Articulos
Urbaneering utopia, a new profession for the design of cities Who is the primary authority in the making of Utopia or any extraordinary future city? Urbaneering is a burgeoning discipline based on urban design that can negotiate the complex mix of technology, theory and practice that embraces the re-invention of the city to exceed the […]
Humanity is facing major global challenges that are transnational in nature and transinstitutional in solution. This essay confronts fifteen of the biggest issues, including how to achieve sustainable development, guarantee access to clean drinking water, foster ethical market economies and fight new as well as re-emerging diseases. While the panorama may appear pessimistic, humanity is winning more than losing – even if where we are losing is very serious. But these challenges cannot be addressed by any single government or institution acting alone. They require collaborative actions among governments, international organizations, universities, NGOs and creative individual. We need a serious focus on green growth, falling water tables, rising food/water/energy prices, population growth, resource depletion, climte change, terrorism, and changing disease patterns, otherwise the results may well be catastrophic.
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A sustainable future requires pushing beyond the mainstream solutions of better technology and policy to new values and institutions. The search for sustainability has become no less than the search for a resilient and decent civilization. We explore alternative scenarios to illuminate the challenge and guide our path. The incremental adjustments of Conventional Worlds futures risk drifting towards the calamity of Barbarization. By contrast, Great Transitions envisions the emergence of mindsets and practices consonant with an interdependent and vulnerable world. In these scenarios an ascendant ethos – human solidarity, quality–of-life, and identification with the natural world – displaces the conventional triad of individualism, materialism and the domination of nature. Each developing value corresponds to a domain of strategic action: nurturing global citizenship, cultivating more fulfilling lifestyles, and redesigning governance and economic institutions. With the principal social actors now on the world stage unlikely to spearhead such as transition, attention must turn to the critical change agent now gestating: a global citizens movement expressing the promise of a more harmonious and sustainable civilization. Giving it life has become an urgent frontline project on the path to sustainability. […]
At the start of the 20th Century there were some 1.5 billion humans on the planet. Before the current century is out that figure will rise to more than 10 billion. In just over 200 years the global population will have multiplied by 7. Never has such fast population growth been seen before and it will have dramatic consequences, including posing a genuine threat to the survival of the human species. The demographic process that humanity is now undergoing is very different from any seen in the past, even in the 20th Century. The main challenges posed by the end of demographic transition include a lack of resources to provide for the entire global population, the effects of climate change, contamination and population ageing. Each region faces a distinct future based on levels of economic development, demographics and geography.
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Starting a company in China is much more expensive than Zimbabwe or Afghanistan. Daniel Altman, Professor of Economy at New York University, uses this fact to answer a question: Will China be the world’s biggest economy in a few years? Altman analyzes China’s potential, as well as its shortcomings and special characteristics, for example, the interesting fact that confucianism is still the main influence on business in Communist China. […]
Hans Morgenthau once wrote that: “ International relations is something not to be taken for granted, but something to be understood and to be changed and, more particularly, to be changed beyond the present limits of its political structure and organization. Here lies indeed the ultimate theoretical and practical justification for our interest in a […]
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world is confronted with a kind of a cooperation paradox. It is popularly believed that cooperation is something in which individual and collective actors pursuing common goals engage, while actors who have differing world views and pursue conflicting objectives are disinclined to cooperate. Until 1990, during the […]
Towards the end of 2012, the economic growth rates of China and India are falling sharply; the growth of the United States and Japan is anemic; the EU is on the edge of a recession. While the Arab Awakening is considered mainly a call for democratization, most citizens of the nations involved are keen to […]
Introduction Education today in most of the world is more suited to the nineteenth-century industrial era than it is to the twenty-first century. There are three key aspects to this insight. Firstly, knowledge is evolving. The fragmentation of knowledge through specialization is widely regarded as being unsuited to the complexity of the twenty-first century by […]
In my line of work it is well known that the future is not just somewhere you go: you create it. This means that governments, companies and individuals play an active part in determining the direction of society, through their actions and choices. Yet there is no doubt that today we face a particularly tough […]