couple of hundred billion.

For a two-degree world, the remaining carbon budget isroughly three hundred billion tons CO2. Imagine acarbon tax of $300 per ton. This sounds high to manypeople—it would, for instance, add about a dollar to aliter of gasoline. The funds raised, however, would bearound $90 trillion—if half of that were distributed as a$6,000 life subsidy to every adult and child in theworld, the global reduction of inequality would besignificant. Those who burned more fuel would still beworse off, but those who were frugal would be richer.Meanwhile a colossal $45 trillion investment pot couldtransform the energy landscape. Pension schemes thatmight suffer from the drop of fossil fuel assets could becompensated to top up the profits from their re-investment in the low-carbon world, and even oilcompanies could be subsidized in developing their low-carbon business models.

What Does this Mean in Practice?

Every financial decision is an investment in one kind offuture or another. At the small scale, every small buyingdecision supports a supply chain and rejects others.Even bike maintenance is an investment in low carboninfrastructure. At the higher end of personal decisions,pensions and housing stand out. Pension portfolios nowrequire scrutiny not just for the returns they offer butfor the type of global future they support. Those signedup to employee schemes may feel powerless, but canstill help by making their views known at work. Housinginvestments can support energy efficient homes andsustainable urban design, rather than suburban sprawlsof leaky homes that necessitate long commutes and highenergy consumption.

For businesses and governments, exactly the sameprinciples apply for all investments and spending, taxesand subsidies. Fossil fuels need taxing and, of course,their subsidies removing. The same goes for relatedinfrastructure and research and development. Therevenue raised here can be used to invest in the criticalareas outlined above as well as to provide a degree oftemporary support for industries and people madeunavoidably vulnerable by the speed of transition. Justas at the individual level, company and state pensionscheme portfolios stand out as key investment areas toget right. Obviously and importantly, electricity can bepurchased from renewable sources; and this is becoming

a more mainstream option, even among largecorporations. But beyond this, every line in the purchaseledger steers the future towards or away from fossilfuels; towards or away from a future we would wish forour children.



Delivering SustainableConsumption and Production

Arab Hoballah

Arab Hoballah is a fomer director of SustainableLifestyles, Cities and Industry of the United NationsEnvironment Programme (UNEP), focused onSustainable Consumption and Production (SCP). SinceOctober 2005 he is head of SCP.

Gargantuan Consumption and Production Cycles

Correcting the mistakes of industrialization, reversingpollution, rehabilitating damaged ecosystems,eradicating poverty, promoting education, and sustaininginclusive green economy require tremendous amounts ofresources—mainly financial resources, in the region ofhundreds of trillions of dollars and euros and yuans. Thismuch is evident, though I will not be listing here thevarious amounts needed, largely reported elsewhere by anumber of media outlets. Equally evident is the fact thatthe general investment policies, financial mechanismsand banking systems developed over at least the lastcentury have largely contributed to current economic,social and environmental crises.

Without rejecting the benefits of development in termsof education, health, freedom and technology, it must be admitted that as a consequence of unsustainablegrowth the world is currently faced with the risk ofeconomic, social and environmental breakdown. Policies and markets need to be seriously reformed, with the financial system at the service of sustainabledevelopment and not the other way around, in order tofacilitate a badly needed transformative change throughthe promotion of resource efficiency and the adoption of sustainable consumption and production patterns,particularly in cities.

With the exception of a few irresponsible business andpolitical leaders blinded by their thirst for unboundedwealth, it is duly recognized that we are going through anunprecedented era, the Anthropocene, in which theworld’s population is consuming more resources than theplanet is capable of producing.

Over the last decade there has been increasingrecognition that to effectively deliver policy outcomes itis crucial to change people’s behavior. While the conceptof sustainable development has gained ground in recentdecades, this has taken place in parallel with a dangerousrising trend of patterns of unsustainable consumptionand production. Presently we consume over one and ahalf times more resources than the Earth can provide,and well before 2050 we will need more than two Earthsto meet our gargantuan consumption habits. Meeting thechallenge of shifting consumer preferences towards more“green” behavioral patterns as well as effectivelyintegrating sustainability parameters in the business andindustry decision-making process requires an in-depthstructural transformative change—and one, at that,which takes standard practices away fromcounterproductive “greenwashing” strategies.

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Today, our consumption habits are depleting keyresources and destroying various ecosystems. Thenumber of things we use in our daily lives has increasedexponentially in many parts of the world. Globalextraction of raw material has tripled over the past fourdecades, rising to an annual figure of 70 billion tons in2010, and is currently expected to reach 140 billion tonsby 2030. This surge in the amount of material weconsume is underpinned by growing populations, themiddle class expanding, and higher income per capitaworldwide. For a variety of economic and social reasonsthese trends are unstoppable, which makes it imperativethat we change the way we produce and consume, doingmore with less, if we are to achieve sustainabledevelopment.

The international community has increasingly realizedthat it is important and indeed imperative to change ourunsustainable consumption and production patterns ifwe are to eradicate poverty and deliver sustainabledevelopment. This has resulted in the adoption atRio+20 of the Ten-Year Framework of Programs onSustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) and theinclusion among the seventeen SustainableDevelopment Goals (SDGs) of a stand-alone goal on SCP,together with related targets in most of the other goals,showing the cross-cutting nature of SCP in support ofsustainable development. In this same spirit, the COP21Paris Agreement has highlighted that sustainablelifestyles and sustainable patterns of consumption andproduction, with developed countries leading the effortto achieve them, play an important role in addressingclimate change.

Uncertain Transition: Resource Efficiency First

There are encouraging signs that society is beginning tounderstand the absolute need to change ourunsustainable consumption and production patterns.Terms such as “efficiency,” “decoupling,”“decarbonizing,” “quality of life” and “sustainablelifestyles” regularly appear in the media, illustrating thefact that people, governments and businesses are alreadyweaving sustainability into their daily decision-making.Carbon footprint monitoring, food waste reductioncampaigns, urban gardening, vehicle-pooling models, andsharing economy, as well as surveys to understand thevalues and motivations of youth, are among the toolscurrently helping people to make more sustainableconsumption and production decisions.

Yet these actions are often piecemeal. They are not yetframed within a holistic vision of what constitutes asustainable lifestyle, nor are they supported by reliableinformation to guide consumer choice towardssustainable goods and services, or, generally speaking, bygovernment policies to the same effect. Consumer actionand choice as well as government policies will benecessary to reduce the unsustainable impact of ourcurrent consumption levels, particularly in developedcountries, and to generate a supply of sustainableproducts to make the adoption of more sustainablelifestyles a realizable goal in all countries.

Take the “simple” example of buildings: green, low-carbon or passive buildings likely constitute the singlemost important sector for reducing energy use and CO2emissions, with criteria and labeling systems already inplace in many countries. But despite their huge potential,the actual number of such green buildings to haveemerged since this was identified by theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asthe low-hanging fruit in terms of reduction ofgreenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions is just a drop in avast ocean of opportunities. Cities and countries can savebillions and trillions of dollars if a low-carbon andresource-efficiency policy is applied across the board inthe construction sector by retrofitting older structures,erecting new high-quality buildings and also, if notmainly, developing suitable social housing programs.

Many of the solutions we require to achieve the shift tosustainable consumption and production patterns do notrest with the ultimate consumers of products. Livingsustainably is not just about individual choice: it is alsoabout ensuring that governments enact policies thatguide people towards this type of lifestyles, that guideand enable markets to adapt accordingly, and thatincrease the offer of sustainable goods and services toprovide consumers with the necessary choices. Thoughpeople are end consumers, most of the decisions aroundgoods and services, and their associated impacts, aretaken at much earlier stages in their design, productionand delivery.

Here is where the public sector can wield a criticalinfluence, stimulating both the production of anddemand for sustainable products by implementingsustainable public procurement policies. Governmentpurchasing accounts for between 15 and 30 percent of thesales of goods and services in domestic markets aroundthe world. This is generally closer to 15 percent in mostdeveloped countries, but reaches 30 percent in somedeveloping countries. Not only does this market share



offer a significant opportunity to send a clear signal toproducers regarding the need for sustainable products, italso means that green or sustainable public procurementpolicies can be aligned with government policiessupporting related social and environmental objectives.

Existing initiatives from around the globe, such asreplacing incandescent light bulbs with energy-efficientfluorescent lamps in all public buildings and public areas,institutionalizing and applying recycling policies,reducing food wastes in enterprises, restaurants andschools as well as university canteens, or reducing andeven eliminating harmful substances in productionprocesses and consumer products, prove that sustainableprocurement transforms markets, boostsenvironmentally friendly industries, saves money,conserves natural resources and fosters job creation.

Given the size and scope of the challenges faced and theactions required, it is necessary for public and privatedecision makers as well as the civil society to achievegreater understanding and implementation of policiesthat deliver resource efficiency and SCP. To that end,applying life-cycle thinking is essential to identify andprioritize the relevant policies and practices. This in turnmust go hand in hand with the systemic thinkingnecessary for sustainability, integrating resourceefficiency in global value chains by using life-cycle dataon environmental impact, thus enabling private andpublic organizations to make informed choices leading toincreased SCP.

Promoting resource efficiency throughout theproduction process is essential to advance a circulareconomy and an inclusive green economy, in particularby enabling the effective development, application,adaptation and replication of resource-efficient andcleaner production concepts, methods, policies,practices and technologies in industries and businesses,focusing especially on small- and medium-sizedenterprises (SMEs).

In this context, the development of eco-innovation andthe application of an innovative business model thatincorporates sustainability and life-cycle thinkingthroughout all business operations and in cooperationwith partners across the value chain will save businessesmaterial and financial resources. For this reason they willbe in a better position to access matching funds fromfinancial institutions to further expand their activities.This strategy entails a coordinated set of modifications ornovel solutions to products (goods/services), processes,market approach and organizational structure, which

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Presently we consumeover one and a half timesmore resources than theEarth can provide, andwell before 2050 we willneed more than two Earthsto meet our gargantuanconsumption habits


leads to a company’s enhanced performance andcompetitiveness.

The “Easy” Case of Energy: Efficiency versus New,Alternative and Renewable

The unprecedented rates at which we are presentlyexperiencing technical change have resulted in muchprosperity, but have also presented us with a range ofdaunting challenges. In order to mitigate and adapt to theeffects of climate change we must pay serious attentionto promoting and scaling up resource efficiency in allsectors and all countries. Nevertheless, the globalcommunity has given priority to GHGs emissions andenergy crises, devoting more attention and investmentsto finding new and renewable energy sources than tooptimizing efficiency as a means to reduce energy use inmost industrial and consumption sectors. In many casesthe business-as-usual patterns of industrial productionand consumption remain fundamentally the same—thatis, wasteful—even if alternative or renewable resourcesare used where possible. By contrast, savings fromefficiency and productivity throughout the value chainare simply gigantic, both in terms of material saved perproduct and other resources (including energy) neededper product.

In this context, energy transition should provide accessto energy at a lower cost to the environment. Energytransition will be the result of a combination of actions,of which energy efficiency is a significant part. Indeed,abatement of the GHGs that cause global warming andclimate change can be achieved by: a) using energy moreefficiently; b) shifting to means of energy supply thatcause fewer emissions; c) better managing biomassresources to reduce emissions where they occur and tocreate sinks for carbon where possible; d) changingbehavior towards lower energy lifestyles. All thesechanges in the sources and use of energy can make afundamental contribution towards achieving patterns ofsustainable consumption and production.

Resource efficiency, in particular when it comes toenergy, is relevant for both developed and developingcountries, especially considering that about three billionadditional middle class consumers will arise around2050. Many of these will be found in emerging countries,which by then will aspire to the same level ofconsumption as current developed ones. Investments inenergy productivity can create new jobs, foster economicgrowth, reduce energy bills for families and make

business operations more profitable. Additionally, indeveloping countries savings from energy efficiencycould contribute to making modern energy servicesavailable to the whole population and at the same timesupport eco-innovation.

But the efficient use of resources, including the “easy”case of energy, will be critical to bring about that goal.The reduction of GHGs emission can be achievedthrough technological innovation and behavioralchanges which lead to the adoption of less energy-intensive lifestyles. These changes include, for instance,choosing more energy-efficient goods and services.Savings generated by more efficient production andconsumption of energy can make a fundamentalcontribution to mobilizing financial resources andunlocking investment capital towards other developmentpriorities such as education and health, once basic needsfor all are guaranteed.

Cities: “To Be Sustainable or Not to Be”

Cities are responsible for most of the consumption andproduction of energy today. As the phenomenon ofurbanization keeps growing the importance of city-levelaction will be reinforced, making cities the focal point ofthe efforts to deliver sustainable solutions to theproduction of goods and enable consumers to makeresponsible choices. The road towards achieving SCPthrough city-level action, however, starts with buildings,the most readily accessible means of advancing energyefficiency and the reduction of CO2 emissions.

In applying sustainable consumption and production,cities can act as catalysts in the promotion of sustainabledevelopment. The New Urban Agenda, prepared throughthe Habitat III process, provides an opportunity to focuson vertical and horizontal integration and theimplementation of the SDGs at the city level. Promotingresource efficiency in cities will increase their economicresilience, contribute to climate change mitigation, andreduce waste and associated costs, while also improvingquality of life.

To that end it is essential that all countries, starting withleading economies such as those under the G20, engagemore proactively in an objective and responsible low-carbon agenda, bringing together central and localgovernments and businesses in a long-term strategicalliance with the aim of delivering the urgently neededtransformative change in policy frameworks and actions,in market evolution and lifestyles, towards responsible



and sustainable consumption and production patterns toachieve sustainability.

Many of the problems attributed to cities areconsequences of past and current policies and actionplans for economic growth and consumer behavior. Inthis context it is particularly important to take intoconsideration the growing global middle class, who arenot only expected to live longer due to improvements inhealth care but are also characterized by their increasedpurchasing capacity. Considering the previouslymentioned expected increase over the next thirty yearsof three billion people belonging to the middle class,cities can be thought of as the “industries of the three-quarters” in the sense that, as an order of magnitude,cities will host about three quarters—between 70 and 90percent, depending on sector and region—of thepopulation, GDP, resources use, waste production, andCO2 emissions of the world. This is to say that therecould be no sustainability if not at city level and withresource-efficient cities looking to deliver sustainableconsumption and production.

However this requires proper knowledge andunderstanding of urban metabolism, in particularresource flows to and within cities. Considering the hugepressures cities will be facing in terms of supply anddemand of resources, there is a need to support cities andtheir networks in better identifying and realizing theeconomic, social and environmental benefits of resourceefficiency and sustainable consumption and production.This in turn will result in cities, and therefore alsocountries, being more resilient on the back of resultingclimate change mitigation actions.

Ultimately, resource-efficient cities combine greaterproductivity and innovation with lower costs andreduced environmental impact, making them the enginesof sustainability. Increasing demand for consumptionproducts will mainly occur in cities. Hence, depending ontheir consumption patterns and demand for low-carbonresource-efficient products, they will drive overalldevelopment towards sustainability or away from it. Inthe same order of ideas, innovation in hard and softinfrastructure will improve resource management incities and provide a plan of action that could easily bereplicated in a large number of urban areas—a perfectopportunity for some cities, especially middle-sized ones,to lead by example.

To conclude, if governments are serious aboutsustainable development and looking for responsibleactions to effect a truly transformative long-term change,

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The global communityhas devoted moreattention and investmentsto finding new andrenewable energy sourcesthan to optimizingefficiency as a means toreduce energy use in mostindustrial andconsumption sectors


the focus should be increasingly on promotingsustainable consumption and production, notablythrough resource-efficient cities with relevant policiesand sound governance, developing adequate marketinstruments and enabling capacity at all levels.Therefore, by improving productivity and efficiency in-house, in-industry, in-city, and by delivering sustainableconsumption and production, countries andgovernments, businesses, industries, and society ingeneral will be better equipped to cope with theinvestment necessary to further consolidate andstrengthen the transition towards sustainabledevelopment.



Regenerative Development

Raymond J. Cole

Raymond J. Cole is professor in the University ofBritish Columbia (Canada) where he teachesenvironmental aspects of building design. He is formerdirector of UBC’s School of Architecture andLandscape Architecture and immediate past-directorof the university’s Centre for Interactive Research onSustainability.

Despite having greater scientific understanding ofhuman-induced stresses on natural systems andunprecedented individual and collective access to thatinformation, political leaders and the public have beenslow to embrace the seriousness of climate change andenvironmental degradation. Such issues remaincompromised in the political realm by a host of otherseemingly more pressing concerns—geostrategiccompetition, mass human migration, terrorism, and theimmediate outfall from increasingly common severeweather events. The public’s priorities, one assumes, willinevitably change as it becomes aware of how the latterare affecting their personal property, food prices, watersupply, and so on, and that their individual and collectivechoices are complicit in global warming and associatedclimate instability.

Legislation, if possible to enforce, has historically beenviewed as one of the most appropriate means ofcombating localized environmental transgressions,particularly if sufficient information is available toformulate workable regulations, set targets and measuretheir effectiveness. Although legislation and regulationwill likely remain important in reducing anthropogeniccarbon emissions, a greater level of cooperation andvoluntary agreements between stakeholders andregulating bodies would seem necessary to morefundamentally address climate change mitigation.

The energy and resource use and greenhouse gasemissions associated with the construction and operationof buildings are acknowledged as a major cause of bothglobal warming and environmental degradation.Importantly, the fourth Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change (IPCC) report recognized that buildingsoffer the largest low-cost potential carbon reductions inall world regions and will play a critical part of any globallow carbon future. How we—individually andcollectively—understand and respond to climate changeand, in particular, what we build, how we build andwhere we build as well as how we use buildings, willprove central to any meaningful transition to asustainable future.

Maintaining a measure of criticality toward the nature ofan impending set of environmental difficulties that mustbe navigated, and simultaneously offering a positive,hopeful message and perspective is not an easy task. Toencourage people to engage and respond to climatechange and other environmental issues with a greatersense of urgency, persuasive appeals have consistentlystressed the negative consequences of failing to amelioratethem. The IPCC’s findings have, for example, been

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variously cast in terms of alarm, pessimism and adepressing possible future—notions that, althoughcharacterizing and conveying clear warning and risk, havefailed to garner public attention and engagement. Whilescholars in the field of environmental psychology haveoffered evidence that providing information alone rarelyleads to the expected or desired behavioral change, tryingto convince the public by presenting a “bad news”storyline seems even more ineffectual. By contrast, apositive transformative vision that inspires hope, offerspromise and creates the necessary cognitive space toexplore new possibilities, is considered far more potent inencouraging collective action than the presentation ofalarming facts and negative messages. Similar argumentsapply to approaches to improve the environmentalperformance of buildings. What is commonly referred toas “green building” design, for example, has been almostexclusively directed at reducing the degenerativeconsequences of the built environment on the health andintegrity of ecological systems rather than emphasizingpositive outcomes.

A primary emphasis of current green buildingperformance relates to that of individual buildings; this isthe scale at which building codes focus and energyservices are metered. The “endgame” of a “doing-less-harm” approach—doing no harm—has logically led tosetting net-zero impact as an appropriate goal forenvironmental performance of individual buildings.Indeed, such an ambition is increasingly embedded innational energy policies with many countries declaringthat all new buildings must conform to performancetargets of net-zero energy and/or carbon neutral emissionstandards by a certain date.

Until recently, very little reference has been made to theconsiderable catalytic role that buildings can play innurturing and supporting positive environmentaloutcomes. The notion of “net-positive” propositions andapproaches to building design practice has now emergedwherein some buildings may offer the potential ofcollecting more energy and water than they need tosupport their requirements. In doing so, it is notsurprising that the primacy of the individual building asthe focus of energy strategies is also being seriouslychallenged with an emerging tendency to view buildingsas potential resource nodes within a networkedinfrastructure, such as a district energy system or smartgrid network.

If we accept that a building, in and of itself, cannot besustainable but can be designed to support sustainablepatterns of living, then the role the building plays is

potentially of greater consequence than the buildingitself. Such a viewpoint is central to the emerging notionof regenerative development wherein buildings, inaddition to meeting their functional requirements, addother forms of “value” to the community such asimproved social welfare, employment creation, newbusiness opportunities and strengthening humanconnections with natural systems. Importantly, ratherthan reducing destructive impacts, the regenerativeapproaches see buildings as enabling the full potential ofthe social and ecological systems in which they sit. Itwould seem, therefore, that if buildings are to act as acatalyst for broader environmental change they mustreestablish a meaningful connection to the places wherethey are situated.

The notion of regeneration—“rebirth” or “renewal”—hasbeen variously applied in relation to the built environmentand communities following major acts of devastation orwhen a prior condition has declined to an extentconsidered ripe for renewal—and, of course, where thecommitment has been found to initiate rebuilding. Theresulting transformed condition, while embodying tracesfrom its past, is infused with new aspirations andpossibilities. Over the past years, however, regenerationhas been garnering increasing interest as a means ofreframing green building practices and, carrying with itqualitatively different and broader connotations than usedpreviously. John Lyle’s 1994 book Regenerative Design forSustainable Development illustrated key differencesbetween linear, single throughput processes and closed-loop processes with the attendant reduction in entropy. Bycontrast, current notions of regenerative developmentemphasize a coevolutionary, partnered relationshipbetween humans and nature rather than a managerial one.Regenerative development represents the first approachto bridge human development with the physical andfunctional, emotional and spiritual attributes of nature.Within regenerative development it is not the buildingthat is regenerated, in the sense of the self-healing andself-organizing attributes of a living system. Rather, it isthe act of building which can become a catalyst forpositive change within and add value to the unique placein which it is situated.

While regenerative approaches and practices are stillevolving, books such as Dominique Hes and Chrisna duPlessis’s Designing for Hope: Pathways to RegenerativeSustainability (2014) and Pamela Mang and Ben Haggard’sRegenerative Development and Design: A Framework forEvolving Sustainability (2016) have provided bothpowerful justifications and understanding of the core



principles. Within regenerative development, stakeholderprocesses, buildings and their inhabitation are collectivelyfocused on enhancing life in all its manifestations—human, other species, ecological systems—through anenduring responsibility of stewardship. Importantly,regenerative development effectively permits cross-scale,socio-ecological relationships and complex adaptivesystems to frame approaches to building andinfrastructure design.

