Global Culture

Fifty years ago the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a small conference on urban design at the University of Pennsylvania sparked a revolution in urban planning and changed the face of our cities. Yet somehow I doubt that newsboys were screaming that post headline from street-corners the next day. It took time for the lessons of the conference to be digested, disseminated and for a young woman who certainly wasn’t the star of that conference to put it all together over the next few years

That young woman was Jane Jacobs, and the book in question “The Death and Life of Great American Cities“.

This past week the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored the follow up: Re-imagining Cities, Urban Design After the Age of Oil. Maybe the sudden drop in the price of oil over the last few days dissipated the sense of urgency that the organizers of the conference had hoped for, but as Lloyd Alter reports the conference was a sequel to the various debates about climate change that have taken place in other forums over the last few years. Very little was done to propose solutions. It would seem that the average citizen was far more inventive when thinking about the proposed scenario as judged by the success of the game “World Without Oil“.

Cities designed with mass public transportation and without highways, with plenty of pedestrian and light vehicles lanes. Perhaps with their own sources of food to reduce dependency from other regions and an insatiable ambition to manufacture locally, from available resources. Connected to other cities in more than one way: through high-speed railways powered by clean energy to enable exchange of services and the few goods that are not produced locally; and fully networked with cities in other hemispheres that can assume critical services and processes as people discover new leisure activities in the dark hours of the day, without having the resort to light-up the entire city. Cities without oil may come at a great cost, but I find the idea inspiring.