Business and Cities Will Drive The Agenda

Blog

07 Sep 2007 – John Elkington

After my SlimCity session yesterday, I have been wondering whether I took a wrong turn in the 1970s? My postgraduate degree, at UCL, was in urban planning – and in 2007, the year that the human species becomes predominantly urban for the first time, cities are very much in the spotlight.

But over breakfast this morning with Peter Head of Arup, who are deeply involved in a number of major urban development projects in China, among them Dongtan, we concluded that business and cities are likely to become even more powerful salients of sustainability in the coming decades. Strikingly, on the hill across from the restaurant, there was a rather grisly geodesic red-and-white structure, rather like a massive football, but enough to remind us both of one of the towering figures in our space, Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was one of the great inspirations of my life – and I was lucky enough to have breakfast with him in Reykjavik in the late 1970s. Given that Peter says that the Chinese are awarding some extraordinarily ambitious urban projects these days, it would have been wonderful to see what ‘Bucky’ could have done here.