| Sense in the City Issue 10, September,2006 Page 1 |
| Sense in the City Issue 10, September,2006 Page 1 |
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World Planners Take a Momentous Leap: Reinventing Planning September, 2006, © Marilyn Hamilton PhD CGA Planning professionals at the World Planners Congress took a momentous leap into the 21C, by reinventing planning in June 2006 at their Vancouver convention. The world's professional planning bodies collectively endorsed the Vancouver Declaration, committing planning professionals around the world to tackle the challenges of rapid urbanization. Simply looking at three major challenges addressed by the planners -- climate change, poverty and HIV-AIDS – we see that they are momentous in scope, interconnected in cause and only addressable with an integral whole systems approach. 1. Planners recognized their role in combating climate change (exacerbated by urban heat sinks) and avoiding risks posed by natural disasters. Stating that, "unless urban areas can be made more sustainable, and rural life more tolerable, the legacy of negative environmental and social costs will become irreversible" if current trends go unchecked. Combating climate change requires not only addressing the objective causes: the burning of more fossil fuel than the environment can recycle without building up levels of CO2 that accumulate in the atmosphere as greenhouse gas. Combating climate change requires engaging with the subjective reasons that people choose to engage in the harmful behaviour. When we scan the globe, we see that the reasons for behaviours stem from simple needs to survive (warmth and cooking fires) to complicated commercial endeavours (to supply the industrial complex) to complex research projects (to conquer outer space). It becomes apparent that planners will not be able to address climate change with a single argument, message or strategy. As Dennis Mileti made apparent with his new book “Disasters by Design”, planners need the perspectives of 30,000 feet and the innovative practices from a whole new paradigm of capacity, capability and delivery that are as appropriate for emergency response as they are for everyday living. David Johnston, of “What’s Working” advocates that planners will need skills that combine complex technical capacity with sophisticated (Spiral Dynamics Integral) communications competency. 2. Planners committed to address the urbanization of poverty -- it is estimated by 2020, that 50% of the world's urban population will live in poverty. As the world’s population continues to urbanize, planners may find the very name of their profession to be an oxymoron. Urbanization is a paradox where even the definition of “urban” varies from country to country – some defining it by population size, others by infrastructure build-out, others by space covered. How can the profession “plan” when the objectives and criteria have no standards? It is estimated, before 2020, that planners need to respond to and/or plan for the equivalent of seven new mega-cities (total additional urban population of 70 million people) whose residents will be largely poor. They will need to understand why people prefer the life conditions of poverty in the city, over life conditions of poverty in rural settings. Planners will have to consider how to address and engage human consciousness, capabilities and capacities to aid them in their momentous planning tasks. Only by taking an intersubjective (eg. our beliefs about happiness, consumerism, relationships) as well as interobjective approach (eg. shelter, food, water, waste , economic systems) to poverty, will planners be able to design complex approaches sufficient to meet the multiple habitats, climates and cultures on earth. Moreover, in addressing the needs of poverty and creating new mega-cities, planners will need to recognize the interconnection of new cities that contribute to global warming. Whole new technologies and design principles will need to be discovered to make the old unworkable solutions obsolete (thank you Buckminster Fuller). The whole profession of planning will need to learn quickly, share widely and develop a broad spectrum of complex adaptive responses in order to avoid the pitfalls described by Jared Diamond (“Collapse”) and Ronald Wright (“A Short History of Progress”). By taking a complex adaptive approach to their work, planners will have a framework that allows them to “Plan for the Unplanned” (Inam) as a way of life. 3. The third issue identified at the Congress, corroborated the vital role that planners will need to play in the human health issue of HIV-AIDS. In achieving global sustainability, Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV-AIDS in Africa, reminded planners they have important ethical contributions to make in alleviating the social, economic and ecological imbalances rapidly resulting from the AIDS pandemic. Planners, whose roles have been traditionally answerable to political mandates, must vigorously counteract political erosion of systematic and systemic policies and action. This new role for planners will no doubt cause considerable discomfort to those whose professional training has relied more on technical and structural design, rather than knowledge of human subjective and intersubjective systems (ie. how people think; how we develop relationships; the power of culture). Lewis knows well that it is human values, beliefs and worldviews that underlie the global attitude and strategies to address HIV-AIDS. Once again, with this issue, planners are being asked to step outside the comfort zone of tradition, training and practice. Like the interconnection of poverty and climate change, the issue of HIV-AIDS is intimately and intricately linked to poverty (the poorest nations of the world have the highest rates; and with globalization (the rest of the world’s is inevitably threatened directly and indirectly). Also HIV-AIDS is affected by climate change as many of the countries most threatened by rising sea levels, drought and/or severe weather are the same countries where the incidence of the disease is highest.
Thus,
planners cannot address one of these three issues, without
facing the challenges of the others. Planners will need
leadership, capacity development and a community of practice
to provide support for such a major and vital shift in
professional paradigm. For Integral information and action: AQAL - Link to Flex and Flo for Personal Actions on Climate Change. UL/LL - Click here to read a draft of The Vancouver Declaration. UL - Go see the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” about climate change. LL/LR - Read “Collapse” by Jared Diamond. LL/LR - Read "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright LL/LR - Read “Planning for the Unplanned” by Aseem Inam. LR - Read “Disasters by Design” by Dennis Mileti. AQAL - Check out: www.whatsworking.com
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