Reducing the rate and scale of environmental degradationand engaging regenerative approaches are essential andcomplementary requirements in charting a sustainablefuture. The intention, language and more comprehensiveframing of regenerative development offers considerablepotential to accelerate the development of systemsthinking, shared vision, shared ownership and sharedresponsibility. While the practice of “participatory design”expands the range of stakeholder input, authority andknowledge still reside largely with the professional designteam. By contrast, regenerative approaches emphasize thecoproduction of the built environment, greater equalitybetween all stakeholders and demand more upfront timeto discover what is valued. Consistent with MargaretWheatley’s notion that people care about what theycreate, forging partnerships and changing the powerrelationships inherent in the production of buildingsprovides greater assurance that the initial ambitions of aproject are maintained through time.

So why is regenerative design gaining prominence?Certainly in North America there has been the search forcomplementary or alternative performance aspirationsand approaches to those both evident in, and as a result of,the US Leadership in Energy and Environment Design(LEED) green building rating system. While havingproven to be an enormously valuable vehicle formainstreaming green building practice, LEED’s checklistformat is incapable of guiding design in a systems-approach manner and establishing positive links betweenbuildings and their context. Moreover, while notdiminishing the importance and necessity of reducing thedegenerative impacts of buildings on natural systems,green design alone is insufficient responsibility andmotivation compared to the aspirations of regenerativedevelopment.

The reaction against reductive, checklist-basedassessment methods represents only a relatively minorreason for the increasing appeal of regenerativeapproaches. A much more fundamental basis for its appealis born out of the convergence of a number of historicalthreads that have either been latent or running parallel to

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The latestIntergovernmentalPanel on ClimateChange (IPCC) reportrecognized thatbuildings offer thelargest low-costpotential carbonreductions in all worldregions


conventional green-building discourse and practice overthe past 30 years or so. While, many of its core tenets—systems thinking, community engagement, respect forplace—have long individual histories in architecturaldiscourse and practice, the regenerative approaches tiesthem together in a cogent manner.

In reframing building performance within regenerativedevelopment, there is the need to understand andreconcile a number of issues, including: the relationshipbetween systems thinking and reductive approaches; therelationship between the performance of individualbuildings and the larger context in which they arelocated; and the relationship between place- or region-specific approaches and globalized systems. What isperhaps the most significant and necessary shift does notreside in the strategic level, but in the mindset amongdesign teams and clients. Here it becomes necessary toaccept that the root causes of our current environmentalpredicament primarily result from differences betweenthe workings of natural systems and human systems.Indeed, a major challenge we face this century resides intransforming what human beings value, instillingenvironmental stewardship as a societal priority and, inparticular, aligning the global economy with the dictatesof ecological sustainability.

A key tenet of regenerative development is reconnectingpeople with the unique places where they live andthereby developing the necessary sense of sharedmeaning, care and stewardship. Given the proliferationand pervasive use of information technology that permitsimmediate digital access from anywhere to anywhere,perhaps there is an even greater need to situate ourselvesin identifiable and meaningful physical places designedfor social interaction and engagement with nature. If,indeed, the experience of place provides the counter tothe more abstract enveloping world of global informationsystems, then it will also be logically coupled withstrategies that offer “slowness” in an ever-acceleratingpace of life. The reemergence of the importance of placeis clearly not confined to where and how we build andmay also be a reaction and manifestation of peoplewanting to reclaim more control over their lives.Localism, for example, supports local production andconsumption of goods, local control of government, andpromotion of local history, local culture and localidentity. Which societal needs can be reestablished andmaintained at a local level and which remain within thedomain of national and global production, trade andexchange, will clearly evolve according to the constraintsand opportunities afforded by place.

All human endeavor, including building-design priorities,are shaped by the prevailing worldview and value systemof the societal and cultural context within which theyemerge. Worldviews shape the underlying assumptionsthat drive what people believe about the world—thequestions they ask, the solutions they seek and themethods they deploy to do so. Fundamental change willlikely only occur through the replacement of theprevailing anthropocentric, mechanistic worldview by anecological worldview that sees humans as integral to alarger community of life. This will not be easy or quickgiven that the prevailing worldview was some fivehundred years in the making and is ingrained in all aspectsof Western society and culture. However, Hess and duPlessis provide evidence that an alternative ecologicalworldview has been gaining ground and, given theincreasing rate of dissemination of ideas afforded byinformation and communication technologies, one cananticipate a more rapid transition.

Although mitigation efforts to limit the extent of globalwarming will remain critical, there will be an increasingneed to adapt to an uncertain and changing climate andenvironmental context triggered by past human activity.Indeed, adapting to a changing climate will likely emergeas a primary human preoccupation for decades to come.While continual change, uncertainty and unpredictabilityare characteristic of complex adaptive systems such as thebuilt environment, human perceptual systems are, bycontrast, oriented toward order, maintenance,optimization, and predictable outcomes. Rather thanaccepting and embracing uncertainty, Mang and Haggardargue that we have largely strived to make our lives morepredictable and controllable through the deployment ofincreasingly energy-intensive technologies. Proponents ofregenerative approaches see the self-healing abilities ofliving systems, the shift in rethinking building design inrelation to natural systems and the innate human creativeand entrepreneurial spirit as collectively offering apositive path through the uncertain future created by achanging climate. How these and other human endeavorscoevolve with changing natural systems to the mutualbenefit of each will likely distinguish future patterns ofhuman settlement development from those in the past.Eventually perhaps, we will come to view the act ofbuilding not as destructive of natural systems anddepleting the earth’s resources but as contributing to andsupporting the creation of a thriving, resilient andabundant world.



With his series of photographs Darkened Cities,Thierry Cohen (France, 1965) recreates the fantasy of an urban sky full of stars. He does this byphotographing the world’s main cities by day, anddeserts, plains and other places free of light pollutionby night. By mounting the two shots, he creates aunique new image infused with a fascinating andimpossible beauty.

Darkened CitiesThierry Cohen


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Environmentalorganizations, scientistsand parliamentarianshave called for theworld’s religious leadersto respond to theenvironmental crisis

Mary Evelyn Tucker


6.Different Visions.One Planet, One City

When entrepreneursare faced with publicofficials ready to takebribes, they are able toignore environmentalregulations

Víctor Lapuente

Intermediary cities are the meeting point betweenthe rural and urbanworlds, and they providean opportunity to generatea civic and democraticspace that large cities ormetropolises can nolonger permit themselvesso easily

Firdaous Oussidhoum


World Religions and Ecology

Mary Evelyn Tucker

Mary Evelyn Tucker is a senior lecturer and researchscholar at Yale University, where she has appointmentsin the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies as well as the Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies.

The environmental crisis is a pressing issue which hasbeen well documented in its various interlockingmanifestations of industrial pollution, resourcedepletion, and population explosion.

The moral imperative and value systems of religions areindispensable in mobilizing the sensibilities of peopletoward preserving the environment for futuregenerations. Clearly religions need to be involved withthe development of a more comprehensive worldviewand ethics. Whether from an anthropocentric or abiocentric perspective, more adequate environmentalvalues need to be formulated and linked to areas ofscience and public policy.

One of the greatest challenges to contemporary religionsis how to respond to the environmental crisis which somebelieve has been perpetuated by the enormous inroads ofmaterialism and secularization in contemporary societies.Others such as the medieval historian Lynn White havesuggested that the emphasis in Judaism and Christianityon the transcendence of God above nature and thedominion of humans over nature has led to a devaluing ofthe natural world and a subsequent destruction of itsresources for utilitarian ends.

Be that as it may, what is necessary is, as the historian ofreligions Thomas Berry has so aptly pointed out, acomprehensive reevaluation of human-Earth relations ifthe human is to continue as a viable species on anincreasingly degraded planet. Indeed, he said that ourchallenge was to develop ethics not just for homicide,suicide, or genocide but also for biocide or geocide.

In addition to major economic and political changes, thiswill require adopting worldviews that differ from thosewhich have captured the imagination of contemporaryindustrialized societies that often view nature simply as acommodity to be exploited.

Ethics and Sustainability

The focus of ethics in the world’s religions has beenlargely human-centered. While some have critiqued thisanthropocentric perspective of world religions as rathernarrow in light of environmental degradation and theloss of species, it is nonetheless important to recall thatthis perspective has also helped to promote majormovements for social justice and human rights.

Social justice and environmental integrity are now beingseen as part of a continuum. For some decades

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environmental philosophers have been developing thefield of environmental ethics that can now provideenormous resources for the world’s religions inconsidering how to expand their ethical focus. Emergingbiocentric and ecocentric ethics are attentive to lifeforms and ecosystems within a planetary context.

Thus religions are gradually moving from exclusivelyanthropocentric ethics to ecocentric ethics and even to“anthropocosmic” ethics. The latter is a term used by TuWeiming to describe the vibrant interaction of cosmos,Earth, and humans in a Confucian worldview.1 In thiscontext, humans complete the natural and cosmic worldand become participants in the dynamic transformativelife processes. This is a fruitful yet still emerging pathtoward a comprehensive ethics for sustainability.

Social and Historical Context

Through intolerance and exclusive claims to truth, worldreligions have often contributed to tensions betweenpeoples, including wars or forced conversion. Butreligions have also often been at the forefront of reforms,such as in the labor movement, in immigration law, injustice for the poor and oppressed. The movements ofnon-violence for freedom in India and for integration inthe United States were inspired by religious principlesand lead by religious leaders such as Gandhi and MartinLuther King.

The emerging dialogue on religion and ecology alsoacknowledges that in seeking long-term environmentalsustainability, there is clearly a disjunction betweencontemporary problems regarding the environment andtraditional religions as resources, which are notnecessarily equipped to supply specific guidance indealing with complex issues such as climate change,desertification, or deforestation. At the same time onerecognizes that certain orientations and values from theworld’s religions may not only be useful but evenindispensable for a more comprehensive cosmologicalorientation and environmental ethics.

Scholars of religion and ecology acknowledge thatreligious scriptures and commentaries were written in anearlier age with a different audience in mind. Similarly,many of the myths and rituals of the world’s religionswere developed in earlier historical contexts, frequentlyagricultural, while the art and symbols were createdwithin worldviews very different from our own. Likewise,the ethics and morality of the world’s religions respondprimarily to anthropocentric perspectives regarding the

importance of human-human relations, and views ofsalvation and spirituality are generally formulated inrelation to enhancing divine-human relations.

Despite these historical and cultural contingencies, thereare particular religious attitudes and practices as well ascommon ethical values that can be identified forbroadening and deepening environmental perspectives.Thus we affirm the actual and potential contribution ofreligious ideas for informing and inspiring ecologicaltheology, environmental ethics, and grassroots activism.

Religions are now reclaiming and reconstructing thesepowerful religious attitudes, practices, and valuestoward reconceiving mutually enhancing human-Earthrelations. The resources of religious traditions can bebrought forward in coherent and convincing ways inresponse to particular aspects of our currentenvironmental crisis. This requires a self-reflexive yetcreative approach to retrieving and reclaiming texts andtraditions, reevaluating and reexamining what will bemost efficacious, and thus restoring and reconstructingreligious traditions in a creative postmodern world. Allof this involves a major effort to evoke the power andpotential of religious traditions to function even moreeffectively as sources of spiritual inspiration, moraltransformation, and sustainable communities in themidst of the environmental challenges faced by theEarth community.

World religions are seen as providing a broad orientationto the cosmos and human roles in it. Attitudes towardnature thus have been significantly, although notexclusively, shaped by religious views for millennia incultures around the globe.

In this context, then, religions can be understood in theirlargest sense as a means whereby humans, recognizingthe limitations of phenomenal reality, undertake specificpractices to effect self-transformation and communitycohesion within a cosmological context.

Religions thus refer to those cosmological stories, symbolsystems, ritual practices, ethical norms, historicalprocesses, and institutional structures that transmit aview of the human as embedded in a world of meaningand responsibility, transformation and celebration.Religions connect humans with a divine presence ornuminous force. They bond human communities andthey assist in forging intimate relations with the broaderEarth community. In summary, religions link humans tothe larger matrix of indeterminacy and mystery fromwhich life arises, unfolds, and flourishes.

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Institutions and Worldviews

Certain distinctions need to be made here between theparticularized expressions of religion identified withinstitutional or denominational forms of religion andthose broader worldviews that animate suchexpressions. By worldviews we mean those ways ofknowing, embedded in symbols and stories, which findlived expressions, consciously and unconsciously in thelife of particular cultures. In this sense, worldviews arisefrom and are formed by human interactions with naturalsystems or ecologies. Consequently, one of the principalconcerns of religions in many communities is to describein story form the emergence of the local geography as arealm of the sacred. The exploration of worldviews asthey are both constructed and lived by religiouscommunities reveals formative attitudes regardingnature, habitat, and our place in the world.

A culture’s worldviews are contained in religiouscosmologies and expressed through rituals and symbols.Religious cosmologies describe the experience oforigination and change in relation to the natural world.Religious rituals and symbols arise out of cosmologiesand are grounded in the dynamics of nature. Theyprovide rich resources for encouraging spiritual andethical transformation in human life. This is true forexample in Buddhism, which sees change in nature andthe cosmos as a potential source of suffering for thehuman. Confucianism and Daoism, on the other hand,affirm nature’s changes as the source of the Dao. Inaddition, the death-rebirth cycle of nature serves as aninspiring mirror for human life, especially in theWestern monotheistic traditions of Judaism,Christianity, and Islam. All religions translate naturalcycles into rich tapestries of interpretive meanings thatencourage humans to move beyond tragedy, suffering,and despair. Human struggles expressed in religioussymbolism find their way into a culture’s art, music, andliterature. By linking human life and patterns of nature,religions have provided a meaningful orientation tolife’s continuity as well as to human diminishment anddeath. In addition, religions have helped to celebratethe gifts of nature such as air, water, and food thatsustain life.

Religions have been significant catalysts for humans incoping with change and transcending suffering while atthe same time grounding humans in nature’s rhythmsand Earth’s abundance. The creative tensions betweenhumans seeking to transcend this world and yearning tobe embedded in this world are part of the dynamics ofworld religions. Christianity, for example, holds the

promise of salvation in the next life as well ascelebration of the incarnation of Christ as a human inthe world. Similarly, Hinduism holds up a goal ofmoksha, of liberation from the world of samsara, while also highlighting the ideal of Krishna acting in the world.

This realization of creative tensions leads to a morebalanced understanding of the possibilities andlimitations of religions regarding environmentalconcerns. Many religions retain otherworldlyorientations toward personal salvation outside thisworld; at the same time they can and have fosteredcommitments to social justice, peace and ecologicalintegrity in the world. A key component that has beenmissing in much environmental discourse is how toidentify and tap into the cosmologies, symbols, rituals,and ethics that inspire changes of attitudes and actionsfor creating a sustainable future within this world.

In alignment with these concerns for “eco-justice,”religions can encourage values and ethics of reverence,respect, restraint, redistribution, responsibility, andrenewal for formulating a broader environmental ethicsthat includes humans, ecosystems, and other species.With the help of religions humans are now advocatingfor a reverence for the Earth and its long evolutionaryunfolding, respect for the myriad species who share theplanet with us, restraint in the use of natural resourceson which all life depends, equitable distribution ofwealth, recognition of responsibility of humans for thecontinuity of life into future generations, and renewal of the energies for the great work of building asustainable Earth community. These are the virtues for sustainability, which the world’s religions can contribute.

Response of Leaders and Religions to the Environmental Crisis

In recent years there has been a growing call fromvarious groups, from environmental organizations toscientists and parliamentarians, for the world’s religiousleaders to respond to the environmental crisis and playan active role in the development of a more sustainableplanetary future. In addition, there has been a strikinggrowth in monographs and journal articles in the area ofreligion and ecology, while several national andinternational meetings have also been held on thissubject. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has sponsoredinterreligious meetings, the United Nations

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Environment Programme (UNEP) has established anannual Environmental Sabbath, the Parliament of WorldReligions, held most recently in Salt Lake in 2015 alsohad a major focus on the role of religions in contributingto a sustainable future.

International meetings on the environment such as theGlobal Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leadershave been held in Oxford (1988), Moscow (1990), Rio(1992), and Kyoto (1993). These included religiousleaders such as the Dalai Lama as well as diplomats andheads of state such as Mikhail Gorbachev. Moreover, theTehran Seminar on Environment, Culture, and Religionwas held in Iran in June 2001 and one on “Environment,Peace and the Dialogue of Civilizations and Cultures”was organized in May 2005 with the second one in April2016. All of these were sponsored by the Iraniangovernment with the support of the United NationsEnvironment Programme. Gorbachev has held severalEarth Dialogues on “Globalization: Is Ethics the MissingLink?” held in Lyon, France in 2002, in Barcelona, Spainin 2004, and in Brisbane, Australia in 2006. TheInternational Union for the Conservation (IUCN)organized the first panel on “Spirituality andConservation” at the World Conservation Congress inBarcelona in 2009 and had a major track on this topic attheir conference in Hawaii in September 2016.

Since 1995 the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew hasconvened symposia on “Religion, Science, and theEnvironment” focused on water issues in Europe, theAmazon, and the Arctic. Similarly, the Alliance ofReligions and Conservation (ARC) based in England hasbeen convening conferences and activating religiouscommunities for some twenty years. In the UnitedStates, the National Religious Partnership for theEnvironment (NRPE) has organized the Jewish andChristian communities on this issue. The time is thuspropitious for encouraging the contributions ofparticular religions to solving the ecological crisis,especially by developing a more comprehensiveenvironmental ethics to ground movements focused onsustainability.

One of the most significant contributions to this work isthe encyclical by Pope Francis, Laudato si’. Here thefocus on integral ecology is one that brings togethersocial justice and environmental protection. The Popeissues a comprehensive call for creating the conditionsfor genuine sustainable development. With a strongcritique of unrestrained capitalism and unlimitedgrowth he calls for a new economics that links equityand the environment.

The Need for Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Religions have a central role in the formulation ofworldviews that orient us to the natural world and thearticulation of ethics that guide human behavior. Thesize and complexity of the problems we face requirecollaborative efforts both among the religions and indialogue with other key domains of human endeavor.Religions, thus, need to be in conversation with keysectors—science, economics, education, and publicpolicy—that have addressed environmental issues.Environmental changes will be motivated by thesedisciplines in very specific ways: namely, scientificanalysis will be critical to understanding nature’seconomy, economic incentives will be central to adequatedistribution of resources, educational awareness will beindispensable to creating modes of sustainable life, publicpolicy recommendations will be invaluable in shapingnational and international priorities, and moral andspiritual values will be crucial for the transformationsrequired for life in an ecological age.

Thomas Berry observed that assisting humans bydegrading the natural world cannot lead to a sustainablecommunity. The only sustainable community is one thatfits the human economy into the ever-renewing economyof the planet. The human system, in its every aspect, is asubsystem of the Earth system, whether we are speakingof economics, physical wellbeing or rules of law. Inessence, human flourishing and planetary prosperity areintimately linked.

Notes

1. The word “anthropocosmic” is used by Tu Weiming in ConfucianThought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation. Albany: StateUniversity of New York, 1985.



Quality of Government andSustainable Development

Víctor Lapuente

Víctor Lapuente is associate professor of politicalscience at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He specializes in the analysis of public policy,comparative public administration and the causes and consequences of corruption.

If the sustainability of the planet depends on the action ofhuman beings, good government of human beings oughttherefore to be crucial for sustainability. However, onlyrecently has good government started to be consideredfundamental for ensuring environmental sustainability. I propose here to summarize the studies which have triedto show the effect that good government of the publicsphere has on the environment. Which governments arebest for achieving sustainable development?

I shall concentrate on two aspects. The first is thehardware of good government, which we know as“governance,” “state capacity” or “quality of government.”Regardless of the label, the hardware of good governmentrefers to those public institutions which act withimpartiality, not favoring the private interests of anyonewho offers bribes or has connections to a political party,or because of their skin color or the language they speak.Countries with impartial public institutions are able toadopt better policies of sustainability, and to implementthem efficiently afterwards. But every hardware needs itssoftware. Good institutions should house good decision-makers, with politicians who apply a philosophyappropriate to sustainability. By “philosophy” I do notmean an ideology, although I do not deny that ideologymay play an important role. The philosophy I amreferring to is something deeper that flows beneathideologies: how far do politicians dare to explore newapproaches to sustainability without prejudice? Unlikethe hardware, for which we have relatively precisemeasurements of the effects it has on sustainability, theeffects of the software are harder to calibrate. However, I would like to stress how important it is that politiciansshould be open to experimentation, to testing measuresthat depart from their ideological scripts, when it comesto policies of sustainability.

Let us begin with the hardware, the quality ofgovernment. The wave of research which has explored theconsequences of impartial institutions over the last twodecades has also reached the shore of sustainabledevelopment. The twenty-first century has witnessed agrowing concern with the governmental characteristicsthat most critically affect the capacity to achievesustainable development.

The first lesson, but perhaps not the most important, isthat democracy matters. Democracy is the first aspect of agovernment we consider. Are the leaders of the countrychosen by means of elections? (And, it should be added,elections that are free and fair, since polls are organizedby most countries today, but many continue to bemarketing operations rather than competitive exercises.)

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This is most certainly important, as was already indicatedby the pioneering researchers into the effects ofinstitutions on sustainability. In comparison withdictators, democratically elected governments have abroader temporal horizon. Parties in government areworried about long-term problems, like sustainability.Dictators, on the other hand (with some exceptions likeSingapore and other rare examples of the phenomenonknown as “developmental dictatorships”) generally worryabout today, scorning a tomorrow when they do not knowif they will still be in power. Authoritarian leaders areespecially unconcerned with sustainable development ifthey, their families and their closest supporters controlmajor sectors of the economy, a very habitualphenomenon. Dictators will give precedence to theextraction of profits from these sectors, often related tonatural resources and polluting technologies, oversustainable and inclusive development. Theirdevelopment is, by definition, exclusive.

