Thursday, October 14, 2010

...17 days left

EC+10: Urbanization Workshop

In 1900, 13% of the world’s population lived in cities. The majority was spread all over the countries, living mostly in villages and earning their every day-bread through agriculture.
But industrialisation and subsequent events changed that dramatically:
In 2030 – only 20 years from now - estimated 60% of the world’s population will live in cities.
Shocking numbers and you’ll find them everywhere (since the media is human-made and humans are sensation-seeking). Combined with articles about a continuously increasing number of homeless people in cities, labour market problems, city growth in an absolutely unbelievable speed, especially in so-called developing countries - the drawn picture of our urban life looks pretty depressing.
Urbanization….an often used term, which is mainly used to point out all the uncountable points where our living system lacks.
Most of the people actually DO recognize it and say to themselves: “Oh, there are so many problems, how terrible!”. But afterwards they simply continue in an business-as-usual-mentality. We don’t want to be like that; we want to find out whether there also is another side to it.

Is it possible to change our communities?
Does something like a sustainable community even exist?
How can we influence the process of urbanisation in a way, that the good sides overbalance?

The “Cities, Communities & Urbanisation“-Workshop deals exactly with this kind of questions – and will, hopefully, give you some positive examples of a more sustainable way of living communities.

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