Adbusters.org – megacities or megaslums?

“But the reality is that the world’s megacities are becoming sprawling megaslums, with city authorities unable to keep up with their growth and increasing inequality.”

“Urban living depends on enormous resource consumption. Urban citizens use four times the energy that rural dwellers consume. The characteristic of a truly sustainable city is, first and foremost, that it powers itself entirely by means of renewable energy systems. In nature, waste materials are absorbed beneficially back into the local environment as nutrients. Cities don’t do that. They work by way of taking resources from one place and dumping them somewhere else causing damage to nature. We need to turn this linear process into a circular process instead.”

“…But life in the endless city would be psychologically intolerable without contact with nature, he says. The vast city disconnected from the natural world and impossible to leave becomes a vast prison with potentially terrible consequences for both human society and the planet itself.

“The key is the degree to which the cities of the future allow people to live high quality lives. Without access to green space sustainability is impossible. Life must include a connection to the natural environment,” he says.  

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The Endless City  by John Vidal is the Guardian’s environment editor.  

How do you see the ‘reality’ of the endless city? of our resource consumption? the future of cities? how to attain sustainability?

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Manuel Castells reading:

OWS and websites such as adbusters or communal social networking websites achieve the goal of collective discourse by the community. The reading did not list demands perhaps because it hopes to influence our everyday consciousness, heighten our sense of awareness.