And there is evidence that democracy helps sustainabledevelopment. Observation of other factors shows us thatdemocracies reduce emissions of CFCs and sulfur oxide,and with them levels of pollution; they are more inclinedto adopt national legislation in support of internationaltreaties like the Montreal Protocol; they were the quickestto ratify the United Nations framework agreement onclimate change; and they protect a larger percentage offorest cover. The more democratic your country is,meaning the more competitive and less fraudulent itselections are, the greater the probabilities of achievingsustainable development.

Two important provisos must be mentioned here. In thefirst place, not all democratic régimes have the samebalsamic effect on sustainable development.Parliamentary democracies generate policies that aremore respectful to the environment, but presidentialistrégimes often adopt policies as lax as those ofdictatorships. For example, parliamentary groups,whether of a single color or multi-party coalitions, havea greater capacity to raise taxes on fossil fuels thanexecutives in presidentialist systems, who have tonegotiate with a potentially hostile legislature. Thesnag, obviously, is that the scope for governmentalabuse, or even the undue appropriation of funds, isgreater in parliamentary systems. For a parliamentarydemocracy to commit itself to sustainable development,then, formal and informal controls over the governmentmust be effective.

The second proviso is that the electoral system itself mayalso have an influence. In majority election systems, such

as the first-past-the-post constituencies of countries withan Anglo-Saxon tradition, parties tend to concentratetheir efforts on key districts, with more sensitivity to localissues than to the general interest. Lobbies that representspecific industries are more influential in majorityelection systems, and so are able to obtain less stringentenvironmental rulings than in proportional representationsystems. Having said this, studies indicate that eventhough a proportional system may have advantages over amajority one, the really important thing is that thereshould be free and competitive elections. Where there is agenuine democracy, regardless of whether we vote for acandidate in a particular constituency or for a party ingeneral, there are more likely to be policies aimed atachieving a sustainable development.

If we examine comparative indices of sustainability, itbecomes clear that democracies, and above allparliamentary democracies, favor sustainabledevelopment. For example, the indices of sustainability orenvironmental action are invariably headed by long-established democracies like Switzerland, Finland,Sweden, Germany or Australia, and some newer butconsolidated ones like Spain and Portugal. However, agrowing number of researchers stress that whiledemocracy is necessary, it is rarely sufficient in itself toexplain the implementation of policies for sustainabledevelopment. Something else is needed.

What is necessary is that a country’s institutions shouldact impartially and incorruptibly. This is perhaps the keyto understanding the differences between countries whenit comes to fomenting sustainable development: howcorrupt are the politicians and civil servants? Study afterstudy shows that after controlling all kinds of factorslinked to polluting emissions, the latter still increasedrastically with a country’s levels of corruption.Corruption raises the emissions per capita of carbondioxide, sulfur oxide and other air pollutants. There arevarious mechanisms through which corruption harmsenvironmental sustainability. First of all, corruptpoliticians in permissive legislations are more liable toallow themselves to be persuaded by interest groups.Second, the implementation of environmental legislationis much more relaxed, or non-existent, in places wherepublic employees are ready to take bribes, or, as occurs inmany countries, where they demand a cut in advance inreturn for looking the other way during environmentalinspections. In the case of Southeast Asia, it is well knownthat entrepreneurs often find it cheaper to buy off officialsthan to comply with environmental regulations.



Corruption also has two important indirect effects on theenvironment. The first is that an absence of corruptionmoderates the negative effect of the shadow economy onlevels of pollution. This is not a minor issue, since theshadow economy represents around a third of world GDPand rises above 50 per cent in many emerging nations,which suffer especially from degradation of theenvironment. Moreover, the underground economy, fromleather tanning to urban transport and illegal factories,spreads particularly in activities with a high potential forpollution. Traditionally, studies had concentrated on thedire environmental consequences of the shadow economy,such as the adaptation of propane among illegal brickmanufacturers in Mexico. However, recent publicationshave broadened the focus by pointing out that the effect inquestion depends crucially upon the level of corruption ofthe public administrations. When the entrepreneurs of theblack economy are faced with public officials ready to takebribes, they are able to ignore environmental regulations.By contrast, an honest public administration minimizesthe negative effects of the shadow economy as regardscorruption. This has important consequences for thedesign of public policies, above all in emerging countries.While we cannot put a stop to the black economy all atonce (although the goal is a worthy one, and achievable inthe medium term), we ought to focus our efforts on theprevention of administrative corruption.

The second indirect effect of corruption upon sustainabledevelopment is produced through foreign investment orcommercial liberalization; in other words, throughglobalization. The level of corruption limits the effectsthat opening up a country’s borders has on its sustainabledevelopment. If corruption is low, globalization has apositive effect on sustainability. The arrival of foreigncapital leads governments to adopt policies that are morerespectful to the environment. On the contrary, if the levelof corruption is high, foreign investment has negativeinstead of positive effects. Governments, willing to selllegislation to the highest bidder, pass laws that aredetrimental to sustainability. The consequences of theseresults go further than policies of sustainability. If we wishto understand why globalization is so poorly regarded insome countries, we should look at the level of corruptionthey possess.

All this is especially important if we bear in mind thatlevels of corruption vary dramatically among countries.This is true even in the context of capitalist democracies,where one might expect fewer differences. In theEuropean Union, for instance, we find some of the leastcorrupt countries in the world according to every indicator,

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The more democratic thecountry, the greater theprobabilities of it achievingsustainable development


such as the Nordic countries, together with some nationsthat rank lower than eightieth or ninetieth in the world.Some of the latter are ex-Communist nations, like Romaniaor Bulgaria, but others, like Italy and Greece, are culturallycloser to us. Besides, if there is one thing we have learnedby studying corruption in recent years, it is that there is noreason why levels of corruption should be on the descent,even in democracies. As we are shown by the experience ofLatin America in the twentieth century, and by sometransitions to democracy in recent decades in both Europeand Asia, corruption can easily end up living side by sidewith regular elections. Votes do not flush corruptpoliticians or civil servants out of public institutions. Onoccasions, corruption is a mechanism for remaining inpower by distributing favors.

The positive note is that corruption can be ended, unlikeother factors affecting sustainability such as a country’slevel of socioeconomic development or its cultural values.However, a great deal of political determination isnecessary, and social pressure is needed from both civil andentrepreneurial organizations in denouncing the harmfuleffects of corruption on sustainable development. But is itpossible to minimize opportunities for corruption in acountry? And how is this to be done?

Fortunately, more and more evidence is reaching us everyday of the kind of reforms that are effective in reducinglevels of corruption. In general, measures to preventcorruption work better than measures to punish it, suchas tougher penalties or the establishment ofanticorruption agencies and other organizations devotedexclusively to fight against fraudulent activities. Thepreventive measures which reduce corruption mosteffectively are those which insert automatic controlmechanisms in public decision-making. The first of theseis transparency. This is not total transparency, whichcould have harmful consequences, but a reasonableamount of transparency which would permit access toinformation on public decision-making (environmentalreports spring to mind), with few restrictions oninterested parties, such as journalists and activists. Thesecond measure is to establish public decision-makingsystems in which people with different interests, such aspoliticians who owe themselves to their party or civilservants who owe themselves to their reputation (and notto political favors), have to reach decisions jointly. In thisway, some exert control over others and vice versa. Theeffects on corruption of such systems of “separation ofpolitics and administration” are very substantial.Moreover, they are not costly in economic terms, thoughin political terms they might be.

Following on from this, I should like to add a finalreflection on the importance of the software, the will ofthe politicians, in producing a good governmentcommitted to sustainable development. Let us take aspecific example. Traffic congestion charges are paid bythe inhabitants of Gothenburg, Stockholm, Oslo, Londonand other cities, though the number of such cities overallremains small. Extremely small, in fact, if we bear inmind the growing urban concentration of the world’spopulation. As experts generally say (and there are somefirst-class ones in Spain, such as Daniel Albalate andGermà Bel), the level of consensus among economists onthe benefits of a congestion charge is inverselyproportional to its acceptance among the public and the politicians.

How to win greater acceptance for policies ofsustainability that are at first sight unpopular? And howto encourage other sustainable policies, such as partiallyreplacing motor traffic with bicycles in city centers,which may also spark resistance? I think the experienceof the Nordic countries is illustrative of the politicalphilosophy, the software, which has to feed public action.Parties owe themselves to their voters and to theirideologies as political organizations. This is quite true,but so too is the fact that governing with a rear viewmirror, looking back at what yesterday’s voters wantedinstead of worrying about collective welfare in the future,torpedoes innovation.

If there is one thing policies of sustainability need, it isinnovation. And to innovate, one must be open todifferent options. If the Nordic conservative parties hadbeen excessively concerned with satisfying the interestsof their voters in the residential suburbs, they would nothave supported the introduction of congestion charges. Asimilar point may be made of the social democrats. Evenin a city like Gothenburg, which revolves around its carindustry, they managed to conquer historic inertia andideological resistance in order to oppose a congestioncharge that affected most the drivers with least resources.

Policies that favor sustainability need to break away fromideological restrictions and from a “stethoscope” politicsconstructed on the basis of opinion polls. They need toincorporate a wider range of players, such as experts andrepresentatives of civil society. And they need toexperiment. The results of a public policy in aphenomenon as complex as sustainability, with itsconfluence of so many unpredictable factors ranging fromthe climate to the economy, cannot be known until it hasbeen implemented. Sustainable development demandsthat we risk making mistakes.



The Great Challenge for Intermediary Cities

Firdaous Oussidhoum

Secretary general of the Global Forum of IntermediaryCities of the United Cities and Local Governments(UCLG) corporation of the UNESCO Chair inIntermediary Cities: Urbanization and Developmentand director of international relations of the AfricanUnion of Architects

The urban world is posing a challenge for thesustainability of the planet. Its inhabitants’ comfort,quality of life and levels of consumption, together withthe need for large numbers of quality dwellings owing tomigrations from rural areas or other countries, havemade that world a place where resources are consumed,and where strategic planning and the use and reuse ofresources, without abusing them, has become anobligation. There is talk today of a circular economy forcities, of green buildings, of renewable and/or cleanenergies, and other concepts. In reality, these are all partof the same quest for solutions in an attempt to preventfurther abuse of the planet’s resources, and to offer ourchildren an opportunity to build their sustainability,since the two-degree temperature rise we are soarduously negotiating today is in actual fact too high,and has come too late.

In the middle of this landscape are cities, viewed interms of their mode of management, mode of living,mode of production, and mode of telling everydayhuman stories.

It is precisely in everyday life that the vital moment nowunfolding is most relevant. Several global agencies andinstitutions are being set up to align and generate aglobal and planetary vision in which all countries will beinvolved and in agreement. The New Urban Agenda, thedecisions of the COP regarding a new climate agenda,the disaster risk agenda, and other similar initiativescurrently taking shape call for local action in order to berealized, necessarily involving local governments butabove all requiring increased awareness andparticipation from all city dwellers on the planet. Theanswer has to be global because the issue is one thataffects all of us in our daily life.

Territorial and urban policies define our everyday life.Cities therefore represent a voice which worldinstitutions can no longer ignore when it comes tonegotiating global agreements, owing on the one hand tothe national and international importance acquired bycertain metropolises, and on the other to the social,economic and safety challenges faced by cities. However, the challenge of the future lies not withmetropolises but with intermediary cities. A third of theurban population currently lives in intermediary cities,another third in metropolises, and the final third in ruralzones and territories.

Intermediary cities are a key piece, if not a unique one,in achieving sustainability for the planet. There areseveral reasons for this.

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The Figures

According to studies carried out by the UNESCO Chair inIntermediary Cities and World Urbanization incollaboration with UCLG (United Cities and LocalGovernments), it is estimated that by 2030 half of theworld’s urban population will live in intermediary cities(or i-cities).1 That number is expected to increase to 70percent by 2050.

For that very reason, the importance of cities in thedynamics of world sustainability seems self-evident, andintermediary cities are the emerging strategic force in thisscenario. This projection clearly proposes a panoramicimage of the planet in terms of urban development for thefuture, and intermediary cities are crucial in this contextfor the world’s sustainability. Indeed, as far as the urbanworld is concerned, the planet’s sustainability will largelydepend on the evolution of intermediary cities.

What Are Intermediary Cities?

Intermediary (or intermediate) cities are cities that play arole of intermediation in their regional and/or nationalterritories, with a potential for intermediary dialogue intheir national or regional systems between the forcesgoverning the territory, whether political, economic,environmental, cultural, social and/or human. Whilegenerally defined by the number of inhabitants (between20,000 and 1 million), i-cities are distinguished more bythe relationship generated with their urban environmentand by the concept of intermediation they embrace inorder to generate development.

This definition is also applicable to China, a context wherean intermediary city can have around five millioninhabitants. Indeed, it is expected that by 2030 75 percentof the Chinese population will belong to the middle class.This raises some very serious issues. Middle-class livingentails more cars, more air conditioning, more comfort,and more resources to consume. Where will thoseresources come from, when China is already seeking themin Africa? This shows the issue to be a planetary one thatconcerns each and every one of us.

Last year, a crucial one for world urban development withthe launching of the UN-Habitat’s New Urban Agenda,intermediary cities have been able to make their voiceheard and develop an agenda of their own in response tothe willingness of their leaders to collaborate in thesustainability of the planet.

The added value of intermediary cities for the Habitat IIIagenda has been defined in the following terms:Intermediary cities are a new paradigm in itself that needsits own agenda. Through i-cities, a voice can make itselfheard for the population represented by localgovernments, for the territories and their resources, andfor a new path to sustainability on a global scale.Intermediary cities must have their own voice indiscussions on cities and urban development.Intermediary cities must have their own agenda forimplementation. This is a great responsibility for bothdecision-makers and citizens, and it points to a central rolefor those who take local decisions in urban and territorialpolicies and affairs.

I-cities therefore offer a unique opportunity to developplanetary sustainability based on a consensus between thedecision-makers and the citizenry, a key element in theimplementation of the New Urban Agenda.

Sustainability Linked to Democracy

Cities are an expression of the type of local democracy thatcombines the democratic identity of a country with thespecificities of its processes. This expression requires ademocratic dialogue between the decentralized systemswithin said country. I-cities thus also become a force ofurban democracy, both at a local and national level.

Since intermediary cities are the meeting point betweenthe rural and urban worlds, they provide an opportunity togenerate a civic and democratic space that large cities ormetropolises can no longer permit themselves so easily,owing to their pace of life (and its management) andgrowth. In this way, cities become a place in whichdemocracy and cohesion can find expression in an urbansetting. This opportunity for safe and cohesivemanagement is offered through an urban democracy thatoffers secure institutional channels of expression. I-cities,with their advantage of proximity and their potential forurban management, make it possible to give serene andpedagogical consideration to matters such as questions ofgender (especially on public transport), the participationof citizens in the city’s life and decision-making, and otherkey aspects of issues currently affecting us.

The concept of urban democracy is made easier by a citythat has proximity as one of its defining factors. Theparticipation and involvement of citizens is essential forthe implementation of urban policies stemming from theinternational recommendations of the SustainableDevelopment Goals (SDG).



In the same way, i-cities are a necessary element for theimplementation of the SDG through global agendas, forthree specific reasons:

1) The implementation of global agendas will have to passthrough the local level, whether the focus is on projects,raising awareness among the population, management,or finance.

2) They represent the largest urban area where agendascan be applied, offering a greater geographical urbanimpact.

3) Since they are an element of dialogue within theterritory, both in terms of vertical governance and interms of proximity to citizens and the rural world,intermediary cities make policy implementationpossible in large territories, resulting on a greaterimpact on the natural environment with a view to itssustainability.

Dialogue, the Essential Strength of Intermediary Cities

One of the greatest strengths of intermediary cities is theirpotential for dialogue on the levels of geography,governance, territory and population. Intermediary citiesmust boost dialogue if full advantage is to be taken of theirpotential for human development.

Space materializes this potential for dialogue. At theterritorial level, intermediary cities are by definition anelement of dialogue. Until now it has been a stage inmigration from the countryside to the metropolis, whereopportunities are sought for work and personal and familydevelopment. Today’s metropolis is looking for solutionsthat will allow it to enter a logic of sustainability, such asthe concept of the smart city, an experiment that startedwith the integration of numerical technology into themanagement of the city and that is finally focusing andmaterializing around the notion of a “more human city.”The human factor, the human scale and proximity are partof the essence of the intermediary city.

In this respect, India, with its capacity, potential and youthin terms of information technology and numeracy, isdeveloping a smart city program for its intermediary cities.It has understood on the one hand that its metropolisescannot hold a larger population, since this will generatemore poverty and inequality, and on the other that thesmart city experiment is naturally applicable in i-cities. Itis also hoped that people will become more aware of the

priorities of sustainability through information technologysystems and through the mobilization of human resources.

“The intermediary city is the solution to the metropolis,”said the minister of Housing and Sustainability of CostaRica at the session of Habitat III devoted to i-cities inQuito in October 2016. This is becoming a reality under itsown momentum. In view of the dynamics in the north ofthe world, where Homo urbanus is trying to approachnature once more and regain a more human environment,the sense of identity and belonging, and the quality of lifeenjoyed by Homo ruralus, reverse migrations are nowoccurring from the metropolis to more “livable” cities.

In this territorial dialogue, we must also pay attention tothe rural environment. Intermediary cities can supportsmall towns and villages, which in effect are the nursery ofa culture in proximity to nature. The question is whether adialogue can be generated to connect these different urbandimensions among themselves. In this regard, horizontaldialogue and city-to-city cooperation on the territoriallevel are urgently needed to open the door tosustainability. Territorial dialogue could (or should)materialize in a mastered and systemic management basedon collaboration, with interconnected cities formingsystems or constellations within more or less specificsurrounding territories and natural environments. Froman economic, cultural, social and ecologic point of view,these need to be managed in the context of knowledge ofthe territory, and this in turn requires a strategic visionthat will value the existing territorial resources.

I-cities will thus be enabled to play their role to the full bytheir integration in the development of the territory thatsurrounds them. Human development and local economicdevelopment go together in a territory whose leadership isgiven value by the intermediary city. These rural links andconnections allow the intermediary city to cover an urbanand natural (rural) space within the framework of ahorizontal dialogue, a development of particularimportance for the implementation of the SDG and theNew Urban Agenda.

Today, in fact, the approximately nine thousand existingintermediary cities cover the broadest geographical areaon the planet. Surely this is a unique potential for theimplementation of the global agendas on sustainability andclimate change.

What is at stake in today’s intermediary cities is urbansustainability for the viability of tomorrow’s planet.

To fulfill this mission, a vertical dialogue is also requiredbetween various levels of governance, integrating the

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various hierarchical levels into a single dialogue with acommon interest: sustainability for all.

A Critical and Strategic Mass

The critical mass of these cities constitutes a key challengefor the cities of the Global South, and is fertile terrain for adynamics of South–South and triangular cooperation,interchange of management and technical expertise, anddevelopment of local democracy and new experiences inlocal governance.

On the national level, intermediary cities can be a force forthe proposal of national as well as international policieswithin the framework of a vertical dialogue, thus makingthem strategic partners.

Hence the need for organization and the importance of theworking group, whose objective was spelled out by itschairman, Mohamed Sefiani, mayor of the city ofChefchaouen in Morocco: “To advance together towardthe same goals in consensus for a more sustainable planet.”

The goal is still to bring integrated policies and the meansto ensure their own sustainability to the citizens of theworld and their leaders, with respect for theirenvironment, culture and identity, on a worldwide scale.

Intermediary cities pose a key strategic challenge on aglobal level. They allow a wider band of the world’spopulation to be affected, they allow urban developmentto be accompanied by human development, and they allowthe urban world to be given a dignified form that willaccelerate in coming years in terms of equity, equality ofopportunity, urban quality, democracy and expression,culture and identity, innovation and apprenticeship,within the framework of a professional, political andhuman dialogue.

There is much talk today of city rights—that is, rights ofand to a city. In my view, it is in fact the human rightscharters that have allowed us to construct the world so far.Now, in the twenty-first century, we have to go further,thinking and projecting a world of greater generosity, withcities that embrace and open themselves to theirpopulations. When we speak of more human cities, weshould be talking of what makes the strength of humanbeings: giving, receiving, and offering from the heart, withgenerosity. This “city attitude” already exists in manyintermediary cities around the world, and needs to begeneralized. That is why in the i-cities community wespeak of “good living.”

With the vocabulary of “rights,” it is suggested that werequest the natural and already-integrated “right to” a city.Citizens must also remember that they have responsibilitiestoward their natural environment, their living space, theircity, their fellow citizens and their planet.

The implementation of these global agendas therefore hasto pass through the local level, with the involvement ofcitizens as individuals and as groups. All of us areprofessionals, consumers, members of civil society, men orwomen, and each of us is trying to live better. That is whyintermediary cities are of key importance in theimplementation of the path to sustainability.

Making of this implementation a coherent planetarystrategy is the next challenge.

Mohamed Sefiani, mayor of the city of Chefchaouen,Morocco

The urban world has understood the importance ofintermediary cities: by 2030, 65 percent of urbandevelopment will be located in i-cities. This developmentrepresents a challenge in every dimension: economic, social,cultural, patrimonial and, above all, that relating tosustainability. It is important to raise awareness at nationaland international levels of the added value of facilitating,promoting and listening to the leaders of i-cities, since thechallenge facing them is the same which faces us all.

In these crucial times, when world agendas are conceivedglobally and acted upon at a local level, answers must alsobe found for how the local can contribute from the bottom upto the global level, then returning to the local for effectiveimplementation.

More than ever, coming together and forming a worldwidecritical mass among those of us who lead intermediary citiesis becoming a strategy to provide us with better conditionsfor responding to the needs of our citizens and assuming ourresponsibilities in the face of our planet’s challenges.

Notes

1. Within the framework of its scientific and political organs, UCLG, inpartnership with the UNESCO Chair for Intermediary Cities andWorld Urbanization in the University of Lleida, has launched a globalworking group on intermediary cities, which since April 2014 has beenchaired by the city of Chefchaouen (Morocco).



