A Random Man on Planet Earth: Some more lectures from MIT: Making cities sustainable

Sustaining Cities: Environment, Economic Development, and Empowerment

I have just finished listening to the first video. It has five different presenters (each speaks for about 10 mins) and they are all worth a listen.

The first presenter is Judith Layzer who argues for “strong sustainability” rather than the current weaker approach. Strong sustainability “entails living within the productive capacity of nature…meeting the needs of the current generation as opposed to their demands.”

The second presenter is Jason Corburn who describes an environmental justice framework that connects ecological, economic and social justice issues, especially in urban settings. Corburn discusses the links between environmental justice and the need for health equity across all of society. He uses health impact assessment measures to examine the inequity between poor and wealthy areas and suggests there is a need to build a new evidence based multidisciplinary environmental justice set of policies to foster equality in health and the environment people live in (e.g. the poor seem be exposed to more industrial pollutants and have shorter lifespans and more illness and disease than those living in wealthier areas).

The third presenter is Phillip Thompson (starts 23 minutes - ends 38 minutes). This is definitely the highlight of the video. He is a great speaker and makes some very good points about the environmental movement and environmental justice. He starts by explaining why he used to hate environmentalists and goes from there. Well worth a listen !!!

The fourth presenter is Chris Zegras who believes the answer to sustainability is access to opportunities that enable sustainable development.

Zegras says it’s hard to argue the importance of climate change to someone “who travels 3 ½ hours a day on a bus to get to a job, and half the salary is eaten up by the bus ride.” First, we must alleviate fundamental issues of accessibility for the poor: their lack of affordable transportation and proximity to schools and jobs.

The last presenter is Adil Najam who asks us to imagine that the Earth as if it were one country - what would we see? He suggests "you’d have to conclude it is poor, extremely divided, degraded, poorly governed and unsafe – a Third-world country". He goes from the global scale to the local and vice versa to tie all these issues (e.g. environmental, equity, access, poverty, development, justice) together. He suggest we need to mitigate adapt or suffer and he suggests it is the world's poor that will suffer the most and be most unable to respond. Najam is a great speaker too, however the best part of his talk is when he discusses Al Gore's movie (An Inconvienient Truth). He says "go watch it again and count how many times he uses the word poor. Nada. Not a single time. And Count how many pandas you see and people. That is the only problem I see. To me it is a people problem".

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Building Responsive Cities: Technology, Design, and Development