We talk about urban planning in class as something thought of in post-production terms; things we have to add onto/ into our city. But this article pointed out that my view of it has been completely flawed. As the abstract spells out, resource management and urban planning have literally gone hand in hand with each other since the beginning of time. The human race wouldn’t have gotten so far if they hadn’t followed their intuition/logic to see how important it was to manage their resources to the benefit them. In modern society now, we’re trying to manage them to benefit both us and the environment.
As Samin points out in his response, the article focuses on how cities can use their limited resources and make them last longer. Why have our resources been depleted so quickly? The authors list industrialism, rapid growth of the world population, urbanization and technological development to be the leading factors. These are things that we can also view as progress for the human race; it’s a double-edged blade. These are also things we can’t really do much about. We talked about dissuading people from having ton of kids, but we can’t control them. It’d also be hard to stop technological progress and industrialization. That’s why we just have to run with it/ work with it. We don’t have the luxury of using up resources without consequences.
The article poses the question of what can be sustained and developed at the same time. The WCED defines sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. But this seems to be a hard balance to find. It’s what requires resource management to be so well thought out, testing all options, knowing the trade-offs. In the 1990s, SD became something linked to social and economic issues which was helpful for awareness and also for idea generation, but I don’t know if this is actually a good thing (draws us away from the main issue?). It would really suck if good ideas and plans were scrapped because of political red tape which seems to be everywhere.
