“We’ve bumped up against the limits of their 20th century thinking.” | Nov 7th at 12:54pm
After the morning plenary, Dr. Judith Rodin spent a few minutes answering questions from a small group of journalists, where she told this story: Soon after becoming university president here at Penn, in 1994, she heard a visiting lecturer talk about this new idea of “globalization.” Then, it was something of significant concern not for America but for the rest of the world—a world soon to be awash in blue jeans and American movies. Her story was meant to illustrate the urgency and potency of Rockefeller’s overarching strategy of “Smart Globalization,” which weaves healthcare with climate change, agricultural technologies with urban planning (and this conference). But, coming off the morning plenary, it caught me at a weak moment, given the—to put it frankly—desperation of David Orr, Adil Najam, and Elizabeth Kolbert. (It’s terrifying to hear of ten-year mitigation plans launched five years ago.)
The scope of interconnectedness this presents is overwhelming—not least to the ways in which we talk about, and build, the city. It only emphasizes again the uncomfortable inadequacy of the past century’s urban planning toolbox. (Rodin, this morning: “Today we’ve bumped up against the limits of their 20th century thinking.”)
So if two hours ago I asked what we talk about when we talk about cities, the answer (so far) is: we talk about the world. Not merely to identify the specter of climate change, but to begin to recognize cities as global organisms. (And that is a shockingly different singular image than the Jacobsean one that dominates today.) In a room dominated by designers, planners, and urban thinkers, Najam asked,
“We’re going to spend the day as people who think about cities thinking about climate. But how do people who think about climate think about cities?”
Andrew Blum writes about architecture, urbanism and technology from Brooklyn, NY. A contributing editor at Metropolis and Wired magazines, his work can also be read at andrewblum.net.
