VISIONARIES - SUSTAINABLE CITIES
WEEK 4
PROGRAMME 1
I want to see, above all else, sustainable cities, which means environmentally sustainable and
socially sustainable. At the beginning of the twentieth century, we had fifteen percent of the
world population living in cities, and humanity as a whole was about one-point-five-billion
people. At the end of the twentieth century we have six-billion people of whom fifty percent
live in cities, so a fantastic increase in the number of people living in cities. That process is
certainly going to continue for the foreseeable future in the twenty-first century. It’s expected
that by the year 2050 something like two-thirds to three-quarters of what will then be
nine-billion people will be living in cities, so extraordinary numbers of people all depending
on resources from outside cities yet really not knowing very much about it. The critical issue
is for people to learn how cities can co-exist sustainably with the natural world, basically
saying, okay, whatever resources we draw into the city need to end up as wastes that are
recycled back into new production systems.
Typically on the continent of Europe now we are seeing waste recycling rates in many cities
reaching something like fifty percent or even higher, so it’s critically important for these types
of ideas to become mainstream and to be adopted world-wide. In addition, of course, and even
more importantly for the twenty-first century, we see the potential for using solar energy for
supplying electricity for our cities. This is already happening in a major way in parts of the
United States, Japan, in India as well. The potential is enormous. A city such as London, even
with its relatively cloudy skies, could be largely self-sufficient in electricity from its own
rooftops in the summer months.
I certainly see the fastest urbanising countries such as China taking seriously this issue of
sustainability. I was at a conference in Beijing a few months ago about something called the
Trans-Century Green Plan for China, which on the one hand envisages very rapid urban
growth; on the other hand, sees urban growth take place within the context of sustainable
development. For instance, Beijing as a city is surrounded by an area of farmland the size of
Belgium, which makes it largely self-sufficient in food from its own hinterland. The same
applies to other large China cities such as Shanghai. And we are certainly seeing this kind of
thing also happening in many other cities around the world. I was in Havana in Cuba recently
and saw an extraordinary development of thousands and thousands of acres within the city
being turned over to urban agriculture, with vegetable growing as well as orchards, for the
supply of organic food in fact to the population of that city.
We are also seeing it happen in Accra in Ghana, for instance. The same is true of Nairobi or
indeed Dar es Salaam. We are certainly, throughout Asia, seeing very energetic initiatives on
sustainable urban development, but simultaneously, the appearance of motorcars right, left
and centre, the use of electricity as never before. We are in a very schizophrenic situation at
the present time. We love the idea of sustainability, but in many ways we celebrate urban and
industrial growth.
The critical question in the future will be whether or not city people are prepared to face up to
the impacts that their lifestyles have. So it requires a major reorientation of our culture, of our
economies, of the systems of architectural design that we use, of the transport systems that we
take for granted, of the waste management systems. It’s a major task. I am optimistic when I
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see cities in a hundred years’ time that will have transformed themselves into exquisite places
of beauty and exquisite architecture of the kind that we’ve seen in the past. The critical
importance is to learn the best lessons of the past for the future of our cities.
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