Climate change mitigation: Can American urban planning matter? (2007 ACSP)
The 2007 IPCC Working Group report confirms that mankind’s role in driving climate change is a significant, if unintended, consequence of technological advancement. Unfortunately, our socioeconomic fabric is knit from technologies the waste products of which include high concentrations of greenhouse gases that drive the warming of our climate. Not only is this relationship ultimately unsustainable, but it also raises the specter of unforeseeable, nonlinear climate catastrophe.
The icon of our social, technological, political, and developmental advancement – the modern city – is a crucible in which planners struggle to balance environmental sustainability, individual preference, and the public good. Urban planning-as-usual appears to present an insufficient response to a post-industrial, environmental threat that derives from the very source of our prosperity . However, migrating planning to a more sustainable footing may be more easily said than done.
At least in the short-term, numerous structural impediments militate against the capacity of contemporary urban planning theory and practice to constructively respond to these environmental risks: the global dominance of a growth-obsessed political economy, tradition-bound city and regional planning institutions, the increasing influence of property rights advocates in the national and local dialogs, and the continued decay of social capital. In order to realize a future in which American urban planning is an essential contributor to developing a truly sustainable urban future, it is critical that we confront these challenges and seek a new path.
Kent Hurst