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Much more is gained byimproving proceduresthan by improving thepeople in charge of them.We should not expect somuch of the virtues ofthose forming part of acomplex system, norshould we greatly feartheir vices. What shouldreally concern us iswhether theirinterconnection is wellorganized

Daniel Innerarity


7.The Challenge of Transversality

There are enoughresources to satisfy global energyrequirements in asustainable way, but whatis needed is a radicalchange in our policies

Domingo Jiménez Beltrán

We need to considerwhether or not the gains in efficiencyderived from thesedevelopments areleading to more livableand equitable urbanenvironments

Michael Batty


The Government of Intelligent Systems

Daniel Innerarity

Daniel Innerarity is professor of political and socialphilosophy, researcher at the Fundación Ikerbasque of the University of the Basque Country and director ofthe Instituto de Gobernanza Democrática(Globernance).

The main task of the government of a knowledge societyis to create the conditions that will enable collectiveintelligence. Systematizing intelligence and governingthrough intelligent systems should be the priority at everylevel of governments, institutions and organizations.Governing complex environments, confronting risks,anticipating the future, managing uncertainty,guaranteeing sustainability and structuring responsibilityoblige us to think holistically and to configure intelligentsystems (technologies, procedures, rules, protocols, etc.).Only through such patterns of collective intelligence is itpossible to face a future that is no longer the peacefulcontinuation of the past but an opaque reality full ofopportunities, and by the same token pregnant withpotential risks that are hard to identify. The sameprinciple of intelligent government should rule the waywe relate to our technological devices in order to face upto the new instances of ignorance that a complex societyobliges us to manage.

The Nature of Collective Intelligence

To understand what a system of collective intelligence is,it may be illustrative to recall the mental experimentproposed by Robert Geyer and Samir Rihani (2010, 188): 1.What would happen if the governors of the Bank ofEngland were replaced by a room full of monkeys? 2.What would happen if Great Britain were to copyNorway’s educational system exactly? 3. What wouldhappen if a super-medicine were invented thatsuppressed all the symptoms of the common cold (or ofour students’ hangovers)? If one had to respond quickly tothese questions, immediate intuition would lead to thefollowing assertions: 1. The British economy wouldcollapse. 2. Educational results would improve, sinceNorway’s educational system is far better ranked than theUnited Kingdom’s. 3. It would be a marvelous advance forpersonal health, since the patient would feel much better.However, as soon as we are able to reflect a little andovercome the automatism of these answers, looking atthings instead from the perspective of the complexity ofsystems, the answers start to look very different. 1. Thegovernment of monkeys would make manifest exactly towhat point we are governed more by systems than bypeople, with checks, balances and counterbalances, and sothe monkeys would do less harm than might be supposed.2. The transfer of an educational system to anothercountry would not be as successful as all that. There is ofcourse much to be learned from the best practices ofothers, but the success of a system as complex aseducation depends a great deal on factors that are not

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automatically transplantable. 3. Being healthy is not thesame thing as feeling well, and removing bothersomesymptoms is equivalent to depriving oneself of signals andlearning mechanisms that are precisely at the service ofour health, understood as something more valuable than amere absence of ill-being at any given moment.

This experiment is interesting because the automatism ofour initial responses shows how indebted we are to a wayof thinking centered on individuals and leaders, on theshort term and on a lack of attention to the systemicconditions in which our actions take place. We still thinkof government as a heroic action by individuals instead ofunderstanding that it is a matter of configuringintelligent systems. This is a proof of what Luhmanncalled “the flight toward the subject” (1997, 1016), whenpolitical action degrades into a competition amongpersons, their programs, their good (or bad) intentions ortheir moral example. That is why we speak of leadershipwith such personalized connotations. Public attention isconcerned principally with the personal qualities ofthose who govern us, and we are more worried aboutdiscovering guilty parties than about repairing poorstructural designs.

Any attempt to place the focus on human beings whenidentifying and confronting our problems, based on thetheory that the human being is more important thananything else from the perspective of either the personalproperties of the leader or the rational choice of theindividual voter, brings with it an undervaluation of thesystemic properties of social complexity. The mainproblems humanity faces today are conflicts engenderedby an interdependent and concatenated system, ones towhich its individual components are blind:unsustainability, financial risk, and those problems ingeneral caused by a long chain of individual behaviorsthat are not detrimental in themselves, but are indisordered aggregate. It is therefore not so much aquestion of modifying individual behaviors as ofconfiguring their interaction properly, and that isprecisely the task which goes by the name of collectiveintelligence. Much more is gained by improvingprocedures than by improving the people in charge ofthem. We should not expect so much of the virtues ofthose forming part of a complex system, nor should wegreatly fear their vices. What should really concern us iswhether their interconnection is well organized, andwhat kinds of rules, processes and structures configurethat interdependence.

Societies are well governed when it is systemssynthesizing a collective intelligence (rules, norms and

procedures) that govern them, not when they haveespecially able people leading them. We could make dowithout intelligent people, but not without intelligentsystems, or, as it is otherwise generally put, a society iswell governed when it stands up to periods under badgovernors. These two hundred years of democracy haveconfigured precisely an institutional constellation inwhich a set of experiences has crystallized intostructures, processes and rules (especially constitutions)that provide democracy with a high degree of systemicintelligence, an intelligence which is not in individualsbut in the components constituting the system. In a way,this makes the democratic system independent of thespecific people who act in it, and even of those who directit, and so resistant to the faults and weaknesses ofindividual players. That is why democracy must beconsidered as something which functions with theaverage voter and politician, for it survives only if the veryintelligence of the system compensates for the mediocrityof the players, including the chance arrival of agovernment of monkeys.

The Double Risk of Technologies

One example of the configuration of our collectiveintelligence is to be seen in the way we design ourtechnological artifacts. I am referring less to theirsophistication than to how we identify their future risksand protect ourselves from them. Now, one of theparadoxes of our technologies is that they have to contendwith two contradictory risks: the risk they will cease toheed those who direct them, and the risk they will heedthem too much. To go by this distinction, some accidentswould therefore be due to impotence and others toomnipotence. We are more anxious about the latter thanthe former. It is more disturbing to be at the mercy of menthan of machines.

The first type of risk is more evident. Complex systemsusually function automatically, since we could have nosophisticated technology otherwise, but this autonomyoften comes at the price of ungovernability, when the verysystems we have configured escape from our hands andhurtle against us. World literature is plagued withfantasies, some highly realistic, of creations that acquire alife of their own and rebel against their makers, fromFaustus and Frankenstein to the general characterizationof today’s world as one flying out of control (Giddens1999). When we consider the specific problems ofcontemporary society, we find a great many examples ofthis lack of control, perhaps the most devastating being

THE CHALLENGE OF TRANSVERSALITY 217


the difficulty of governing financial markets. When, forexample, we affirm that something is not sustainable, weare saying that we were able to start it functioning, but weare not able to guarantee that it will function in future inaccordance with the intentions that justified itsimplantation. In short, it could collapse. For an everydayexample, we might also consider to what point ourrelations with the technology we use have been modified.We have grown accustomed to using devices whose logicwe are ignorant of, and so hardly anyone now knows howthey work, or is able to mend them. Even the specialist weturn to replaces parts rather than performing repairs.When something goes wrong, it does so irreparably.

The automatic pilot is a very good example of theparadox that emerges when we ask ourselves who is incharge around here. A pilot thinks he flies planes, butfrom this point of view, the truth is just the opposite.The pilot starts up the system, but it is immediatelythereafter the machine which prescribes the pilot’sactions to the smallest detail until finally doing withouthim altogether. The pilot has to adapt to the logic of theflight. A system is intelligent when it can even disobeycertain absurd orders. Nobody in their right mind woulddisagree with this, since it provides us with an enormousnumber of devices that make our lives easier andsometimes literally safer.

The other great risk is that technologies will beexcessively subject to the control of those who run them.There are accidents and catastrophes that are caused byan excess of power held by those running a technologicalsystem, not a lack of it. One thinks of railway accidentsdue to excess speed in which no device prevented thedriver from surpassing the critical limit, as in the traincrash of Angrois on July 24, 2013. The most dramatic casewas that of the suicidal Germanwings pilot who crashed aplane into the French Alps on March 24, 2015. In bothcases, the disaster was caused by the excessive power of aman over an artifact that was insufficiently intelligent,since it allowed the individual in charge free rein over thespeed of the vehicle or even the liberty to crash it into amountainside, with all the alarms going off but no deviceobliging him to rectify his course. There are many systemsthat are intelligent because they are able to oppose theexpress will of those running them. The sophistication ofgoverning devices is brought about through systems thatprevent governors from doing what they like, fromconstitutional limits in politics to automatic brakingsystems for car drivers.

I shall put this somewhat provocatively: the paradox ofany intelligent system is that it does not permit us to do

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Systems of government,from the most modesttechnology to the mostsophisticated politicalproceedings, are moreintelligent insofar as theycan resist the obstinacy ofthose who govern


whatever we want. Let us take a few examples. What aconstitution principally resembles is a set of prohibitionsand restrictions. It even makes itself hard to modify,laying down conditions for procedures and qualifiedmajorities in order to guarantee that no such changes willbe implemented on a whim or sanctioned by only a verysmall majority. The ABS brake system prevents us in amoment of panic from braking as much as we want to,which would endanger the stability of the car and end updoing us more harm than not braking. Even fear is aninstinct that protects us from ourselves. In this respect,we might recall the story of the patient suffering frombrain damage that prevented him from experiencingcertain emotions such as fear. This allowed him to dosome things better than other people, such as driving onicy roads, since he avoided the natural reaction of brakingwhen the car skidded (Damasio 2008, 193). Anyone is freeto buy all the financial products they want (and can, ofcourse), but the experience of the economic crisis hasmade us establish more exacting conditions forpurchasing them, obliging the credit institutions to ensurethat those who buy them have the necessary solvency andknowledge to acquire a product that is not free of risk. Insome way, systemic intelligence has configured a series ofprotocols so that people cannot do as they please whenthere are especially dangerous artifacts involved, whethera vehicle or a financial product. Indeed, there is aflourishing market in what we might withoutexaggeration call “the protection of people againstthemselves,” such as the “behavioral apps” which advise,urge and monitor us. Human beings do not always wish todo as they desire, and such self-restriction is a source ofreasonable forms of behavior.

We can therefore say without fear of contradiction thatsystems of government, from the most modest technologyto the most sophisticated political proceedings, are moreintelligent insofar as they can resist the obstinacy of thosewho govern. That is what Adam Smith, Karl Marx andothers tried to teach us: that social systems have theirown dynamic which acts independently of the will ofindividual players. All of human progress is at stake inthat difficult balance between permitting the human willto govern events and at the same time preventingarbitrariness.

The Germanwings crash perhaps occurred because thisreflection on the dangers of those in charge of atechnological device had disappeared from view as aconsequence of the defense against terrorism, whichtends to consider the enemy as someone located literallyand metaphorically outside. It should be recalled that the

pilot flying the aircraft began his maneuver to crash intothe Alps at a moment when he had been left on his own.Neither the other pilot nor the rest of the crew were ableto get into the locked cockpit once the suicidal intentionsbecame apparent. Our security protocols have beensophisticated since 9/11 with outside enemies in mind,not inside ones: an encroaching terrorist, not a mad pilot.That, among other reasons, is why it was possible to lockthe aircraft’s cockpit from the inside, and why the doorwas armored. The whole paradox of the affair lies in howto cope with the risks presented by our own securitymeasures, and how to avoid excessive protection.

An intelligent system is, so to speak, a system thatprotects us not only from others but also from ourselves.It is configured after the experience of the dangers we arecapable of generating for ourselves, and against theatavism of considering that our worst enemy is someonedifferent from ourselves. To act with this type of counter-intuitive intelligence, it is necessary to have realized, forexample, that a society is not threatened so much bynuclear weapons in the power of an enemy as by its ownnuclear power plants, and far less by the biologicalweapons of the enemy than by certain experiments of itsown scientific system. It is not menaced by the invasion offoreign troops but by its own organized crime and thedemand of its own drug addicts, and not by the famineand death caused by war but by the disabilities and deathcaused by its traffic accidents (Willke 2014, 60). Whatmakes it most difficult for plural societies to decide theirdestinies freely is not so much an external impediment asa lack of agreement in their very heart. The solution doesnot lie with individuals, I would conclude, but inimproving the systems that protect us against people andagainst our mistakes, our dementia and our evil.

An Enlightenment of Ignorance

In an intelligent system for the purpose of governingtoday’s complex environments, two fundamentalexperiences are crystallized. One is that knowledge ismore important than norms, and the other is that whathas to be managed is ignorance rather than knowledge.

Let us begin with the importance for governing ofcognitive rulings. Government, when understood assomething normative rather than cognitive, is too rigid,retrospective and slow to be effective in complex anddynamic knowledge societies. Apart from a normativeperspective for simple and stable constellations, otherknowledge-linked resources are also necessary, such as



the expert knowledge that turns itself into rulings, theability to argue and convince, and the possibility ofcollective learning. While the first Enlightenmentrevolved around the acquisition of knowledge forindividual and social progress, the secondEnlightenment should aim at a broader level ofknowledge, at the intelligence of organizations andinstitutions, and at organized forms of collectiveintelligence. For organizations, constructing collectiveintelligence means that learning no longer takes placesimply through evolution or mere adaptation, but mustbe systematically organized into sensible processes ofknowledge management.

Just as decisive as the generation of knowledge,however, is understanding the function fulfilled byignorance in a knowledge society, and why ignorance isimportant for the acquisition and reproduction ofknowledge, as well as for the emergence andtransformation of institutions. A knowledge society isone whose collective intelligence consists of prudentlyand rationally managing the ignorance in which we areobliged to act, which means in the last instance a societyof unknowledge. We might put this less dramatically byaffirming that it is a society where we have no option butto learn to go about things with incomplete knowledge.One fundamental aspect of collective ignorance is thequestion of “systemic ignorance” (Willke 2002, 29),when we refer to social risks, futures and constellationsof players in which too many events are related to toomany other events, so overwhelming individual players’capacity for taking decisions.

Whereas the dominant methods used to combatignorance in other times consisted of trying to eliminateit, we may assume today that there is an irreducibledimension to ignorance, and we must thereforeunderstand it, tolerate it and even make use of it andconsider it as a resource (Smithson 1989; Wehling 2006).One example of this is the fact that the risk entailed in“trust in the knowledge of others” in a knowledge societyhas become a key issue (Krohn 2003, 99). The knowledgesociety may be characterized precisely as one which hasto learn to manage this ignorance.

The limits between knowing and unknowing are notunquestionable, self-evident or stable. It remains an openquestion in many cases how much can still be known,what can no longer be known, and what will never beknown. It is not the typical discourse of Kantian humilitywhich confesses how little we know and how limitedhuman knowledge is. It is even more imprecise than that“specified ignorance” of which Merton wrote. I am

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In an intelligent system forthe purpose of governingtoday’s complexenvironments, twofundamental experiencesare crystallized. One is thatknowledge is moreimportant than norms, andthe other is that what hasto be managed is ignorancerather than knowledge


referring to weak forms of knowledge, like something thatis supposed or feared, of which it is not known preciselywhat is unknown and up to what point.

The appeal to unknown unknowns, which lie beyondscientifically established hypotheses of risks, has becomea powerful and controversial argument in social debateson new research and technologies. Of course it is stillimportant to broaden the horizons of expectation andrelevance so as to be able to glimpse the unknown spaceswe were previously unable to see, and so proceed towardsthe discovery of the “ignorance we are ignorant of.” Butthis aspiration should not make us fall into the illusorytrap of believing that the problem of the unknownunknown can be resolved in the traditional way, which isto dissolve it completely for the sake of more and betterknowledge. Even where the relevance of the unknownunknown has been expressly recognized, it is still notknown what is unknown or whether there is anythingdecisive that is unknown. Knowledge societies must getused to the idea that they are always going to have to facethe question of the unknown unknown, and that they willnever be in a state to know whether and to what extentthese unknown unknowns are relevant with regard tothose confronted of necessity.

From now on, our great dilemmas are going to hinge ondecision-making under ignorance (Collingridge 1980).Now, decision-making under ignorance requires newforms of justification, legitimization and observation ofconsequences. How can we protect ourselves againstthreats about which by definition we do not know what todo? And how can justice be done to the plurality ofperceptions of the unknown if we are ignorant of themagnitude and relevance of what is not known? Howmuch unknown can we permit ourselves withoutunleashing uncontrollable menaces? What ignoranceshould we regard as relevant and how much can weignore as inoffensive? What balance between control andchance is tolerable from the point of view ofresponsibility? Is the unknown a wildcard for takingaction or just the opposite, a warning that maximumprecautions must be taken?

These are the deep reasons why a knowledge democracyis not governed by expert systems but through theintegration of those expert systems into broaderprocedures of government that necessarily includedecision-making in areas where ignorance is irreducible.Our principal democratic controversies revolve preciselyaround the amount of ignorance we can permit ourselves,how we can reduce it with forecasting systems, and whatrisks it is opportune to assume. The challenge facing us is

that of learning to manage these uncertainties, which cannever be eliminated completely, and transform them intocalculable risks and learning opportunities.Contemporary societies must develop not onlycompetence in solving problems but also the capacity toreact suitably to the unexpected.

While the first Enlightenment aspired towards clarity andexactitude, the second has to make do withunfathomability, inexactitude and uncertainty. The firstEnlightenment assumed there was nothing problematicalin the aggregation of rational components, whereas thesituation now is that the convergence of parts (ofindividual interests and the interdependence of systems)gives rise all too often to an irrational totality: knowledgesdo not accumulate but generate confusion, interests arenot aggregated but neutralize one another, the increase ofinformation enhances not the transparency but theopacity of the whole, and decisions, even if individuallyrational, trigger fatal consequences. What theory andpraxis of government respond to this new constellation?The government of intelligent systems might well be anappropriate denomination for this new challenge.

References

Collingridge, David. 1980. The Social Control of Technology. New York:St. Martin’s Press.

Damásio, António. 2005. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and theHuman Brain. New York: Avon Books.

Geyer, Robert and Samir Rihani. 2010. Complexity and Public Policy. A New Approach to 21st Century Politics, Policy and Society. London:Routledge.

Giddens, Anthony. 1999. Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Routledge.

Haldane, Andrew. 2012. “The Dog and the Frisbee,” speech given atthe symposium on politics held at Jackson Hole (Wyoming) on 31 August 2012. http://www.bis.org/search/?q=haldane+dog+and+frisbee.

Krohn, Wolfgang. 2003. “Das Risiko des (Nicht-)Wissens. Zum Funktionswandel der Wissenschaft in der Wissensgesellschaft.” InWissenschaft in der Wissensgesellschaft, edited by Stefan Böschen andIngo Schulz-Schaeffer. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag: 87–118.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt:Suhrkamp.

Smithson, Michael. 1989. Ignorance and Uncertainty. Emerging Paradigms. New York: Springer.

Wehling, Peter. 2006. Im Schatten des Wissens? Perspektiven der Soziologie des Nichtwissens. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft.

Willke, Helmut. 2002. Dystopia. Studien zur Krisis des Wissens in der modernen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

———. 2014. Regieren: Politische Steuerung komplexer Gesellschaften.Wiesbaden: Springer.



Energy Governance and Sustainability as aVector of Change

Domingo Jiménez Beltrán

Domingo Jiménez Beltrán is a consulting engineerwho specializes on sustainability and the environment.He is the chairman of the Fundación Renovables and apatron of the Fundación Desarrollo Sostenible. He wasthe executive director of the European EnvironmentalAgency between 1994 and 2002.

In its periodic reports on the situation of our naturalresources (water, soil, energy, biodiversity, etc.), theUnited Nations has been arguing for some years that “thecrisis is not one of resources but of the management ofresources.” In other words, the richest or best countries,those with the highest levels of well-being and thegreatest chances of achieving sustainability are not thecountries with the largest amount of resources but thosewhich best manage the resources they have, as is clearlyshown by countries that exemplify the two extremes ofthis thesis, such as Venezuela and Denmark.

The crisis is not one of sustainability but of governance,governability or simply good government. There is nosustainability without governance, and this is particularlyevident where energy resources are concerned, withclimate change as the result of their mismanagement on anational and global level. There are enough resources,and ones that are moreover renewable, to satisfy globalenergy requirements in a sustainable way now and in thefuture, but what is needed is a radical change in ourenergy policies.

Such a change clashes head-on with the interests ofmany countries with fossil resources, and of energy andelectric companies whose source of income lies in theeconomy of coal and fossil fuels (not forgetting nuclearenergy). These interests, generally speculative and short-term in outlook, are strengthened by cartels such asOPEC or simply by oligopolies, as in the Spanish case.Interests of this kind make for positions of extremeresistance, as that of the United States was until recently,a resistance tempered only thanks to the mandate ofBarack Obama.

The Challenge

The challenge is not a technical one, as we have matureand accessible technology for renewables, nor is iteconomic, since most technologies have surpassed notonly what is known as “grid parity,” by equaling costs atthe point of supply, but also “generation parity.” This isshown by the fact that in 2015 investments inrenewables for generation of electricity have been muchgreater, and with much more installed power, than infossil and nuclear technologies. This is the situationeven despite the fact that not only do the latter notinternalize their environmental costs but also,appearances to the contrary, they received nearly fourtimes as much aid and subsidies in general asrenewables, according to the International Energy

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Agency (IEA) itself. The challenge is simply political, itis one of “good government” or governance.

What is all this about governance? And what chances dowe have of using it to propitiate energy sustainability,thereby responding to an otherwise necessary andopportune change in the energy system (and with it themodel of production and consumption in general), whichwould result in a true mitigation of climate change?

Acting Is the Key

The key is to move from reactive to proactive positions.Although it has not been sufficiently explained or, aboveall, emphasized, that is what is provided for (thanks tothe negotiating capacity and diplomacy of the Frenchteam headed by Laurent Fabius and Ségolène Royal) bythe Paris Agreement, now coming into force. Indeed, thepreparations for the Marrakech Summit (COP 22) inNovember 2016 confirm that the goal of establishing therules for the implementation of the Paris Agreementimplicitly calls for a reliance on renewable energies inmaking the transition toward more sustainable energyand progress.

