Americas Quarterly

reducing the spatial privileges of class, and on a far healthier relationship to the natural environment. Until now, such planning has too often been the victim of the fragmented and dysfunctional politics of our undisciplined, overweight cities.

Studies by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that a primary villain is urban sprawl and its enabler, the automobile. Their collusion is characterized by rampant suburbanism and by low-density patterns of land use that make mass transit both economically and logistically impossible. And because we walk less, we are less healthy. But this is not simply a function of urban form. Obesity is disproportionately a disease of the poor in the U.S.—a paradox that arises directly from the dominance of an industrialized fast-food system that offers the most degraded form of nutrition at low prices, laced with corn sugar to seduce, and supersized to suggest value.

Michael Sorkin is the principal of the Michael Sorkin Studio, president of the nonprofit Terre-form and Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. His most recent book is Twenty Minutes in Manhattan.

The growing unhealthiness of urban lifestyles is a global problem. The world’s urban population is growing at the rate of one million people a week and half of this growth is concentrated in slums, where the lack of access to transportation, goods and services, a proper diet and adequate living space has aggravated existing health problems—even as it ironically gives slums a lower ecological footprint. These inequities within cities are often ignored in the debate over carbon caps—with its clash bet ween exponents of calculation by absolute emissions (where China leads) and per capita emissions (where the U.S. is champ). But an urban-oriented approach to environmental change must be aimed at achieving greater parity at the individual level. This will mean a kind of conceptual capping and trading in which hyper-consumers will ultimately be obliged, in effect, to switch some of their “credits” to the poor, even as the aggregate is driven down.

Such a convergence can only take place by redeveloping cities with a view to reducing their impact on the environment, which means a global rethinking of what a good city should be. One of the most popular initiatives enacted by President Barack Obama’s administration has been the “cash for clunkers” program, offering incentives to car owners to trade up from their old gas-guzzlers to more fuel-