Improving the urban environment

Abstract

In the last decade, a world-wide concern about environmental pollution has spawned whole tribes of experts, and the UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in June 1972 was such a major verbal jamboree that many participants have perhaps not yet survived the deluge of papers produced. I particularly liked the succinct summary made by one of the journals that "the experts were agreed that they understood neither the magnitude of the solutions nor of the problems!" Notwithstanding all this, ecological deterioration is a serious matter, and particu- larly in terms of development planning, no planner or architect today should be unaware of the issues at stake. In June 1970 I chaired one of the sub-committees in a UN Symposium on "The Impact of Urbanisation on Man's Environment"; and in my sub-committee we arrived at resolutions pertaining to the mobilisation of available professional manpower "to combat, prevent and/or alleviate environmental deterioration, degradation and wastage of resources." We were then and are now still concerned about the acute shortage of responsible manpower that is needed for the develop- ment process in developing countries. The developing countries are hardly in a position to luxuriate in concepts of zero growth, or in excessive arguments about the pros and cons of conservation as against development. We need our full energies to evolve national programmes for planned economic growth and to implement viable examples of conducive development. We should naturally learn from the mistakes of ecologically disruptive development in other parts of the world.