It is crucial that we have gone from talking simply of theintention of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions toconsidering them an objective, as a result of a promisingand opportune change in the energy model and system atevery level. Even if there were no climate change, thistransformation would in any case be necessary. Climatechange, however, obliges us to act more quickly.

Above all, climate change has equipped us withsomething fundamental for the “governance” of thischange in the energy model. In the measurement of GHGemissions and their corollary, the increase in globaltemperature, it has provided us with an indicator toestablish the inexorable route from here to 2050–2100,which is in no case to exceed a 2ºC increase in globaltemperature and if possible to keep the rise below 1.5ºC.

Let us hope that this will lead to a definition on the routemap drawn up in subsequent summits, beginning withMarrakech, of the intermediate goals to be attainedregarding GHG emissions. Said intermediate goals willresult from the sum of the commitments accepted by thesignatory states of the Paris Agreement, and could include:

— Reaching the peak of the greenhouse effect before2020, in line with the IEA’s “bridge scenario”proposal for CO2 emissions. Considering the

reduction in such emissions in 2014 and 2015, thismight already have been achieved thanks to thedecrease in coal burning in China and the USA, andshould therefore be maintained.

— A 60 percent reduction of GHG emissions by 2050with respect to 1990, as the European Commissionproposed before Paris (surprisingly defended by theCommissioner Arias Cañete), in order to reach apractically “decarbonized” energy and economy by 2100.

This proactive approach is legitimized simply by theconsideration that this reduction in GHG emissions, ordecarbonization of energy and the economy, will notonly do away once and for all with the atmosphericpollution of our cities (“Spanish cities are beingasphyxiated,” we read in the press) and its huge impacton our health—something that is not sufficientlystressed—but will also involve:

— A “de-energization” or reduction in energy demandthrough more effective and efficient consumption,healthy also in economic terms.

— The “dematerialization” of the economy in order toreduce inputs not only of energy but also of non-renewable resources, raw material and so on, which inturn is mirrored by an equivalent reduction in thegeneration of waste (there is symmetry between “zeroemissions” and “zero waste”), a step that is alsonecessary for environmental and economic reasons.

— The substitution of non-renewable energy sources andtheir related technologies, which are environmentallyand socioeconomically unsustainable, with renewableenergy sources and technologies, the best alternativefrom every point of view, and inexorably a part of the future.

The Role of Renewables

Renewables provide a key strategic element for thesustainability and progress of countries and regions.Energy sovereignty, achieved with autochthonous andrenewable resources, is instrumented, I prefer the term,by “connected energy self-sufficiency.”

Unfortunately for the energy and electric companies, suchself-sufficiency is already possible where electricity isconcerned. There is a growing number of electrifiedsystems at domestic level in self-consumption dwellingsand buildings, and the same is true of whole



neighborhoods, farms, industrial compounds, andmunicipalities with distributed generation and integratedenergy management, which could even lead to themunicipalization of the energy grid, as occurs in Germany.

As a Nobel Prize laureate has pointed out, “the Stone Agedid not end because there were no stones left, but becausethere were better alternatives: metals. The same is true offossil fuels.” The fossil fuel age is not coming to an endbecause fossil fuels are running out, or even because theycause climate change (as they do), but because there ismoreover a much better alternative: renewables.

The first industrial revolution was based on coal, and thesecond on petroleum. The third is already being based onthe abandonment of both as fuels and a decisive switch torenewables. As in those cases, this shift towards energysustainability could be the vector of change1 (or in anycase a decisive vector) toward more sustainable progress,more effective and more efficient in the use of resourcesin general (Fundación Renovables 2015).

The important thing is that this change in the model ofproduction and consumption, which, like any paradigmshift, would otherwise have taken decades or evengenerations to take place, is now linked to a timeschedule. The years 2050 and 2100 are theunpostponable deadlines for mitigating climate changeand adopting a clear alternative: renewables.

We know what is happening and will keep happening ifwe continue using fossil fuels. We even know what has tobe done to escape this growing cycle of unsustainabilityand enter the path of sustainability, not only of energybut of the economy in general. If energy changes,everything changes.

Organization for Governance

If all this is so obvious, then why is this necessary andopportune change not already effectively under way?Why is it that since 1992, when the Convention onClimate Change was agreed at the Rio Summit, emissionshave continued to rise, and with them the levels of GHGsin the atmosphere, the average global temperature, and inconsequence, the impact on the world’s climate ingeneral? Why have we had to wait until December 2015to achieve an agreement subscribed by most countriesthat is still, as the United Nations points out, clearlyinsufficient for the achievement of the goals deemedessential for 2050 and 2100?

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The fossil fuel age is notcoming to an end becausefossil fuels are running out,or even because they causeclimate change (as theydo), but because there ismoreover a much betteralternative: renewables


The answer is quite simple: because we have beenincapable of organizing ourselves properly to manage thechange. This is because these inexorable scenarios ofsustainable energy and socioeconomic sustainability arenot yet accompanied by the mechanisms of governancenecessary at a global level to manage route maps forovercoming the short-term interests of the variouscountries and economic sectors linked primarily to thefossil fuel economy.

The challenge for the Marrakech Summit andsubsequent climate summits up to 2020, when thecutbacks in emissions undertaken by the differentcountries in the Paris Agreement will start to be applied,will be to establish not only the regulations forhomologating each country’s efforts to reduce emissions(reference dates, sectors involved, etc.) but above all toagree how to make these commitments much moreambitious. According to the United Nations, we need ageneral reduction of up to 25 percent more by 2030 ifthe agreed global objective, a temperature rise of nomore than 2ºC and preferably less than 1.5ºC, is to be respected.

The challenge lies in the governance of the ParisAgreement, as can be surmised from the fact that whatmajor countries such as the United States and Chinawere resisting was not so much, or not only, committingto the reductions but rather abiding by rigorousmonitoring mechanisms for such commitments, withchecks (always under voluntary schemes, since thepossibility of binding commitments such as the ones thatapply to EU states was out of the question) taking placeevery five years.

Finance

Among the difficulties of governance we must includewhat is always the thorniest issue: the predictableprovision of funds for financing the agreements. Themost important such agreement is the one reached inCopenhagen in 2009, which is supposed to raise 100,000million dollars by 2020. This figure constitutes thecondition for the countries most affected and leastresponsible for climate change—generally developingcountries—to join the agreement as receivers ofeconomic resources to adapt and contribute to climatechange mitigation. Some of the receiving countries, suchas Cape Verde, Samoa and Papua New Guinea, arespearheading the proactive position outlined above bycommitting to self-sufficiency with 100 percent

renewable electric systems and consequently “zeroemissions” by 2030. This is a shining example forcountries such as Spain, with more reasons and potentialto adopt such an approach.

The challenge is not a trifling one. It requires radicalchanges in global governance if adequate management isto be provided for the objectives of emission reductionand the changes in energy and general economic modelsnecessary for sustainability to be achieved.

In December 2004, at the end of his term as SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations, Kofi Annan seconded theconclusions of a report by a team led by Jeffrey D. Sachs.This defined the keys to global governability with the aimof progressing towards the Millennium DevelopmentGoals and global sustainability.

The first key was to have global strategies which now, inthe case that concerns us, have clear substance in the so-called Global Sustainability Goals, and in particular in theclimate change strategies established within thedevelopment mechanisms of the 1992 Convention onClimate Change and the 2006 Kyoto Protocol, nowstrengthened by the Paris Agreement of 2015. This is notthe main shortcoming where strategies are concerned.

The second key was to develop global capabilities,necessarily within the United Nations, and embodied inthis case in the United Nations Secretariat for ClimateChange, the different working groups and commissionsset up to implement the Paris Agreement, and othersimilar organizations within the United NationsEnvironment Programme (UNEP) or the GlobalSustainability Goals, among others. In this respect,however, there are shortcomings. These bodies have verylimited powers, since none of the goals are binding, norcan they impose economic sanctions for deviations fromthe relevant commitments acquired (as the World TradeOrganization can). Most importantly, however, (and thisshortcoming is connected to the third condition), they donot have the resources or a sufficient foreseeable budgetto economically incentivize compliance and financeexisting commitments, above all in developing countries.

The third condition was the need for shared globalresponsibilities that would acquire substance, as occursat state level, in the existence of predictably availableresources. These resources would be obtained byconsolidating annual budgets with taxes or tariffs (canwe imagine states financed with the voluntarycontributions of their citizens, as occurs with the UnitedNations?), which in this case would be global. These



responsibilities would contribute to global cohesion andcooperation, and to the proper distribution of chargesand redistribution of the resources generated. Theywould also be the guarantors of a global budget, aninstrument that would strengthen global capabilities andprovide them with resources to incentivize compliancewith the goals, and to finance programs for adaptationand mitigation in less developed countries. This isperhaps the most serious shortcoming for globalgovernance, and for our ability to embark on proactiveand operative processes to mitigate climate change,understood simply as management of a worldwideenergy transition, necessary in any case, that will resultin climate change mitigation and act as a vector of changetoward global sustainability.

A Tax

Once again, climate change, thanks to the existence of anindicator as evident, measurable and controllable asemissions expressed in CO2, has provided us with apowerful potential instrument, a global tax on CO2(preferable to the so-called “carbon pricing”) in order tofinance the Paris Agreement. Such a tax was in factalready suggested at the Rio Summit in 1992, and wasunfairly whisked off the agenda during the negotiationsfor the Kyoto Protocol at the insistence of the UnitedStates (which in the end failed to ratify the protocol) toprovide for another not-so-efficient economicinstrument, tradable emissions permits, in what provedto be a lost opportunity.

A tax equivalent to 3–4 dollars per ton of CO2 would besufficient (its repercussion would be just over one centper liter of fuel, or one third of one cent per kWhproduced with fossil fuels, for example) to secure the100,000 million dollars per annum that have beencommitted, but not so far advanced, to implement theParis Agreement.

Owing to its fiscal repercussion, this fund could no doubtbe multiplied four or five times simply to catch up withthe subsidies received today by fossil fuels according tothe IAE, or to double the investments in the generation ofelectricity with renewables in 2015, a year in which, asstated above, they surpassed investments in generationwith fossil fuels.

This would satisfy the second and third conditions for global governance in climate change (capabilities andglobal economic resources) and sustainable energy.Additionally, it would almost certainly make the goal of

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The challenge lies in thegovernance of the ParisAgreement. Majorcountries such as theUnited States and Chinaresist not so muchcommitting to thereductions but ratherabiding by rigorousmonitoring mechanismsfor such commitments


zero emissions a desirable and advantageous reality,together with that of efficient (up to 50 percent less finalenergy consumption) and 100 percent renewable energysystems by 2100. The process would be punctuated by areduction in emissions by 2030 that would be 25 percentgreater than the number stipulated in the ParisAgreement, and a reduction of 60 percent by 2050 of theemissions recorded in 1990.

All this might put us on the path to remaining below a1.5ºC global increase in temperature, besides achievingmore sustainable energy systems and progress in general.Not forgetting an added dividend, the drastic reductionin atmospheric pollution in our cities.

So why wait to demand global fiscality on CO2 (we mightstart with kerosene for aviation, which currently pays no taxes) in order to ensure governance of the ParisAgreement? This fiscality would ensure we have the funds necessary to achieve sustainability with our energysystem and the resulting mitigation of climate change. It would also finally introduce the vector of the necessarychange in the model of production and consumption, aswe advocate at the Fundación Renovables.

Let us imagine for a moment what it would mean to add a proactive approach to climate change as the climax forchange already propitiated by the Paris Agreement, and due to be reinforced in Marrakech, in the form of aglobal CO2 tax that would supply predictable resourcesproportionate to the effort to be made, and which wouldgradually disappear with the “decarbonization” of theeconomy. It would put the Paris Agreement in“turbodrive,” but this time with renewables.

Notes

1. Fundación Renovables. 2015. La energía como vector de cambio parauna nueva sociedad y una nueva economía [Energy as change vector fora new society and a new economy]. Madrid: Fundación Renovables.



Technology and theDemocratic Management of Urban Complexity

Michael Batty

Michael Batty is Bartlett professor of planning atUniversity College London and chairs the Centre forAdvanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), whose focus isresearch into a science of cities.

The computerization of society has now reached the stagewhere hardware and software are rapidly spreading outinto the built environment and enabling ourselves as bothusers and designers of cities to automate many of ourroutine practices and functions. This automation has givenrise to the notion of the “smart city:” cities in which digitalmedia is heavily embedded in public and private places,enabling us to function better, to become smarter citizens,by producing much more secure, sustainable and livableenvironments. Once we build information infrastructureinto cities—which is no more, or less, than what we havebeen doing for the past two hundred years withconventional transportation infrastructure—we are notonly able to control the functions of the city in better waysbut we are also able to enhance our understanding of citiesand their planning thanks to the useful informationgenerated by such infrastructure. Much of this data isstreamed in real time and in this sense it is “big” in termsof its volume. Therefore, we need to employ new digitalmethods to explore and manage it. Such big data isessentially the “exhaust” or by-product of the smart city,and we are only just getting to grips with assessing howuseful this is likely to be for managing the future city.

Cities, of course, tend to be sustainable under manyvarieties of technological disruption, such as theintroduction of new forms of automation and changedbehaviors associated with them, for they are highlyadaptive, complex systems. But the real question iswhether cities are becoming more sustainable in terms oftheir living environments with the kind of technologicalchange that currently dominates their development. Weare living in a time when our ability to communicate withone another is being dramatically enhanced by newinformation technologies (IT). The issue we need toconsider is whether or not the gains in efficiency derivedfrom these developments are leading to more livable andequitable urban environments. To this end, this chapterwill explore the ways in which these developments arebeing implemented under the guise of the smart-citymovement. Smart cities imply smarter responses to urbanproblems but at the same time these responses, like manydevelopments in cities, can be divisive and confusing, andmight go against the more general goals of sustainableurban development.

Currently the smart-city movement embraces aperspective that examines the city through its mostroutine functions. These tend to include the flow ofinformation, materials, and people which takes place dailyand which we record over a relatively brief period of time,be it minutes, hours or days. In fact, city planning in thepast has been largely about how cities change and are

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planned on much larger time scales, over years and evendecades, which reflect the time required for substantialspatial change to take place. But the fact that we now havethe ability to capture data in real time using a variety ofsensors is changing the way we look at cities, shifting thenature of our planning and design to the much shorterterm. Data is being captured either through passivesensors embedded in the built environment or active oneswhich we control through our own actions, typicallysmartphones and portable computers of various kinds.Much of this data capture is made possible by theelectronic skin that has been layered across the planet inthe last thirty or forty years, with the Internet and itsvisual interface constituting one of the most dominantmodes of communication. Many private networks at manyspatial scales also exist and interact with the Internet indiverse ways—a fascinating glimpse into this world iscontained in Andrew Blum’s book Tubes: A Journey to theCenter of the Internet (Ecco Books, 2013). But most of thetime this world is hidden to us and we only see evidence ofthe smart city in the most superficial way—in the use ofour own devices as smart sensors, in the data that isprovided by them and packaged into information deliveredto us to help our decision-making, particularly in terms oftravel, retail purchasing, perhaps in how we might controlenergy use at home in basic ways involving heating, and inthe delivery of online financial services, increasinglyknown as “fintech.”

As a matter of fact, our image of the smart city is muchmore comprehensive than the reality of it. The bigcomputer companies, such as IBM and CISCO amongmany others, portray an image of the smart city whereeverything is integrated in seamless fashion, where thereis universal access for all, and where the prospect is one ofcontinued sustainability. The reality, however, is verydifferent. New information technologies do requireintegration—which ranges from interoperability overdifferent platforms to different data being linked to eachother—but this is extremely difficult to achieve, not leastbecause software and indeed hardware is increasinglydeveloped ad hoc.

It could not be otherwise, for developments incomputation involve new discoveries and it isimpossible to invent and develop a piece of hardware orsoftware able to anticipate all future developments, nomatter how flexible and open its design. Sustainabilitycan thus be compromised by the fact that we can neverknow the future. In fact, all complex systems are likethat—they evolve in an organic manner rather thanbeing designed from the top down as rigid and fullyfunctioning structures.

The other message that has been preached in the lastthirty years in terms of cities is the idea that they arecomplex systems, more like organisms than machines,systems that grow from the bottom up, never designed intheir entirety, and that, for the most part, undergoincremental development. Such development is notirrational: it may be very rational in function but thedesign of complete cities is a rarity, often conceived as anideal type and predicated as a demonstration project. Anumber of smart cities have been designed this way,almost like company towns: the digital new towns ofMasdar in the United Arab Emirates and Songdu in SouthKorea are examples of what might be produced inidealized, optimal conditions. But like conventional newtowns before, they tend to force population behaviors intosomething of a straightjacket.

Smart cities, which as mentioned above are part of thecurrent stage of the computerization of society, trace backtheir origin to the Industrial Revolution and the use ofmechanical technologies in the late eighteenth century.Cities were then transformed by electricity in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and have beenpowered by digital computation since the mid twentiethcentury. This automation has permeated virtually everycorner of our lives. Thus the smart city, which is the mostrecent stage of urban development, can be defined inmultiple ways through multiple applications of digitalmedia and IT. It is not possible here to define all of these,for they are everywhere, but some are more important andwidespread than others, and in this brief outline we willfocus on three of them: the first dealing with transport, thesecond with social media and social networks, and thethird with citizen services and citizen science. Each ofthese examples has different implications for increasingthe sustainability of our cities, and in each case there isevidence that these developments will both enhance anddetract from the general goals of increased sustainability.

For over 50 years we have been collecting data on thesupply (numbers, type, etc.) of vehicles through loopcounters embedded in roads, though progress has beenslow in terms of collating ticketing data into transitdemand measures. Some of the first IT developments intransport involved automated ticketing, and in many largecities—cities with a population in excess of two to threemillion people and underground transport networks—such systems are now routine. In London, whose innercore is home to over eight million people, some 40 percentof the population travel by public transport, 85 percent ofwhich use the standardized automated ticketingassociated to the Oyster card. This is the smart card whichrecords the details of every tap in and out of the system,



the cost of each trip, and the stored credit available fortravel which users load onto their card. There areapproximately twelve to thirteen million such taps per dayon tube, overground rail, and bus, and the data obtained inreal time—according to location at the start and end ofeach trip, and time elapsed in seconds—provides a uniquerecord of the behaviors of the travelers and the dynamicsof the transit system.

This data can also be used to control such systems. It ispossible to extract the functions of travel from wherepeople enter and leave the system by comparing this withland uses and activities at different locations, and toexplore the enormous heterogeneity of travel which isassociated with these functions. The impact of disruptionson the system can be studied with respect to the cascadingeffects of stalled trains and signal failures on the paths andtrips made by travelers and then used to suggest strategiesof mitigation.

These are all features at the cutting edge of what the smartcity might deliver in terms of transit, so that the quality ofthe travel experience can be improved and made moresustainable; but the clearest benefits to date involve thedelivery of information online through apps onsmartphones or digitally within stations, where displaysand dashboards inform travelers about the state of thesystem. There are now at least two dozen systems aroundthe world with comprehensive automation and anincreasing number of smaller systems with partautomation, and it is very likely that most transit systemsin the wealthier G20 countries will be automated in thisway by 2025. In fact, purpose-made smart cards are likelyto disappear as such automation is ported to contactlesspayment cards (credit, debit and the like, as in Londonnow)—a development that mirrors the massiveproliferation of purchases now made electronically eitherdirectly in stores or on the web, which is part of thegrowing electronic skin of the planet we noted above. Addto this mix the commercialization of autonomous vehicles,which are self-driving and self-maintaining to differentdegrees, and the prospect of widespread automation intravel will soon lay before us, making this aspect of thesmart city a reality. These are important elements ofincreasing sustainability with respect to congestion,accessibility and mobility in cities.

One of the most pervasive and fastest growing features ofthe smart city involves social media. Since the use ofsmartphones became widespread, as the cost of telecomsand phones fell and messaging apps became available,there has been enormous growth in individual access andmessaging to websites that enable people to

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It is impossible to inventand develop a piece ofhardware or softwareable to anticipate allfuture developments.Sustainability can thus becompromised by the factthat we can never knowthe future


communicate virtually anything they care to think about.Some half a billion tweets (short text messages) areposted to Twitter each day; the number of registeredusers in Foursquare, a similar but more niche socialmedia site, is much smaller at 60 million; but both ofthese pale in comparison with the over 1.7 billion users ofFacebook; and the list goes on: photo sharing sites suchas Flickr now have 112 million users, while Instagram hasmore than 500 million. In China, similar but separatesystems are fast emerging; these include Weibo, a socialmessaging site like Twitter, and Baidu, the search engineequivalent to Google. When we consider web search andemail traffic, the size of the digital world positivelyexplodes, and many of these statistics now correspond tosignificant fractions of the world population. Much ofthis is taking place in cities, possibly and hopefullymaking us all better informed and smarter while at thesame time raising problems about personal privacy,confidentiality, ownership of intellectual property, and soon. The extent to which all these new media which havecome upon us in the last decade are changing ourbehavior poses an enormous challenge to the way weunderstand the world, particularly the world of cities, therole of location, and the impact of globalization.

To some extent there is skepticism as to whether or notthese new media are actually changing the traditionalfunctions of the city. They may simply be reinforcingtraditional modes of behavior, but as the data streamed bythe sensors built into the various devices and applicationsis so unstructured, it is extremely difficult to search forpatterns that might be different from those that we areaware of traditionally.

The other domain of data which is genuinely a product ofthe smart city is the much more interactive basis ofInternet use known as crowdsourcing—where “crowds” orindividuals forming a population create their own datafrom their own responses, which are recorded through themedium of the web. Despite the notion that the power ofthe crowd might come to a somewhat different or moreintelligent conclusion than unstructured responses ofmany individuals, crowdsourcing data collection is nowpossible if enough people have access to a web-basedmedia and are motivated to respond to a particular set ofquestions, issues, or challenges. This general area involvesnot only the creation of data but furthermore concernsdata used for purposes which often work towards theempowerment of those involved in collecting it. Citizenscience is the term often used to suggest that this activityis one in which citizens themselves can become smart, inthat they are part of the process of collecting data thatmight make the city smart.

