Some mistakes are irreversible, and some are quite tame, all of them are opportunities to learn. We’ll see if city planners can learn from the mistakes of their forbearers. As virtually everyone is pushing for a transition to electric vehicles, it’s an opportunity to right the mistake of fossil fuels in cities.
We’re usually focused on positive solutions in this space but this really excellent (if somewhat bleak) article by Lev Kushner and Greg Lindsay at Bloomberg’s CityLab is very much worth a read, as it exposes a glaring need for more pro-active and forward looking governance in cities.
We can apply regenerative philosophy to design and ask: how can we put life — human life, the planet, and everything it sustains — at the centre of everything we do?
Although this visualization of the accumulation of human-made mass on Earth is not specifically related to cities, one has to recognize that the 549 gigatons of concrete, 65 gigatons of asphalt, the 92 gigatons of bricks, and the 386 gigatons of aggregates are evidently concentrated in large part in cities.
Provenance is quite an interesting organization, they want to help companies to track the provenance of their products and their impact. They recently released an excellent initiative, the open-source Provenance Framework, which is “is made up of 50+ shopper-facing claims spanning 5 focus areas: climate, communities, nature, waste and workers”.
