International Cooperation and Urban Planning

I am angry, resentful, irritated and most of all powerless.

It seems difficult to understand that climate change, energy efficiency and urban resilience are just the new slogans of the international cooperation. When talking about the urban future of the world, namely the urban poverty explosion in the south Sahara area, the international cooperation for urban planning suddenly fragments into the small issues, i.e. land use, housing, slums, energy, waste water treatment etc. Each of them represents a possible channel of cooperation areas, a branch of expertise, and a stakeholder at the local level. Urban development and planning can be frightening. It is a big issue mayors have to deal with. This is no surprise. However hardly ever are they planners or simply clever minds, with a development vision, which can perceive and know how to manage tools and methods to achieve urban development objectives for their cities.

Meanwhile I have 7,000 millions neighbours and the decision makers are not able to plan their lives, their productivities, their residencies, their services while climate change and the catastrophes which this entails will finally take over and the water supply and sanitation refrain will come back again depicting a middle age scenario.

In the meanwhile there is a growing capacity of young architects and engineers and more and more appropriate tools and methods are at hand to be used in urban planning.

Urban planning is definitely a complex discipline and more than one software needs to be used at the same time.Young architects and engineers can easily manage them giving them the right role and function: Excel to think, GIS to link, CAD to ink (because of better rendering quality) and SPSS to pink (gender issues could be easily analysed through cross tabulations).

Young architects and engineers can be frightening.They are the counter-power of the despotic mayors and decision makers with or without urban planning knowledge.

The latter instead makes us believe that urban development and planning is frightening because it is costly, because it is not a science and could be based on subjective perceptions and evaluations, because a few can do it and many cannot check it, because it consists of an explosive combination of power and savoir-faire.

If the first is true, all of them are debatable and could be subject to debate here, on this web page.

At the end of the day my anger, irritation and impotence are still there. All these bad feelings were collected in a fair conversation with a young colleague and resulted into a fake interview, here attached.