A rather basic and perhaps mundane but immenselysuccessful effort is the crowdsourced mapping technologyOpen Street Map – OSM (www.openstreetmap.org) whichinvolves relatively informed but amateur attempts togenerate as detailed a map of an area as is possible at thelevel of streets and land parcels, including the activities orland uses that pertain to these. OSM is producing maps thatare as good, if not better, than those producedprofessionally by national mapping agencies, with theadded proviso that these maps get better and better asinformed volunteers correct errors and add to theircontent. It is also part of the wider movement to make data“open,” with crowdsourced data of this kind being open toothers almost by definition. This is giving added impetus togovernment and other sectors to open and share their datamore freely than has been the case in the past. In this sense,smart cities are cities where open data is the modusoperandi of making citizens smart and giving them powerover their future with this new technology. This, webelieve, enhances their sustainability.

All of these technologies and the efforts to implement themhave the potential to make the city smart. It is worth notingthat the term smart is peculiarly American in its usage, butthe downside is that it has become such a buzzword that itis being applied to every aspect of the city at the presenttime. Perhaps this is no bad thing because it does drawattention to the difficulties of widespread automation, thedisruptions that are taking place, and the notion thattraditional ideas about place-based activities need to beextended to movement and communications. Newinformation technologies are providing an entirelydifferent basis for communicating with one another thanwas possible in the past, and this is changing the nature ofplace. The terminology of the smart city will not last, asthere will come a point in time when the focus of new ITwill move from this public domain to other cutting edges—probably medicine, possibly the alleviation of poverty,perhaps the restructuring of government. And it may takesome time before the promise of integrated IT systems—platforms, as they are increasingly being called—become areality. But what is clear is that the industrial revolutions, ofwhich the smart city is but the latest, are changing theconcept of the city from a place-based set of activities to aset of activities that exist in a different kind of reality whereinformation will be the new energy, the new fuel that willpower the way we work and function in cities. In fact,when we move beyond the smart city, we may no longertalk of cities in a world where we are all in constantcommunication with one another, no matter where we are.In this sense, we consider that what is now happening withnew technologies does herald an era when cities are likelyto become ever more sustainable.



The photographs of Nick Cobbing (United Kingdom,1967), taken over several decades, testify to thechanging character of natural life in the Arctic regionsand the urgent need to care for it. Having embarked onmany expeditions with international organizationssuch as Greenpeace, his camera has managed tocapture the beauty and fragility of the frozenlandscape. His photographs are the most eloquentimage of climate change, and have done much to raiseawareness of it.

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If journalists do notcover climate changethen they are missingthe greatest threat tohumanity ever. And ifjournalists do not tellthe story of how toavoid the worst-casescenarios then they areleaving their readerswithout any hope forthe future

Suzanne Goldenberg


8.Communicationfor Change

Ours is the firstgeneration to haveunderstood the gravity of problems like climatechange, and it is probablythe last that will be able toact with effectivesolutions

María Novo

Landscape allows us torecognize a new scenario of our heritage. It has beenestablished thatadministrative bodies willlook after the historic, artisticand natural heritage, but thelandscape heritage, which is acountry’s geographicalheritage and is thereforeexposed to every inclemency,has not yet been included

Eduardo Martínez de Pisón


The Responsibilities of the Media

Suzanne Goldenberg

Suzanne Goldenberg, journalist, is the former USenvironment correspondent of The Guardian.

Many years ago, when I was at the beginning of mycareer in journalism, I worked in a newsroom with a manwho had a strange habit of jumping out of his seat for noapparent reason and raising his arms in the air, loudlydeclaring to no one in particular: “I fear the worst.” Mycolleague, who was otherwise a quiet, mild-manneredman in middle age, would immediately sit back down,hunch over his keyboard and resume typing as if nothinghad happened. If you looked his way after one of theseeruptions, he might offer a small, benign smile but therewas never any explanation forthcoming for his agitation.

This was certainly unusual behavior, even by thenewsroom standards of the day, when eccentricities weregenerally overlooked or even welcomed as a way ofrelieving the tedium of the night shift. Over time, withour colleague still disinclined to offer any explanation forthe recurring eruptions and no one daring to askoutright, a few people began putting forward their owninterpretation of the bizarre behavior. Some claimed tohave noticed that particularly strenuous outbursts fromour colleague would be followed by breaking news of anearthquake, a tsunami or some other natural disaster, arefugee crisis, a famine or a war. That is, bad thingshappened, just like our agitated colleague had said theywould. And so we began to joke among ourselves that hepossessed the powers of prediction.

Just as often, of course, the worst did not occur. Ourcolleague would leap out of his seat, agitated as ever forno particular reason, and it would remain a routine newsday for the duration of our shift. We were less inclined tonotice those occasions, however, precisely becausenothing dramatic had happened. There had been noreason to notice anything, it had been a routine shift.

And that is the importance—and also the challenge—ofreporting about climate change and sustainability.

Climate change is a life-and-death threat on a planetaryscale. It is the human rights story of the twenty-firstcentury. Heat waves and floods, food shortages andclimate-spurred migration are already upending theworlds of business and politics, threatening globalsecurity and decades of development.

But telling that story—relaying the enormity of anupheaval that has yet to fully unfold, that is occurring at amuch slower pace than the 24/7 bombardment of thedigital news cycle—is incredibly difficult. It is perhaps astory too big to tell. The story of climate-inflected eventsdoes not readily conform to a single, easily digestiblemessage. It is messy: it is global but the effects are

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hyperlocal, and it does not have a clear beginning,middle, and end—at least not one that is understood fullyby scientists at this time.

If journalists do not cover climate change—the rising seasand sudden downpours that are already causing regular“nuisance” floods in cities like Miami and Manila, theblistering heat waves from Abu Dhabi to Australia, andthe rapid melting at both poles—then they are missingthe greatest threat to humanity ever. They are notperforming the public service that is a vital part of theirjob. They are not telling the public what to expect fromclimate change. They are not warning the public how toprepare for the worst—and in good time, so that they cantake measures to avoid upheavals and unrest.

And if journalists do not tell the story of how to avoidsuch worst-case scenarios—the free fall in the price ofsolar panels, the advances in battery storage, thelengthening range of electric cars—then they are leavingtheir readers without any hope for the future.

The worst does not have to occur. With careful planning,it is possible to escape catastrophic scenarios—by movingto less polluting energy sources, by adopting bettertechnologies, by careful use of existing resources. Andthose choices often bring their own benefits: the moresustainable course would have been the better choice,even without the forcing of climate change. That is amessage that has been sounded for years by economistsand government officials.

There have been mountains of studies about the savingsthat would result from careful preparations to avoid theworst effects of sea-level rise, extreme weather and otherclimate impacts. Accurate weather forecasts, early-warning systems, and shelters have demonstrated it ispossible to avoid mass casualties that used to becommonplace with hurricanes, even in low-lyingdeveloping countries, such as Bangladesh, which areexposed to greatest risk. In Rotterdam and Hamburg,construction of flood gates and town planning—puttingimportant infrastructure above the high-tide line,designating city parks as water catchment areas—protects billions in property from flood damage.

But the slow and orderly work of planning for disasterrarely jumps up and announces itself as a breaking newsstory. It’s a story of incremental change, damagingsetbacks, and outcomes that fall short of the originalsoaring goals. It’s not the short, sharp shock of the bigdisaster story. It’s not the type of feel-good story thatimmediately goes viral.

It’s a difficult balance, further complicated, especially inthe US, by a disinformation campaign by corporationsand conservative billionaires that has—until recently—made it politically risky for the White House andCongress to confront climate change, and that hasconfused the public about the dangers of warming.

In November 2009, only weeks before governments weredue to gather in Copenhagen for a major United Nationsclimate summit, unidentified hackers broke into theservers of the University of East Anglia’s ClimacticResearch Unit and published over a thousand of theclimate scientists’ private emails online.

The timing could not have been worse. The election ofBarack Obama, who had campaigned for the WhiteHouse warning of a “planet in peril,” had put climatechange back on the US political agenda. With the run-upto the Copenhagen summit, the threat of climate changeand the need for global action finally commanded publicattention. The hack caused an immediate uproar.

Leading conservative figures such as Sarah Palin, theformer US vice-presidential candidate who notoriouslydenies the planet is warming, claimed the emails showedthat climate scientists had colluded to hide data showingtemperature rise had stalled. They based theirarguments on a highly selective reading of the emails,but the breach conveniently fed into the climate changedeniers’ narrative that the science of climate change wasstill not settled. Four separate investigationssubsequently cleared the scientists of falsifying theirdata, but by then the Copenhagen climate conferencehad already ended in collapse.

The email hack did not cause the collapse of theCopenhagen summit. The global economy was mired in apainful recession and climate change, seen as a distantthreat, was relegated to the bottom of the agenda. With therecession, media companies were also fighting for theirsurvival in a digital age that was destroying their economicmodel. Companies reduced their staff—includingenvironment reporters. But the scandal sapped thepolitical will to come to an agreement, and distracted thepublic. It was hard to argue that climate change was thereal story when there appeared to be doubts—even amongscientists—that climate change itself was real.

In reality, of course, the science behind climate changewas already well established by 2009. Researchers begansuspecting that humans were capable of changing theclimate through the burning of fossil fuels in the latenineteenth century. By the second half of the twentieth

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century, the risks of climate change were seen assufficiently serious to merit the preparation of briefingpapers for US presidents Lyndon Johnson and RichardNixon. In 1988, the leading climate scientist, JamesHansen, told the US Congress that climate change wasalready occurring in real time—it was no longer a threator a risk. Climate change was already happening.

But it would take fifty years after those early WhiteHouse briefings, and twenty-five years after that publicwarning to Congress, before a US president tookdecisive steps to respond to the threat of climate change.

In the US in particular, oil and coal companies—andmore recently electricity providers and conservativebillionaires—bankrolled disinformation campaigns thatsought to confuse the public about the risks of climatechange. These disinformation efforts were extremelysophisticated, with the industry distributing money to avariety of front groups—think tanks, “astro-turf” groupswhich mimicked grassroots activism, “experts” in thepay of fossil fuel companies.

Those efforts proved remarkably effective: long afterscientists had reached a consensus about the causes ofclimate change, leading US, British, Canadian andAustralian news organizations continued to give an airingto so-called experts whose mission was to spread doubt.

Those so-called experts raised doubts thatindustrialized countries could run their economies onclean energy—without shutting off the lights and idlingbusiness. They warned that electricity prices wouldskyrocket, hurting ordinary consumers. They arguedthat efforts to deal with climate change would ultimatelyfail, claiming there was no chance other countries wouldjoin the historic big emitter, the US, in cuttingemissions—even after China and other countries hadembarked on the construction of ambitious solar andwind power plants. They even raised doubts about theexistence of climate change—although the underlyingscience had been broadly accepted for years.

Those false assertions—amplified by think tanks andcampaign groups—found their way into the opinionsections of newspapers, and too often into the newscolumns, in the name of balance. The result was verydamaging, when it came to coverage of climate change,because the disinformation campaign muddied themessage. With so many competing messages, it grew evenmore difficult for news organizations to seize on a clearstoryline about climate change, and it became harder forthe public to grasp the urgency of dealing with it.

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In the US in particular,oil and coal companies—and more recentlyelectricity providers and conservativebillionaires—bankrolleddisinformationcampaigns that soughtto confuse the publicabout the risks ofclimate change


And crucially the narrative of doubt found its way intothe political agenda. One year after the collapse of theCopenhagen climate summit, efforts to pass US climatelegislation also failed. For the remainder of Obama’s firstterm in the White House, climate change was regardedby the president and democrats in Congress as politicallytoxic. And for many news organizations, that turnedclimate change into a non-story.

* * *

On a blistering June day in 2013 Barack Obamaannounced a sweeping plan to fight climate change,anchored on regulations cutting greenhouse gasemissions from power plants. “The question now iswhether we will have the courage to act before it is toolate,” Obama said in his speech at Georgetown University.“And how we answer will have a profound impact on theworld we leave behind not just to you but to your childrenand your grandchildren. As a president, as a father and asan American, I am here to say we need to act.”

Obama made it clear he was done with waiting forCongress to take up climate change, and was directing USgovernment agencies to take charge. He also beganhitting back at opponents who deny the existence ofclimate change, dismissing them as members of the FlatEarth Society. Over the next three years, the WhiteHouse went on to roll out actions and announcementsabout climate change almost on a weekly basis—andcontinued to hit back hard at climate change deniers.

The high-visibility climate campaign—reinforced byObama’s trips to climate-affected locations such asAlaska and Hawaii—also put climate change on the newsagenda. Climate coverage on its own might be a non-story according to traditional news judgment, but thepresident certainly was news, and news organizationscovered him. Over the course of Obama’s second term,there was a far greater coverage of climate issues in USnews outlets than before, while big newspapers such asthe Los Angeles Times pledged they would no longer givespace to climate deniers.

It took far too long—and it’s not going fast enough. Butthe US is finally on its way.



Landscape, Culture and Sustainability

Eduardo Martínez de Pisón

Eduardo Martínez de Pisón is professor emeritus ofgeography at the Autonomous University of Madrid, aswell as an explorer, traveler, writer and mountaineer.In 1991 he was awarded the Premio Nacional de MedioAmbiente (Spain’s National Environmental Prize).

Landscape is a result, a formal decantation on thesurface of the Earth. Landscape is moreover anexpression of territory. And it is also a culturalinterpretation of the configuration acquired bygeographical facts. So in the words of Philipp OttoRunge, the painter who managed to put all colors ontothe face of a sphere, “everything converges onlandscape.” By accumulating spatial elements andhistoric times, landscape can show the keys to territorialcompatibility or disharmony in one fell swoop. Seen inthis way, landscape offers proof of sustainability.

As we have said, landscape is a configured (andsometimes disfigured) place. Geography, meaninglocalization and territoriality, is therefore the first stepto its revelation. It is a unity that integrates natural andsocial forces, physical and human components, andinternal pieces or territorial units. The formal constructsresulting from an evolution of all these ingredients arepresented as settled, and inter-assembled in a local,regional and universal chorology. The geography oflandscape which makes sense of such a mosaic or map is,then, initially a morphogeography. But it does not endthere. Since landscape is furthermore a culturaldiscovery of the territory and not merely its formaldecantation, the revelation of its profound, cultured andaesthetic aspects means that the perception of place issupplemented by its comprehension, even its sentiment,and naturally by its representation, its scientific andartistic image. In using the term “landscape” rather than“territory,” I am therefore including the latter asmateriality with the addition of that image receivedthrough the senses, of the study which assembles itsareas and components in an integrated fashion, and ofthe given culture with which it has been qualified. Theact of seeing a landscape is one of discovering a higherdimension in the territory. The geographical fact isthere, and precedes the discovery, but without thediscovery there is still no landscape. Landscape is thusthe sum of an ecological, historical and geographicalwhole with another interpretive whole.

Morphology is therefore the basis of landscape. Itsforms show the Earth’s faces, including both itsphysical face and the physiognomies formed out of thenatural picture by lifestyles, techniques and economicfunctions, as well as cultural and moral styles,categories and levels. When a territory is interpretedculturally and comes to be recognized as a landscaperather than merely being viewed pragmatically, it isreorganized intellectually, aesthetically and ethically.

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A special dialogue with broader contents is thenestablished with it. Historic advances in the concept oflandscape, its artistic representations, its methods ofstudy and its social significance are achievements in thehistory of civilization that encompass technicians,inhabitants, politicians, thinkers, artists and scientists—that is, they affect the entire cultural body. The readingof a landscape is, then, the reading of a process and acultural system. From its very sources as a modernscience, geography has assumed that the correctunderstanding of landscapes stems from the principleof terrestrial unity, and of the combination, correlationand successiveness of phenomena. It only remains toadd that when speaking of landscapes, culture is one ofthose phenomena.

Cultural representations of landscapes can even teach usto see. They guide our perception. Their pressure is sogreat that educational levels are decisive for anunderstanding of landscapes, since prior images help toimprove the perceiver’s vision, although it can alsohappen that the traveler—as Hippolyte Taine wrote ofhis journey to the Pyrenees in the mid nineteenthcentury—rebels against this and makes a virtue out of apreference for his or her spontaneous, personal anddirect vision, refusing to deform it with previouslyacquired information of a geographical, literary orpictorial nature. This is generally inadvisable since, asHenry David Thoreau argued, we shall see all the more,the better we are prepared for it. Even the sensesthemselves are combined and transposed in a perceptivewhole as a resonance of the unity of the real, thearmature and the weave of the landscape. Implicit in theterm landscape, as part of its existence, is the concept ofstructure. Behind forms lie invisible structures thatorder (or disorder) appearances. The Enlightenment andRomantic notion of “nature pictures” already rested onthe fact that such pictures were the face of thatgeographical structure. The structure takes a form, theform presents a face, and the face is what we perceive.The function that builds up much of that structure thuslies behind any territory, which today is nothing but across-section of its historical process. Understandingplace, however, leads to the contents and meanings thatappear within any landscape. Inverting the terms,landscape for the writers of the 1898 Generation was agateway to the spirit.

When viewed within a geographical framework, Ortegay Gasset’s “circumstance” refers to landscape. Landscapethus appears as a condition and reference for life. Ortegaadded that if I am myself and my circumstance, then if I

do not save it, I do not save myself. This places landscapebeyond the environment or any mechanical relation ofmere productivity or survival. Rather than thetraditional idea of the “environment,” Ortega wrote asearly as the beginning of the twentieth century, weshould say “landscape.” In our observation of the world,seeing the environment as landscape would thus requirethe revelation of a higher degree in the conception ofplaces. In the specific case of anthropic landscapes, itwould seek the correspondence between man andnature, which would make it necessary to move from anaturalist causality to a humanist one. The landscapewould thus be the environment converted intocircumstance. Landscape finally acquires the value of aconcept that frees history of geographical determinism.In doing so, however, it entails a sense of responsibility, abehavioral ethic, as every freedom does. If we are free,we are responsible for our places and our landscapes.When the human gaze discovers the world as landscape,it also sees its depth behind appearances.

Landscape allows us to recognize a new scenario of ourheritage. It has been established that administrativebodies will look after the historic, artistic and naturalheritage, but the landscape heritage, which is a country’sgeographical heritage and is therefore exposed to everyinclemency, has not yet been included.

Landscapes form tesserae that change gradually (orsuddenly) from one to another of their principal modesof representation on the map of the Earth: those whichare predominantly natural (but not necessarilyexclusively natural), those predominantly rural (withtheir basis in nature and their references in urbangroupings), and those predominantly urban (with aphysical foundation and a nodal relationship with thewhole functional, natural and rural system). In addition,there are mixed spaces. For a landscape is any territorythat is interpreted as such, from Antarctica to Madrid’sPuerta del Sol or the vineyards of Castile, formingregional, continental and even marine spaces in more orless tangled groupings. Every landscape is a well definedaverage unit of understanding that participates in otherlarger spaces and is itself composed of smaller groupedlocalities. In this way, the landscape is organized ondifferent scales where the tensions betweenhomogeneity and diversity define its geography. Thispermits its cartography, and thereby its establishment,its typology, its analysis, its communication and itsmanagement. In other words, its utility.

In this way, we have on the one hand what we call thematerial components of the scenario, where relief enters



into dialogue with climate, water, vegetation and alsoman to form the basic weave of any landscape. Man, thegreat overall active agent in terrestrial landscapes, hasrecomposed the planetary film of the morphosphere. Wehave positioned the center of geographical interestwithin what is proper to our own species, in ourreconfigurations and artifacts, and we have alsomultiplied the understanding of landscape in both timeand space. We tend to blur the traditional diversity oflandscapes, even dispersing “non-landscapes” aroundthe planet, similar to one another, strange to theirsurroundings, and distanced from the geographicalsense of place. What was once the original geosphere,which still maintains its key physical features as a basicorder of the world, has thus lost both its nature and itsdiversity. The primitive biosphere has changed in thelong course of geological time, but has also done so inthe short course of historical time. We human beingshave modeled an ecosphere to our measure, one that isnow being transformed in such a way that the originalgeosphere, while always subject to change, is nowturning into a technosphere ruled by artificiality,homogeneity and acceleration. Landscapes arouse lessand less interest.

Landscape in which human additions andrecompositions participate is, in short, a physical andanthropic complex, with increasingly rare andvulnerable exceptions. The habitual patrimony thatappears on the Earth’s surface, with its differentpredominance, therefore consists of this complex. Thispatrimonial landscape is the sum and the dialogue of itsvaried constituents, and its understanding and treatmentthus requires multifaceted professional expertise fromthose who try to establish its various components andthe sense of convergence necessary for a comprehensionof the way they interlock. Landscape heritage, then,begins with natural morphogeography and ends withhuman territorial action (on the rural and urbanheritage, on the regional system of relations, on themonumental and functional system, on the so-calledconstructed landscape, and on experience,comprehension and representation). The intellectualmanagement of such a resource requires a great deal ofeffort and high levels of competence, but in atechnological panorama of progressively decreasinginterest in landscapes, this can only be assured on a solidcultural bedrock which, as we well know, is notdeveloped or implanted everywhere to a sufficientdegree. A rigorous approach to landscape is even morecomplicated when the composition of the geographicalscenario is followed by infinite explanations of

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The sustainability oflandscape does nottherefore lie simply inits maintenance butin suitable protectionfor the direction of itsevolutionarydynamics, just likeevery living being


experiences, feelings, tastes, thoughts, representationsand projects, which make it necessary to enter theinvisible. However, Ortega y Gasset himself wrote thatthe forest is more the latent than the patent, more theprofound than the superficial, more the invisible thanthe visible, and more the inside than the outside. Theforest is suggested to one within it, not seen by them,since it always develops behind the immediatelyperceptible line of trees, and like everything in reality, itsmost profound aspects are those which are leastapparent. The theory is that the forest exists when it isinterpreted as such. Bruno Zevi added in his book Saperveder l’architettura that humans are not accustomed tounderstanding space, since a vision of it requires threedimensions. To achieve this, we must situate ourselves inthe midst of it. In other words, we achieve it only whenthe landscape contains us.

