After the crunch: more urbanisation or less?

by | Feb 18, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global Dashboard

As the credit crunch pronounces the last rites on the great debt-fuelled consumer boom, things look pretty grim for suburbia too. But if suburbia was the spatial expression of the consumer economy, then what does the economic geography of the future look like?

Two recent articles by two different authors exemplify a crucial intellectual fault line in assessing prospects for the world’s cities. Richard Florida argues in the new edition of the Atlantic that mega-cities are set to flourish as centres of post-material innovation and creativity.  James Howard Kunstler, on the other hand, argues that resource scarcity trends mean that we’re all heading for a much more localised world.

So who’s right – and why is it that despite largely overlapping analyses, the two authors reach such different conclusions? Find out after the jump…

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Risks and Resilience in the New Global Era – new journal article

by | Feb 17, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development, Global Dashboard, Global system

The latest edition of the journal Renewal takes as its theme the transformation of foreign policy, and David and I have an article in it on ‘risks and resilience in the new global era’.

Pause to reflect on the issues that have really defined politics since the turn of the millennium, and it’s soon clear that risk is the thread that runs through most if not all of them: terrorism, climate change, weapons of mass destruction, energy and resource scarcity, and most recently the credit crunch and the ensuing global economic downturn.

But have policymakers started to develop a political agenda that centres on resilience in the face of such risks? Not yet.

Our article sets out a typology of different types of risk and explores some of the ways that such risks can lead to breakdown, renewal or outright collapse in social, political, economic and ecological systems, before turning to a discussion of what a political agenda focused on resilience might look like.  Part of what makes resilience such a complex topic, we argue, is the profound questions that it raises about values and identity:

Resilience is fundamentally about integrity and the capacity to remain ‘whole’. It involves the ability to flex and to absorb threats, and to respond to them in a way that protects, reinterprets, and fulfils identity. It can be summed up as follows: has a threat diminished us, or are we rising as we respond to it?

Our conclusion:

In the end, resilience is about a politics that is ‘progressive’ in a pure sense. Rather than following the ideological imprint of a bygone age, we need to be prepared to take a broad view of the systems that we depend on – and re-order our priorities to ensure that every action we take helps strengthen and defend them. That takes courage, and a farsighted vision of the future. The question is not ‘what risks do we want to avoid?’ but ‘what do we want to be resilient for?’

Resilience – a case study

by | Feb 10, 2009 | Cooperation and coherence

60 Minutes had the first interview with the crew of the US Airways flight that crash landed in the Hudson over the weekend, including accounts of the crash from the pilot and from the entire crew.

Amanda Ripley has some good commentary over on her blog, noting how much of Sully’s account echoes themes set out in her book The Unthinkable, which was a book of the year for most of us at Global Dashboard.

As she observes, Sully’s first reaction was disbelief – “‘I can’t believe this is happening. This doesn’t happen to me.’… I had this expectation that my career would be one in which I wouldn’t crash an airplane.” – a classic reaction to disaster, and much more common than panic or hysteria. Ripley also quotes Sully’s description of the crew’s reaction to his announcement that the plane would be going down:

I made the brace for impact announcement in the cabin, and immediately, through the hardened cockpit door, I heard the flight attendants begin shouting their commands in response to my command to brace: heads down, stay down, I could hear them clearly and they were chanting it in unison over and over again to warn them, to instruct them, and I felt very comforted by that. I knew immediately that they were on the same page. That if I could land the airplane, that they could get them out safely.

That these commands were shouted was crucial to overcome the passengers’ own disbelief – as two of the cabin crew note, some of the passengers were looking out of the window rather than bracing, while others were making calls on their cellphones.

The whole thing’s worth watching – including 60 Minutes’ footage of the reunion between the crew and the passengers if you want to get all misted up.