The World is a Third-World Country | Nov 7th at 10:41am
There is an incredible disconnect between urban policy and climate policy. Many people agree that there is a direct connection between the two—but we’re not there yet. Imagining the world as one country is an easy way to see how we’ve failed.
This is the hypothetical view of Adil Najam, of Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. “In some ways I don’t think you can understand the city if you’re too close too it,” he says at a morning plenary session of the Urban Design After Oil symposium at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s kind of like forests.”
If our world were actually one country, he says, it would be a very poor and troubled place. Income distribution would be incredibly out of whack, the overall state of our natural resources would be incredibly degraded, and there would be an extreme food distribution problem. Climate change would make the world dramatically insecure. The world would be like a third-world country.
And as we know, climate change policy in third world countries is hardly revolutionary. If anything, it is incredibly lacking. And if we are to look at this one-country world in the same light, our global climate change policy is similarly lacking—mainly because it doesn’t exist.
Another policy that doesn’t exist in this hypothetical one-country world is an urban development policy. David Orr of Oberlin College argues that we don’t even have an urban development policy for one of the actual countries in our world, the United States. Orr and Najam argued today that these are two areas that need broad-scale consideration in the frame of policy. But they are not separate worlds.
Najam asks “Can you have sustainable development without effective climate stabilization?” Simply stated, no. The relationship between urban planning and the effects of our urban areas on climate change are becoming incredibly clear to a wider range of professionals and laypeople. Building policies that address urban planning issues and climate change will need to happen soon, and ithese policies will have to be drafted together in a unified way. Maybe a good way to start that policymaking is by looking at the world as Najam’s single third-world country.
Nate Berg is the assistant editor of the urban planning news website Planetizen, where he reports, blogs and podcasts about urban planning issues. The topic areas he's most interested in right now are the environment, public space and event-based urbanism.