The patrimonial significance of landscape is drawn fromits values. Once these are established, it has to be bornein mind that landscape is dynamic and thereforechanging. The sustainability of landscape does nottherefore lie simply in its maintenance but in suitableprotection for the direction of its evolutionary dynamics,just like every living being. Achieving this meansprotection not only for its visible face but for thestructure that generates it, the dynamism that gives itvitality and the change it requires, with attention paidalso to the background of ideas, perceptions and imagesthat feed it culturally. The “whole” responds only as atotality, and man and nature are within it in theirappropriate place as part of its life pulse. In our care ofthe landscape, or in our lack of it, the positive ornegative sign of sustainability is thus established. Thefinal decantation of landscape is a central position in thesystem of territorial change and preservation. It lies atthe confluence of three flows and vertices: theconservation of nature; the protection of resources,traditional customs and cultural components; and theregulation of activities, processes of change andeducational uses.

In 1838, the Romantic writer José Zorrilla published apoem on the Creation. The earth, the hill, the breeze, thebird, the beast and man all appear successively, joiningtogether in the landscape, until Paradise is undone by atwisted conscience: “the cool valley’s splendor wasfaded / the world trembled on its axes of diamond.” Thatwas the beginning of a well-known story that will endonly when “the tremendous day / of universal harm isdone.” Let us hope so much drama does not have such adesolate ending. We should begin by restoring our

paradises. We have the instruments for it. But the taskwill certainly be made easier and more acceptable if theidea of sustainable landscape becomes one of theseinstruments, entering the concept, regulation andpractice of its management. It might be like planting anarrow in the center of the system.



The Role of Art and Education. Change in Times of Uncertainty

María Novo

María Novo is a doctor in philosophy and educationsciences and holder of the UNESCO Chair inEnvironmental Education and Sustainable Development.

The Anthropocene, an Epoch of High Uncertainty

There is widespread scientific consensus on the evidencethat we have entered a new geological period, theAnthropocene. Its fundamental characteristic is theenormous influence human beings have on the globalbio-geo-chemical processes of the planet. With ourtechnological actions oriented by an economy that doesnot respect the limits of the ecosphere, we have brokenthe range of variability of many natural cycles in anaccelerated movement that leads us to a future plaguedwith risks, one in which our viability as a species isalready starting to be questioned.

Global change is a reality. The planet has changed and ischanging, influenced by the rhythm and intensity of ouractions. Problems such as the lack of biodiversity,improper use of water and energy resources, thedisarticulation of the territory, and several othersconfigure a high-uncertainty scenario, in whichanthropogenic climate change, caused directly orindirectly by our ways of life, stands out as one of themost significant factors.

In this uncertain context of global warming, humanityfaces ecologic problems the effects of which may beirreversible. As Mario Molina, winner of the Nobel Prizefor Chemistry, said of climate change, we know thesystem can suffer abrupt changes, but we do not knowwhere or when. However, our world leaders are moreattentive to economic, financial and strategic questions,generally reversible issues, than to the points of no returnwith which certain ecologic risks confront us.

The larger picture of this environmental crisis is verycomplex. It has implications of political, ethical, ecologic,economic and social order, and it involves enormousrisks, such as massive migrations caused by rising sealevels, the probability of changes in the Gulf Stream, anddiseases moving from south to north with the northwardshift of the heat boundary.

If we had to characterize this situation with a singleword, it would be “uncertainty.” Not only is the futureuncertain, but so too, increasingly, is the present. We livein the midst of experimental processes whose short- andmedium-term effects we can barely glimpse. This bringsan uncertainty that is further fueled by war, famine,terrorism and other threats which have arisen from ourinability to engage in dialogue on fundamental aspects ofcommunity life that would generate social peace. Whatwe do know, however, is that if certain thresholds of riskare crossed (and we are close to doing so in some cases),

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the changes will be not only quantitative but alsoqualitative, and there will be no going back for certainphenomena.

What to Do about This Scenario

Clearly, urgent changes to our energy policies need to beimplemented, with short-term priority accordeddecisively to renewable energies, evaluating the subjectnot only in economic terms (necessary though this is) butalso from ecologic, social and strategic perspectives. It isnot a question of making a purely monetary costcomparison between energy sources, since the balancemust also include the damage (negative external effects)that the use of fossil fuels causes to people’s health, thestate of the seas and oceans, the food we eat, and the airwe breathe.

Within decades we must make drastic reductions in ourgreenhouse gas emissions, redefine the organization oflarge cities, reorient and incentivize reforestationpolicies, and educate the population of rich countries andsectors to consume differently, with self-restraint andawareness of limits. These and many other measures,such as sustainable water policies and conservation ofbiological and cultural diversity, could effectively bringabout the civilizing change toward sustainability that weso badly need today.

For this change to take place, we must move aroundcertain basic axes of thought and action:

— Awareness of the biophysical limits of the planet andthe social limitations on our desires.

— Incorporation of ethics into economic and politicaldecisions on every scale, with special emphasis onecological ethics.

— Changed priorities in public policy-making and globalgovernance.

— Changes in the management of natural resources(energy, water, food) on a local, regional and global scale.

— Changes in the collective imagination of the West andof the wealthiest countries and sectors, differentiatingthe purely quantitative “standard of living” from“quality of life,” measured with qualitative indicators.

Transformations of such magnitude are impossiblewithout the involvement of people from all walks of life,the scientific community and the world of art and

creation. Making the population aware of such issues,stimulating the need for change, and constructingalternatives in the hearts and minds of the world’sinhabitants is the task of education. Said education, ortraining, must reach not only the population at large butalso, and especially, the professionals who manage thedifferent areas of economic, political and social life,including planners, managers and decision-makers. Theglobal problem requires urgent measures, and we cannotwait for the coming generations to realize what ishappening and take appropriate action. Ours is the firstgeneration to have understood the gravity of problemslike climate change, and it is probably the last that will beable to act with effective solutions.

The Paradigm Shift

At the beginning of the twentieth century, scienceunderwent a paradigm shift that was truly revolutionaryfor the interpretation of reality: moving beyond theapproaches of mechanistic, reductionist and deterministexplanations to embrace a complex vision in whichrandomness and uncertainty have a place. The researchcarried out by Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and many otherpioneering scientists opened the gates for a newscientific concept that includes the impossibility of anabsolute separation between the observer and that whichis being observed; a form of science that overcomes theold dualistic vision of modernity (person/nature,mind/body) and proposes instead a conception of theworld akin to a great machine that obeys deterministiclaws. Cartesian and Newtonian visions of reality and itslaws were hence not refuted, but they were resituated intheir areas of validity.

From a classical perspective, a law of nature would beassociated with a deterministic description, reversible intime, which privileged order and stability, and linkedknowledge to the possibility of certainty. New sciencerecognizes the vital role of fluctuations and instability,considers position one of the constitutive variables of thecomplexity of the real world, and expresses itself not somuch in terms of certainties as of probabilities. Time (thearrow of time) enters physics, and the irreversibility ofthermodynamic phenomena moves to the heart of thescientific gaze. Consequently, as Ilya Prigogine affirms, thefuture is not assured. We are living the end of certainties.

Complexity thus makes its way into the scientific spirit,permeating both philosophy and art at the same time.The new postulate attends not only to the quantifiable



aspects of life but also to those which challenge the ideaof a predictable, manageable and risk-free world, and itquestions the attempt to separate the realm of reasonfrom that of feelings and emotions. At the same time, aprocess is set in motion whereby history is accepted intoscientific discourse, bringing with it the incorporation oftwo key elements for a complex interpretation of theworld: the subject (the observer) and the context.

This vision emphasizes the interactions which take placein the living world, an intricate network of relationshipsand nexuses that is comprehensible only in systemic orcomplex terms. Philosophers such as Nietzsche alert usto the danger of reducing knowledge to formulae orclosed truths. Reality is a cascade of realities, he says,incorporating the idea of the subject as multifarious andof knowledge as a multiplicity of constructs.

Popper illustrated this paradigm shift by asserting thatscience had gone from clocks to clouds, from amechanical and predictable world to one which, likeclouds, had fuzzy boundaries and was subject to constantchange. Indeed, clouds provide us with the image of aninapprehensible and contingent world that makes andunmakes itself before our theories can grapple with it.They symbolize a complex reality beyond simplification,always diffuse, fluctuating, and above all unfinished. Newscience accepts that its truths are open to conjecture, andtherefore provisional. They are necessarily open todisproof in confrontation with other ideas and theorieswhich might better explain phenomena at any givenmoment. Uncertainty has come to stay in our way ofinterpreting the world.

In short, science on the one hand and reality on the otherlead us to the greatest contribution to knowledge made inthe twentieth century, which, as Edgar Morin states, isprecisely the knowledge of the limits of knowledge; theimpossibility of eliminating certain uncertainties. At thesame time, our impact on the ecosphere has confrontedus in the twenty-first century with the limits of ourplanet—limits which we are surpassing, with predatoryecologic and social effects which have resulted inextremely serious and intractable eco-social problems. Itis a process whose consequences are largelyunforeseeable. New uncertainty, growing uncertainty…

Scientists, thinkers and artists provide us with thediagnosis: we need a civilizing change that will allow us,with the necessary adjustments, to maintain our ways oflife on Earth. We are facing new problems never beforeexperienced by the human race, such as induced climatechange. We cannot meet these challenges with our old

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The potential of artisticcontributions to conjure upan alternative possibleworld lies not only in itsadded creativity andimagination but also in itshistorically proven capacityto anticipate


answers, yet no evident solution is forthcoming evenwhen we try out new approaches...

Questions and Answers

We need to understand that when a paradigm changes, it is not the answers that change but the questions. Ashumanity, we must moreover ask ourselves not onlydifferent questions, as certainly is the case, but alsoquestions of a different kind, ones that go beyond thefield of economics and politics to enter territories such as ethics, philosophy and ecology.

From this point of view, the most significant questionswe should ask today would not revolve fundamentallyaround the efficiency of our systems, hugely importantthough this is. The key to our questions is to be found, inmy opinion, in the pertinence of the life models we havegenerated, and above all of those we wish to adopt. It liesin devising a way of relating to nature which no longersees it exclusively as a provider of resources, and inadopting new ways of consuming, planning our citiesand attaching value to the rural world. Clearly, thispertinence encompasses the need to ascribe a leadingrole to women in many cultures and to promote thecultivation of values such as harmony, solidarity inconsumption, and cohabitability. It is essential toremember that as well as Homo faber, we are also Homoludens, beings who dream and play together, and need tolook one another in the eye so as not to feel alone.

We are at a giant crossroads, and the choice we nowmake collectively will be decisive for our future on Earth.This situation confronts us with changes of a Copernicanmagnitude that demand not only technological solutionsbut also an extra set of values, creativity and imaginationthat will enable humanity to evince a future ofsustainable living. In the words of Federico MayorZaragoza, our societies are suffering from a deficit ofsoul, one which we must necessarily heal by recoveringthe true value of time and hope, of interpersonalrelations, dignified labor, and of suitable forms andspaces of cohabitation.

Change in Times of Uncertainty: The Role of Art

Science provides us with the tools to forecast the gravityof problems such as global warming, rising sea levels,droughts and floods, which will become increasinglyfrequent and unpredictable. Technology can help us find

possible ways to mitigate these problems, though suchmitigation will always be partial and incomplete. Bothtechnology and science, however, are insufficient when itcomes to imagining and elucidating possible worlds—new relations, values, qualities and properties of the realthat are hidden to a purely experimental researcher. Asthe poet Valéry once said, imagining is tantamount tounlearning that which we are led to believe by customand conventional language.

The great challenge we face is using the fragile and brittlematerial at our disposal to give birth to new forms ofcollective life, making a reality of those possible worldswhose qualities we can currently only intuit. In this task,the role of art and artists is fundamental. We mustabandon the purely instrumental vision of nature andliving systems, no longer considering them merely asproviders of resources but recognizing the potentialitythat lies hidden in them on an invisible plane. We need todiscover our surroundings anew in astonishment, learn tolook with new eyes, listen as though it were the first time,and perceive with all the senses available to us. Only thisintuition of the invisible allows us to understand the truevalue of Life for our own lives, which consist of muchmore than producing and consuming.

Confronted with a scenario of increasing uncertainty, theprofound change lying ahead of humanity if it is toadvance toward a sustainable world presents us with thechallenge of placing imagination and creativity, guided byethical values, at the center of our thought and ourdecisions. Art can help us learn, imagine and expressaspects of reality and complexities that are unintelligiblefrom the scientific point of view. While science pursuesprecision (which is welcome but must always pay theprice of its own limitation) art is able to expand ourvision in the midst of uncertainty, since its goal is not tobe precise but to pose questions and elicit brand newanswers. Scientists and artists, meanwhile, need to beilluminated by ethics throughout the process.

We need a form of art that manifests itself as a privilegedspace for the creation of knowledge about the world weare being challenged to build, one vastly different fromtoday’s. In this respect, the potential of artisticcontributions to conjure up an alternative possible worldlies not only in its added creativity and imagination butalso in its historically proven capacity to anticipate,which now more than ever is so necessary.

Uncertainty cannot be fought, nor should it be ignored.We must humbly limit ourselves to managing it as well aswe can. But we are not ready to embark on such



management. Addressing the great ecologic and socialissues of our times we employ too many fixed rules andtoo little imagination. We repeat worn-out formulae andresort to the old instruments. Can we hope in that wayfor a civilizing change toward sustainability? For themoment, let us allow our artists to speak, give voice topeople’s dreams, listen to our profound but muchneglected nature as humans, and also confront thechallenge hand in hand with the philosophers, whoremind us of a forgotten ethics, and the teachers, who aretrying to save thought and wisdom from being smotheredby information.

Uncertainty and Education, a Necessary Bond

When did uncertainty disappear from education? Or wasit never really a part of it in the first place? Westernculture has constructed potent educational systemswhich in times of lucidity, such as the days of theInstitución Libre de Enseñanza in Spain, haveincorporated all the creative potential of human beingsinto their pedagogy. It is no coincidence that those whocame out of their classrooms include creators such asSalvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, greatly admiredtoday. Afterwards, however, rationalist methods came tothe fore in the pedagogical field, fostered by an incipienttechnology that placed more emphasis on explaininghow the world functions than on teaching how to thinkabout possible worlds or question oneself on the ethics ofgood living. Lessons on the “how” eventually prevailedover questions about the “whats,” the “whys” and the“who for.”

Today this model has reached its culmination. Fromschool to university, educational systems now emphasizeinformation and the technological instruction of ourchildren and youngsters. We teach them thousands ofconcepts, theories and computer skills, but we do notenthuse them with the pleasure of discovery, the kind towhich the Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman referredwhen he said that he had been attracted to the world ofscience by the infectious enjoyment of an adventure.

In making these remarks, I am of course speaking ingeneral terms, and referring only to what educationalsystems today, at least in Spain, propose and expect oftheir students: that they learn a large amount ofinformation and know how to handle themselvestechnologically. However, I should like to stress that Iknow there to be many educational centers and teachersthat manage to dodge round these models and choose to

260 s .m.a . r. t .

The great educationalchallenge of this centuryis that people at any stageof education should learnto manage uncertainty


work with their students stimulating their creativity,their ethical values and their pleasure at allowingthemselves to be surprised by knowledge. Are theyrepresentative of the majority? We shall leave thequestion open for each reader to reflect upon.

In my opinion, most of our education, from nurseryschool to university, with magnificent and highlyestimable exceptions, provides our children andyoungsters with answers to questions that they have notasked themselves. We go too fast for them, and thismakes us unable to generate the conditions from whichthe questions could arise from them. We do not givethem enough time or space to feel astonishment at themarvels of life. We keep them shut up too long inclassrooms, where everything is under control, far fromthe real world with its uncertainties and problems.Randomness does not visit educational centers, and if itdoes, it is immediately reduced. Can we expectgenerations educated in this way to cope with theuncertain and insecure world we are leaving them?When will we start teaching them fewer theories andgiving them decision-making tasks (which can be smallbut still educational) related to the conflicts of theirenvironment?

On the same note, it is also worth reflecting on how manyof the answers we teach them still respond to oldquestions, to a worn-out paradigm, and so have nomeaning in our context, where everything, includingnecessarily our vision of the world and our strategies forengaging with it, has become more complex.

The great educational challenge of this century is, Ibelieve, that people at any stage of education (for weadults also have to keep learning) should learn to manageuncertainty. We must be able to live amidst complexproblems, make decisions even if we don’t have all thefacts at our fingertips, and imagine new scenarios forliving that go beyond the real, testing their possibleimplementation. This challenge means something likeintroducing poetry amidst so much educational prose,restoring the value of questions and creativity, andaccepting that true knowledge only settles and comesalive when it comes as a response to restlessness,interrogation and the sense of a quest.

The butterfly effect of the imagination could invade oureducational spaces and turn them into places thatconciliate reason and emotion, search and discovery, thevisible and the invisible. Places with room forastonishment. We need education to enthuse the citizensof all ages with the pleasure of wandering down

unexplored paths that lead to sustainability and goodliving. And to achieve this, in addition to the mind andheart, we have to bring resistance and resilience intoplay, teaching how to construct out of adversities, to singin the midst of the storm, to discover unexplored pathsand overcome fears hand in hand…

In an uncertain world like the one we now live in and arecondemned to live in henceforth, education must help usto confront questions of potential irreversibility assomething urgent and vital. Our present and future are atstake. It is not a task to be left until tomorrow, since theproblem is already burning in the dining rooms of ourhomes. Among other things, this predicament points to aneed for joint, humble, collaborative learning in which allof us are called to share: the learning of cooperation, ofthe art of putting ourselves in the place of someone else’sorphanhood, in order to recover the value of nature as acommon home, the common ground among the humanfamily, the quality of relations, knowledge as a sharedconstruct, and life as an encounter.

Above all, we can and must imagine, imagine, imagine,guided by ethics and the art of good living. In the wordsof Ernesto Sábato, our youngsters need (and so do we) tolearn to glimpse a horizon while standing before theabyss. For that is where we are in times of uncertainty.



The inverted trees of Rodney Graham (Canada, 1949)emphasize his interest in the behavior of visual opticsand perception, in what is seen and what goes beyondthat which is seen. However, they also demonstrate hisconcern for nature, whose most significant and poeticrepresentation adopts the form of an ancient tree withits roots. His images, which are at once an artistic,technical and environmental reflection, thus becomemonuments to our natural surroundings.

TreesRodney Graham


Oak Tree, Red Bluff 1, 1993–2000


Authors

Siddharth Agarwal A doctor by training, he has worked in the fields of research andprogramming in the areas of public health, social welfare andnormative support for national and regional governments. He is thedirector of the Urban Health Resource Centre in New Delhi, anonprofit organization that works to improve the health, nutritionand welfare of the inhabitants of underprivileged urban zones, andwhich played a key role in the National Urban Health Mission whichmandates reaching out to all listed and unlisted slums, vulnerablesettlements in India. He has been a member of several internationalcommittees and panels, member of several Government of Indiacommittees and an adviser to the World Health Organization, UN-Habitat, UNFPA. He teaches public health from a multidisciplinaryperspective at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg, WashingtonUniversity, University of California, Berkeley, TERI University,Institut d’Etudes Politiques Sciences Po, Paris, and is past presidentand executive board member of the International Society for UrbanHealth. Recipient of the AXA Outlook Award 2014, nomination-based award by Paris-based AXA Research Fund, and of the RotaryVocational Service Award for his services towards the betterment ofthe underprivileged in 2015.

Michael BattyThis British urbanist and geographer is a professor of The BartlettSchool of Architecture at University College London, where hedirects the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), whoseresearch is centered on computer-based models of cities. Thesestudies have been published in several books such as Cities andComplexity, which won the William Alonso Prize at the NorthAmerican Regional Science Association Annual Conference(NARSC), and The New Science of Cities, as well as the blogswww.complexcity.info and www.spatialcomplexity.info. He is theeditor of Environment and Planning B, and in 2013 was awarded thePrix International de Géographie Vautrin-Lud, known as the “NobelPrize” of geography.

Mike Berners-LeeAn expert in carbon emissions, the scale of climate change and thesustainability agenda, he is the founder of Small World Consulting.He has written the books How Bad Are Bananas? and The CarbonFootprint of Everything, and has coauthored The Burning Question,among other books on the environment. He is a professor at theInstitute for Social Future of the Lancaster University, where hestudies the great challenges for sustainability in the twenty-firstcentury. He contributes to various media and has worked in areasrelated to energy and emissions for various organizations in thepublic and corporate sectors.

Paolo BifaniItalian economist, former senior officer of the United NationsEconomic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean(ECLAC), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), UnitedNations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as wellas consultant with other UN agencies such as the Food andAgriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the WorldIntellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the InteramericanBank For Development (IDB), the OECD, the Commission of theEuropean Union, and the International Labour Office (ILO). As aprofessor has been associated with universities in Spain (UAM),Mexico (Universidad de Guadalajara, UNAM) Switzerland (Institutde Hautes Etudes Internationales et du Developpement), Chile,Colombia, Costa Rica and Cuba. He is the author of Medio ambiente y desarrollo and La globalizacion: ¿otra caja de Pandora?, and hascoauthored nine other books, including Technology, Trade Policy andThe Uruguay Round; Global Land Uses and Changes; Biotechnology aHope or a Threat?; Sociedad, Cultura y Desarrollo Sustentable; and

Trade and Environment Review 2016: Fish Trade. He has alsopublished more than eighty articles in specialized magazines.

