Towards the Sustainable City

marialuisa palumbo - http://paesaggisensibili.wordpress.com/ - malupa@libero.it

1.The verge of collapse

2.Downsizing

3.Soil Sealing

In the European Union about 1,000 kmÇ were annually subject to land take for housing,industry, roads or recreational purposes between 1990 and 2006.This is exceeding the size of Berlin.About half of this surface is actually sealed by buildings, roads and parking lots.Soil sealing means covering of the soil by a completely or partly impermeable artificial material (asphalt, concrete, etc), causing an irreversible loss of soil and its biological functions and loss of biodiversity, either directly or indirectly, due to fragmentation of the landscape.

Only about 3% of the global land surface can be considered as prime or Class I land and this is not found in the tropics.Another 8% of land is in Classes II and III. This 11% of land must feed the six billion people today and the 7.6 billion expected in 2020. Desertification is experienced on 33% of the global land surface and affects more than one billion people, half of whom live in Africa.

“Food production is central to risks related to human health and environmental sustainability. Agriculture alone occupies more than 35% of Earth's terrestrial surface, the largest use of land on the planet, yet an estimated 33% of global food production is wasted. That is a depressing consequence of how unsustainable our current production and consumption pathways are. The picture becomes even more worrying when considering that globally, one out of four children under the age of five is so malnourished that they will never reach their full physical and cognitive potential.”Johan Rockström

4.Learning from ants

“Individually we are much larger than ants, but collectively their biomass exceeds ours. Just as there is almost no corner of the globe untouched by human presence, there is almost no land habitat, from harsh desert to inner city, untouched by some species of ant. They are a good example of a population whose density and productiveness are not a problem for the rest of the world, because everything they make and use returns to the cradle-to-cradle cycles of nature.” William McDonough & Michael Braungart

Transmission lines

Landfill

5.Laboratorio Roma

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R9lGLf_rpw&list=UUepngZcPplZBRMUFdnpcxKA