Sustainable Urban Planning

Issues of market failure are often expressed in environmental

terms, but these are only the symptoms– environmental pollution,

resource depletion – rather than the causes.These arise from the

growth-on-growth mantra, now aided by fast and volatile stock

option profiteering and a pernicious free-raider resource exploita-

tion which rejects environmental constraint. Of all the species

established on earth Homo sapiensis the most exploitative of its

habitat, the most mindful of its destructiveness, yet the least effec-

tive at correcting its mistakes. And of course the human species

is uncertain about the longer-term future for a global habitat

punctured with ozone holes, melting ice caps, fresh water scarcity

and the enduring retention and build-up of toxins. It is an irony

that for wealthy and informed settler societies, and also for the

stable and well-educated Old World enclaves, there is no problem of human over-

population – which remains a Third World complexity – yet there is an acute

awareness of dangers to the global habitat, most specifically as a consequence of

toxin accumulations and nuclear stockpiles, along with global atmospheric

warming.

Any modestly sized open economy in supposed fiscal control of

its own destiny can find itself the subject of a stealthy buy-out

raid or sell-out scam initiated by cash-loaded corporations and

interlopers intent on asset-stripping and liquidation. Small

nations and weaker states within large nations, striving to run

open fiscal systems, induce an adverse knock-on effect, opening

up their resource base to speculative exploitation. For all that the

IMF and the WTO have willed fiscal openness and free trade, they

never condoned its consequence, the predation to which turbo-

capitalism has given birth – the skimming, trimming, gleaning,

extractive raider processes visited upon the smaller, the weaker

and the vulnerable.

One consequence is that a million or so multi-millionaires

have emerged from cyberspace over the last two decades, in pros-

perous and poor nations alike. This is not just a ‘that’s how the

cookie crumbled’ scenario; it is more akin to the horror of giving

a toddler matches in a fireworks factory. And when those

quicksilver multi-millionaires and billionaires divert attention

from the pursuit of gains, and direct their fiscal tsunami at real

property, this happens in a way which hurts settler societies

in their middle and poor sectors first and worst, with property

inflation, resource depletions, consumer discards, socio-economic

dysfunction, and habitat degradation, reversing the very

determinants of balanced growth – property security, fiscal

stability, contract validity.

So much for the global problematic, which can be largely laid at the door of the

G7, IMF and WTO – whose almost impossible challenge, and one they have never

270 Practice

‘If current predictions of

population growth prove

accurate and patterns of

human activity on the

planet remain unchanged,

science and technology

may not be able to

prevent either

irreversible degradation

of the environment or

continued poverty.’

Joint Statement,National

Academy of Scienceand

The Royal Society,

27 February 1992

The number of

millionaires in the world

grew, by the year 2001,

to 7.1 million.

Cap Gemini, Ernst Young,

Merrill Lynch.

As at 2002 the per capita

global array of incomes

for nation states, varies

from a dollar-a-day on

average as the lowest, to

$112-dollars-a-day the

highest.

• In terms of morality,
  people can be
  educated to live
  lightly on their home-
  scape.


• In terms of behaviour,
  individuals can be
  taught to correct
  unsociable actions.


• In terms of business,
  profits can be made
  from ecologically
  benign manufacturing
  processes.