BoomoonThe South Korean photographer Boomoon gave up painting in the1970s to study photography at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. At thetime he focused on black and white street photography, attesting tothe rapid transformation of Korean society through contrastsbetween rural and urban life. In the 1980s he began shifting towardsmore abstract compositions devoid of any human presence, and it isfor these that he is now renowned around the world. His work hasbeen shown at the Flowers Gallery in London and New York, theForum für Fotografie in Cologne, the Miami Art Museum, theYokohama Museum of Art and the Daegu Art Museum.

Nick CobbingCobbing’s vocation for photography originates in his interest innature and his determination to help preserve it. His work focuses onthe landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctic, and on the effects ofclimate change in these zones. He is a contributor to NationalGeographic, Geo, The Sunday Times and the BBC. His work has wonmajor prizes such as the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year andAmerican Photography awards, and has been exhibited at manygalleries and institutions such as the Parliament in Stockholm andthe US Capitol. He has also made films produced by the Look ThreeFestival of Photography and National Geographic magazine.

Thierry CohenHas devoted himself professionally to photography since the mid1980s, when he began to explore the use of digital techniques.Specializing first in editorial portraits, since 2006 he has focused onhis own personal work. In his series Binary Kids, from 2008, hereflected on the future of the new generations confronted with digitaltechnologies. Since 2010 he has toured the world with his camera,from great megalopolises to solitary deserts, to create the DarkenedCities series, which imagines what cities would be like without lightpollution. His work has been exhibited at the Palais in Tokyo, theMusée de l’Homme in Paris, the Danziger Gallery in New York, andthe official selection of Le Mois de la Photo.

Raymond J. ColeProfessor at the University of British Columbia (Canada), he hastaught environmental aspects of building design for the past 40years and holds the designation of University Distinguished Scholar.He is former director of UBC’s School of Architecture andLandscape Architecture and immediate past-director of theuniversity’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability. He isan honorary member of the Architectural Institute of BritishColumbia and a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute ofCanada. He has won considerable recognition and numerousacademic and professional distinctions for his teaching and researchactivities, including awards from the North American Association ofCollegiate Schools of Architecture, US Green Building Council,Canada Green Building Council and World Green Building Council.

Mariana CorreiaHolds a doctorate in heritage conservation from Oxford BrookesUniversity, a diploma in earthen architecture from CRAterre-ENSAG,France, and master’s degree in architecture from the ArchitectureFaculty of the University of Lisbon (FAUTL). She is president ofEscola Superior Gallaecia, Portugal, director of Ci-ESG ResearchCenter, and project leader of FCT SEISMIC-V and the Europeanresearch projects VerSus and 3dPast. She is an ICOMOS internationalconsultant of world heritage sites. She is also a board member of theIberian and Latin American Proterra network; president of theSteering Committee of the Mali Earthen Architecture Center fromAga Khan Trust for Culture (2015–2020); Steering Committeemember of the program WHEAP-UNESCO (2012–2015); Peer Review

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282 s .m.a . r. t .

Committee member of the Seismic Retrofitting Project (SRP) fromGetty Conservation Institute (2013–2017); a member of the board oftrustees of the Portuguese Heritage Foundation Convento da Oradaand the Spanish Heritage Foundation Antonio Font de Bedoya; andcofounder of the Iberian Prize on Vernacular Architecture Research.

Albert CuchíWith a degree in architecture from the Escuela Técnica Superior deArquitectura in Barcelona, he is a tenured lecturer and researcher inthe Department of Architectural Constructions at the EscuelaTécnica Superior de Arquitectura del Vallès of the PolytechnicUniversity of Catalonia (UPC). His research focuses on the relationsbetween architecture and sustainability from the point of view bothof the development of a new vision in the architectural field and ofthe creation of tools that will allow this vision to be applied. Heunderstands sustainability as the need to close material cycles in thetechnical processes that satisfy human requirements, and theobjective of Cuchí’s work in this respect is the study of the processesthat determine inhabitability—the basic social purpose ofarchitecture—and its application to the various areas in which thearchitect makes decisions. Some of his most important works areParámetros de sostenibilidad (2003), Arquitectura i sostenibilitat(2005), Las claves de la sostenibilidad (2007), and the report Sobreuna estrategia del sector de la edificación frente al cambio climático.

Ahmed DjoghlafThe former executive secretary, until 2012, of the Convention onBiological Diversity within the framework of the United NationsEnvironment Programme (UNEP), he has played a major role inpromoting biodiversity at the top of the political agenda of the UnitedNations Organization. He was previously assistant executive directorof UNEP and director of the Global Environment Fund Division. Healso acted as cochair of the preparatory committee of the ParisConference, rapporteur general of the preparatory committee of theRio Conference on environement and developement, and viceprisident of the negociating committee of the desertificationconvention. He has studied at prestigious institutions such as theUniversity of Nancy in France, where he took his doctorate inpolitical sciences; St. John’s University in New York, where he earneda master’s degree in political and information sciences; and theUniversity of Algiers, where he obtained his bachelor’s degree in law.He is currently an adviser to the World Future Council, anorganization formed by personalities of recognized ethical staturethat represents the interests of future generations by placing them atthe center of political decisions. He is the founder and honorarypresident of the Friends of the Green Wave, an educational campaignthat seeks to engage youth and children.

Suzanne GoldenbergA former correspondent on environmental topics in the United Statesfor The Guardian, she spent years as a reporter in areas of conflict,earning several prizes for her work in the Middle East. She has alsoreported from the most remote places in India and Pakistan,including the world’s highest battlefield, the Siachen Glacier. In 2003she covered the American invasion of Iraq from Baghdad. She is theauthor of Madam President, which deals with the historic career ofHillary Clinton and her attempt to reach the White House.

Rodney GrahamAfter studying history of art, anthropology and French and Englishliterature, he developed his artistic abilities in the fields of film,music, photography, video and literature. Together with Ken Lum,Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace, he is a member of the Vancouver School ofconceptual artists. His works are found in the collections of theNational Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario and theVancouver Art Gallery. He has had exhibitions at the MACBA inBarcelona, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, theWhitechapel Art Gallery in London, the Hamburger Bahnhof in

Berlin, and the Kunsthalle in Vienna. He has also taken part in theSydney and Lyon Biennials, the Whitney Biennial in New York, andthe 47th Venice Biennial, where he represented Canada.

Marek HarsdorffAn economist specialized in development cooperation and theenvironment. With an in-depth knowledge of the economicdynamics between employment and environmental policies,Harsdorff argues linking social, economic and environmentalresearch to effective policy-making with the view of attainingmutually supportive solutions for sustainable development ratherthan conflicting ones. He currently works as an economist andpolicy advisor at the International Labour Organization’s Green JobsProgramme, active in more than thirty countries to ecologize theireconomies through job-led green growth strategies. He is providingpolicy advice and directing technical cooperation programs for thecreation of green jobs.

Naoya HatakeyamaThe Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakayema studied at KiyojiOtsuji and finished his training at the University of Tsukuba. Sincethen he has lived in Tokyo, a city that has provided the model andinspiration for his work, which focuses on the relationship betweennature and the city. Hatakeyama’s photographs are found in thecollections of the National Museum of Modern Art in Osaka, NationalMuseum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Metropolitan Museum ofPhotography in Tokyo, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, YaleUniversity Art Gallery, Swiss Foundation for Photography, MaisonEuropéenne de la Photographie in Paris, and the Victoria & AlbertMuseum in London.

Arab HoballahFrom January 2015 to the end of 2016 Arab Hoballah was the directorof Sustainable Lifestyles, Cities and Industry for the United NationsEnvironment Programme (UNEP). He has also been the director ofSustainable Production and Consumption since 2005, havingpreviously occupied important positions for more than fourteenyears in the Mediterranean Action Plan, all within the UNEPprogram. He has launched and supervised a number of initiatives andjoint partnerships in the fields of construction, cities and tourism. Hehas been actively involved in the preparations for the United NationsConference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20 aswell as the Habitat III Summit.

Daniel InnerarityA tenured lecturer of political and social philosophy, IkerbasqueResearcher at the University of the Basque Country, and director ofthe Institute for Democratic Governance, he has also been a guestlecturer at various universities, including recent spells at the RobertSchuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European Institute inFlorence, Georgetown University and the London School ofEconomics. He is director of associated studies for the FondationMaison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. His latest books include La política en tiempos de indignación, La democracia del conocimiento,(winner of the 2012 Euskadi Prize for essays), La humanidadamenazada: gobernar los riesgos globales (with Javier Solana), Lasociedad invisible (winner of the 2004 Espasa Prize for essays), andLa transformación de la política (winner of the 2003 NationalLiterature Prize, essay section). He contributes regularly to El País,El Correo, Diario Vasco and Claves de razón práctica. In 2013 he wasawarded the Príncipe de Viana Prize for Culture by the RegionalGovernment of Navarre. The French magazine Le Nouvel Observateurincluded him on a list of the world’s twenty-five great thinkers.

Domingo Jiménez BeltránThe former Environment and Public Works counselor on the SpanishPermanent Representation to the European Union, he then took overas head of the Division of Health, Safety and Quality of the European


Commission. Until 2002 he was the first executive director of theEuropean Environment Agency based in Copenhagen, and he hasheld many important positions in both the European Commissionand the Spanish government. An industrial engineer by training, heacted in an advisory role for the president’s Economic Office and asdirector of the Sustainability Observatory in Spain before throwing inhis lot with clean energies as the head of the Fundación Renovables,an organization devoted to accelerating change in the energy model.He is currently the chairman of the Fundación Desarrollo Sostenibleand the Institute for European Environmental Policy in London. Hehas been the recipient of many awards, among them the 2007National Environment Prize.

Yolanda KakabadseThis Ecuadorean conservationist of Georgian extraction first becameinterested in environmental matters after finishing her studies ineducational psychology at the University of Quito. In that city, shewas one of the promoters of the Fundación Natura, an organization inwhich she acted as executive director from 1979 to 1990. At the RioEarth Summit, she provided liaison with nongovernmentalorganizations. She was the driving force behind the creation in 1993of the Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano, chairing the organizationuntil 2006. Afterwards she also had spells as the president of theWorld Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union forConservation of Nature (IUCN). Kakabadse is moreover a boardmember of the Ford Foundation and the Holcim Foundation forSustainable Construction, as well as a member of the InternationalEarth Charter Commission.

Aisa Kirabo KacyiraDeputy executive director and assistant secretary-general of UN-Habitat providing critical leadership to promote sustainable citiesand human settlements globally. Previously, Dr. Kacyira held variousgovernment positions including governor of the Eastern Province ofRwanda, mayor of Kigali and an elected member of parliament. Dr.Kacyira is also a former president of the Rwanda Association of LocalGovernment Authorities, former president of the Eastern AfricanAssociation of Local Government Authorities, and former vicepresident of the United Cities and Local Governments of Africa.

Víctor LapuenteHolds a doctorate in political science from Oxford University andthe Instituto Juan March, and a master’s degree in publicadministration from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, theUniversitat Pompeu Fabra and ESADE. This lecturer and researcherspecializes in the comparative analysis of public policies, thefunctioning of state administrations, and the causes andconsequences of corruption. He currently works with the Quality ofGovernment Institute at the University of Gothenburg. He is amember of the Piedras de Papel group (eldiario.es) and contributesregularly to El País and other media.

Sze Tsung Nicolás LeongAn Anglo-American photographer, he was born in 1970 in MexicoCity, where he spent part of his childhood. He studied at the ArtCentre College of Design in London, the University of California,Berkeley, and the University of Harvard. Some of his pieces form partof the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,MoMA, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. His work has beenexhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Monterrey,Mexico, in collective shows at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundationin Lisbon, at the 2006 Havana Biennial, at the High Museum of Art,and at the 2004 Taipei Biennial.

Todd LitmanFounder and executive director of the Victoria Transport PolicyInstitute, an independent research organization located in Victoria(Canada) that seeks to improve transport planning and policy by

means of innovative and practical solutions, such as improvingresource-efficient alternatives to private car travel, and moreaccessible community design. Litman has worked on numerousstudies evaluating transportation costs, profits and innovations. Heauthored the Online TDM (Transport Demand Management)Encyclopedia, and numerous other publications concerningtransportation innovations. He is a regular speaker at symposia onthese subjects all over the world.

Joan MacDonaldA Chilean architect, she specializes in urban and housing policies.She was undersecretary of Housing and Urban Planning of theRepublic of Chile. MacDonald proposes redefining the profession ofthe architect, whose clients, she maintains, should be the thousandmillion people in the developing countries who need housingsolutions. She has carried out numerous research projects andconsultancies for organizations and institutions such as UNESCOand the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean,and she has published approximately thirty books and articles. Heracademic record and outstanding humanistic career as an architecthave earned her two National Prizes from the College of Architectsand University of the Republic of Chile respectively.

Eduardo Martínez de PisónEmeritus professor of geography at the Autonomous University ofMadrid, winner of the National Environment Prize, and author ofmore than 550 publications, he is the director of the LandscapeInstitute of the Fundación Duques de Soria, and has taken part ingeographical expeditions to the North Pole, Alaska, Siberia, the Gobiand Taklamakan Deserts, the mountains of Central Asia, the SilkRoute, the Himalayas and Tibet. He has been a member of theSpanish UNESCO MaB committee and a correspondent for theWorld Glacier Monitoring System. He is a trustee of Ordesa andMonte Perdido National Park, Sierra de Guadarrama National Park,and Teide National Park.

Steve McCurryA famous American photojournalist known especially for the “AfghanGirl” photograph that appeared in National Geographic in 1985. Hebegan film studies at Pennsylvania State University, but finally earnedhis diploma in performing arts. His interest in photography was theresult of his collaboration with the university newspaper, The DailyCollegian. He later devoted himself to photojournalism, starting hiscareer with the war in Afghanistan. He subsequently continuedcovering international conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war, thestrife in Beirut, Cambodia and the Philippines, the Gulf War andAfghanistan. His work has been published in journals around theworld. He contributes to National Geographic and is a member of theMagnum agency.

James MollisonA Kenyan photographer raised in England, where he studied art anddesign at Oxford Brookes University, and afterwards film andphotography at the Newport School of Art and Design. He moved toItaly to work for Benetton, and since 2011 has been the creative editorof the brand’s magazine, Colors. His work has been published in manyprestigious journals, including Colors, The New York Times Magazine,The Guardian Magazine, The Paris Review, GQ, New York Magazineand Le Monde.

María NovoA doctor in philosophy and education sciences and holder of theUNESCO Chair in Environmental Education and SustainableDevelopment, she has been teaching and researching for thirty yearsin the field of environmental education, the environment andsustainable development. She is a member of the board of directors ofthe Spanish Chapter of the Club of Rome, director of the Ecoarteproject for the integration of science and art in the treatment of

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environmental matters and president of the Asociación Slow People.She is also the author of twenty-six books, including treatises andessays, poetry and fiction, and she has been awarded theinternational N’aitum Prize for her professional career.

Firdaous OussidhoumA Moroccan architect and urbanist, and a lecturer of philosophy of architecture, a discipline that allows her to study humandevelopment through sustainability and culture. She is a member of the UNESCO Chair in Intermediary Cities: Urbanization andDevelopment, and the secretary general of the Global Forum ofIntermediary Cities of the United Cities and Local Governments(UCLG) corporation. She has been a member of the InternationalUnion of Architects and is the director of international relations ofthe African Union of Architects, whose objective is to build bridgeswith national and international institutions in a new South–South and North–South dialogue that would lead to sustainability. As such, she is currently assisting mayors and institutions in sustainabledevelopment strategies.

Teresa RiberaThe director of the Institute for Sustainable Development andInternational Relations (IDDRI) in Paris, an institution for which shewas previously an international adviser on climate policy. From 2008to 2011 she was the Spanish government’s secretary of state forClimate Change, with responsibilities for environmental and climatepolicies in conjunction with the State Meteorological Agency. Shebelongs to the State Civil Administrations Corp. She has also been alecturer at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She frequentlycollaborates with various think tanks and nonprofit organizations, aswell as with various international institutions. She is a member of theboard of the Stockholm Environment Institute, the Institut pour laRecherche du Développement, and the Leadership Council of theUnited National Sustainable Development Solutions Network(UNSDSN), of whose Spanish chapter she is copresident. She chairsthe Advisory Council of the Momentum for Change initiative withinthe United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Jeffrey D. SachsAn American economist specializing in sustainable development,he is an adviser on sustainable development to internationalorganizations and governments, and until 2016 was the director ofthe Earth Institute at the University of Columbia. A professor ofeconomics at Harvard from 1980 to 2005, he was the director of theUnited Nations Millennium Project and advised Ban Ki-Moon duringthe drawing up of the Millennium Development Goals. His nameappeared on Time magazine’s list of the world’s hundred mostinfluential people. The New York Times called him “the world’s mostimportant economist,” and Le Nouvel Observateur cited him as “oneof the fifty most important leaders of globalization.” His outstandingpublications include The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth:Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), The Price of Civilization(2011), To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (2013), and The Ageof Sustainable Development (2015). He also contributes to majornewspapers and journals, including The New York Times, London’sFinancial Times and The Economist.

Sven TeskeThe research principal of the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF)at the University of Technology Sidney (UTS), he has published morethan fifty special reports on renewable energy systems and theirintegration in the market, including the Global Energy Revolutionscenario series and the market perspectives for Global Wind Power"Global Wind Energy Outlook". He also was a lead author for thespecial report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) on renewable energies, published in 2011, and he is a memberof the group of consultants to the Japanese Renewable EnergyInstitute. Teske has also been on the reviewer for the International

Energy Agency's annual report on the World Energy Outlook (WEO),and moreover has experience in practical small-scale developments.In 1999, he founded the first power utility organised as a cooperativein Germany’s electricity market. For ten years he was the director ofRenewable Energies for Greenpeace, leading five editions of theproject Energy [r]evolution: A World Sustainable Energy Outlook, withjoint research by the German Aerospace Center, the Global WindEnergy Council, and various nonprofit organizations.

Mary Evelyn TuckerSenior lecturer and researcher at Yale University. Together with herhusband, Professor John Grim, she is the codirector and cofounder ofthat university’s Forum on Religion and Ecology, and teaches on thejoint program of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studiesand the Divinity School in New Haven. She has written and publishednearly twenty volumes and hundreds of articles. A pioneer in the fieldof religion and ecology, her work has been distinguished with manyprestigious prizes for ecology. She was moreover a member of theinternational council for the United Nations Earth Charter.

Anne Whiston SpirnLandscape architect, photographer and academic, as well as theaward-winning author of books on landscaping, her work is devotedprimarily to the promotion of communities of sustainable life. Shestudied history of art at Harvard University, where she graduatedwith honors in 1969. In 1974 she took the master’s degree inlandscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and since1987 she has directed the West Philadelphia Landscape Project,devoted to the integration of landscaping, community developmentand urban rainwater management. Throughout her long career, Spirnhas received numerous scholarships and prestigious awards,including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the President’s Award ofExcellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects. Shewas a finalist in the 2002 National Design Award, and won theJapan's International Cosmos Prize in 2001 for her “contributions tothe harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind.” Since 2000 shehas taught landscape architecture and planning at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology (MIT).

284 s .m.a . r. t .


Edited byACCIONA

Produced byLa Fábrica

Project ManagerAntonio Lucio

Editorial CoordinatorMiriam Querol

Designgráfica futura

TranslatorPhilip Sutton

Copy EditorMontague Kobbe

PhotosettingLucam

PrintingBrizzolis

BindingRamos

The typefaces used in this book are Bliss and Mercury Text and it has been printed on Magno Vol paper gram 170.

Anne Whiston Spirn's essay “Landscape Literacy and Design for EcologicalDemocracy” is an abridged version of a chapter published in PragmaticSustainability (Routledge, 2016), which was a substantial revision of two priorpublications: “Restoring Mill Creek: Landscape Literacy, Environmental Justice,and City Planning and Design,” in Landscape Research (July 2005) and “RestoringMill Creek: Landscape Literacy, Environmental History, and City Planning andDesign,” in Nature's Entrepot (University of Pittsburgh, 2012).

Images

Horizons, pp. 38–53© Sze Tzung Nicolás Leong, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Playground, pp. 72–87© James Mollison

pp. 110-119© Boomon

Lime Hills, pp. 140–157© Naoya Hatakeyama

Darkened Cities, pp. 176–191© Thierry Cohen, courtesy Danziger Gallery, New York, and Esther Woerdehoff Gallery, Paris

Gateway to India, pp. 208–217© Steve McCurry / Magnum Photos / Contacto

Ice, pp. 238–249© Nick Cobbing

Trees, pp. 268–283© Rodney Graham

© this edition: ACCIONA, 2017

© texts: their authors

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be stored in aretrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronicor mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any informationstorage and retrieval system, distributed, publicly displayed ortransformed, without the written permission of the publishers, barexceptions stipulated by Spanish law. Should you wish to photocopy orscan any fragment of this work, go to CEDRO (Centro Español deDerechos Reprográficos, www.cedro.org).

ISBN: 978-84-17048-54-9Depósito Legal: M-30339-2017


s.m.a.r.t.

s.m.a.r.t.Paths to Sustainability

A Common Agenda at LastJeffrey Sachs / Teresa RiberaThe Social Dimension of SustainabilityJoan McDonald / Marek Harsdorff / Paolo BifaniHardware versus Software and MindwareTodd Litman / Albert CuchíWater, Renewable Energy and InfrastructuresYolanda Kakabadse / Sven Tesk / Anne Whiston Spirn / Ahmed Djoghlaf Dialogue between Generations and GenderAisa Kirabo Kacyira / Siddharth Agarwal / Mariana CorreiaHow We Finance the TransitionMike Berners-Lee / Arab Hoballah / Raymond J. ColeDifferent Visions. One Planet, One CityMary Evelyn Tucker / Víctor Lapuente / Firdaous OussidhoumThe Challenge of TransversalityDaniel Innerarity / Domingo Jiménez Beltrán / Michael BattyCommunication for ChangeSuzanne Goldenberg / Eduardo Martínez de Pisón / María Novo

PortfoliosTze Tsung Nicolás Leong / James Mollison / BoomoonNaoya Hatakeyama / Thierry Cohen Steve McCurry / Nick Cobbing / Rodney Graham
