Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-10-13-Speech-4-020"
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"en.20051013.3.4-020"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the urban dimension represents man’s way of life today and in the immediate future. Eighty per cent of the world’s population will be concentrated in densely urbanised areas of the planet, bringing us close to the
posited by the geographer Constantinos Doxiadis in the early 1970s.
Another geographer of international repute, Jean Gottmann, described the spread of another pattern of settlement and urban development – the megalopolis – as exemplified today by the urban sprawls on the Atlantic coast of the United States, and in Southern China and Japan.
The phenomenon of massive urban expansion is also underway on the coast of California, in India – between Delhi and Calcutta – as well as in Europe, along the Rhine axis of the Ruhr, which runs from Germany to the Netherlands, and in Italy’s industrial triangle of Milan-Genoa-Turin. I will stop there or the list of examples will grow too long.
These are huge demographic melting pots of often very different cultures and social groups. These highly artificial constructs suffer from constant energy and environmental imbalances, as well as worsening problems of communication, water supply, social tension and crime.
Unlike closed natural systems, these artificial ecosystems are configured as open systems. They should therefore try to sustain themselves by focusing on certain priorities: reduction of waste production and improved recycling of resources; and planning of efficient horizontal dimensions, which depend not only on what a city produces and how it produces it, but also on how a city interacts with other urban centres and surrounding suburban or rural areas.
Mr Beaupuy is surely right to highlight in his report the importance of urban partnership networks, at both interregional and cross-border levels. The dimensions of the problems encountered are spread over such a broad spatial area that it is only through an integrated approach to investment and administration – we might define it as the great urban basin – that we can hope effectively to tackle them. We need to find a way of making sure we do not move from the reality of a ‘megalopolis’ to the reality of a ‘necropolis’."@en1
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