Americas Quarterly

To pollute or not to pollute: A gas station in Brazil offers pumps providing gasoline or sugarcane-derived biodiesel.

vant to urban planners today are their boundedness, their autonomy and their “green-ness”—all qualities that need to be recovered if we are to produce cities that can be truly sustainable. The particularity of our new cities will come from a very careful focus on the political, cultural and natural features of locality. City planners and policymakers must begin to embrace the authentic elements of locality, as opposed to the current, widely followed model in which the paradigm is a sealed, uniform, 75-degree, “comfortable” environment every where and in which “local” means little more than a funny top on the same old skyscraper, and where McDonald’s is on every corner.

To make this local planning model a reality, cities must rely on resources that are produced nearby, not shipped at extravagant energy costs from afar. They must be acutely attentive to their climates and bioregions, developing patterns and habits that can be sustained, and they must build their identities out of local culture, memory, history, and relationships rather than a cookie-cutter Disney version of what modern cities are imagined to be. Contrary to the modernist fantasy of universal architecture (and subjects), our new cities will find fresh means to

58 Americas Quarterly FALL 2009

establish unanticipated differences: good cities must be places of diversity and surprise. In our Southern Hemisphere, this will surely entail a merger of the freedom and inventiveness of Latin American informality with the security and durability of more permanent structures.

Mega-cities like Mexico and São Paulo show that when cities grow beyond a certain scale they become dysfunctional, apraxic and lack coherency in their infrastructure. They are hostile to the direct communication necessary to authentic democracy. Governments, whose role is to ensure the fair distribution of access to resources and services, must take the lead in preventing such mega-sprawl. They are, in effect, obliged to protect the planet from urban obesity.

This will require establishing firm boundaries between urban centers and their surrounding regions. It will mean a dramatic ratcheting-up of local self-reliance and the introduction of a clear sense of limits to growth, consumption and waste. It requires that attention be paid to reinvigorating the power and vitality of neighborhoods. And, perhaps most important, it will mean that the internal development of cities must constantly tend to complexity, change and choice.