Prof. Najam speaks on “Re-imagining Cities”
Prof. Adil Najam, Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and Prof. David Orr, the Paul Dears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College were the two featured panelists in the opening plenary, moderated by Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker, at a conference on Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil, held at the University of Pennsylvania on November 6-8, 2008.
The event marks the 50th Anniversary of the 1958 University of Pennsylvania/Rockefeller Foundation “Conference on Urban Design Criticism,” whose participants included Jane Jacobs, Louis Kahn, Kevin Lynch, Ian McHarg, Lewis Mumford, and I.M. Pei. That historic conference helped shape the new field of urban design in the 20th Century.
The conference brought together leading climate experts with leading thinkers on urban design to re-imagine the future of the city and how the urban landscape might respond to the new challenges posed by global climate change. In his remarks, the Pardee Center Director highlighted the importance of thinking about the poorest communities and countries as we think of the urban challenge. He presented the metaphor of the global as a “Third World Planet” an argued that we need to think of the cities not just as independent units but part of an interconnected global ecosystem – an ecosystem in which the poorest communities, many of which are urban communities, are also the most vulnerable and least resilient to global climate change.
Prof. Adil Najam also introduced some ideas from the recent Pardee Center paper on Transportation Challenges in Mega Cities, written by Pardee Center Research Fellow Nadaa Taiyab.
The conference was covered by a variety of journalists and bloggers, and particularly by live blogs from the Next American City magazine. See blog comments on Prof. Najam’s remarks here.