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This book's cover shows us La Paz, Bolivia

City living: present, future and worldwide

a book review by Eric Jackson

2007 State of the World: Our Urban Future

by the World Watch Institute

Linda Starke, editor

W. W. Norton & Company, New York (2007)

250 pp, 18.95 in paperback

ISBN 978-0-393-32923-0

You wouldn't know it from the ways that Panama's national government behaves, and you can't really know it from the Alcaldia because our centralized system of government doesn't give local officials the tools they need to address urban problems, but for some years now Panama City has been home to a growing band of hundreds of urban policy wonks. We are not yet at the point of large crowds beseiging public institutions over city planning issues, but even if the venal and self-destructive politicians and the also short-sighted wannabe tycoons who buy them off have taken meticulous care to avoid the possibilities of such situations, all manner of movements, community groups, outspoken professionals and ordinary urban denizens who see the possibilities of the good life receding amid the stresses are moving together, as if attracted by a strong magnet, toward the direction of a coalition of the annoyed.

The World Watch Institute has for many years been the premiere international environmental policy think tank, taking an expanded view of the environment that doesn't put cute animal symbols over economic realities but also doesn't accept poweful but short-sighted special interests' word as the ultimate arbiter of what's real. The institute's not partisan and not even really a pressure group, but if you're an intelligent politician or community activist you will find the things that it publishes in its World Watch magazine, its books and its annual reports most useful.

This year the annual report is about urban policy, and it's a "must read" for those Panama City residents engaged in the struggle for a more livable city who can read English. (This reviewer is not sure whether there is or will be a Spanish edition, but meanwhile you can find much of what the World Watch Institute has to offer online.)

With forewords by Anna Tibaijuka, the executive director of UN-HABITAT and Jaime Lerner, who served as appointed mayor of Curitiba during the military dictatorship era of Brazil and later governor of the state of Parana, this year's report's nine chapters address the issues of urban growth, water and sanitation services, urban agriculture, transportation, energy, natural disaster risk management, public health, local economics, and confronting poverty and environmental injustice.

Now this reviewer, long a small-time urban gardener, a user of public transportation in both Rust Belt and Third World settings and someone who has worked on and formally studied various aspects of urban policy, read the chapters out of order based on a hierarchy of interests. But even though they were all written by different people, with little illustrative sidebars by still other writers, the work goes well together as a whole. The chapters are about rich cities and poor ones, urban areas that are designed around cars those that aren't and so on, noting common or universal issues and those peculiar to various types of cities. Now that it has been superseded by newer buzz words like "sustainable," is it permissible to use the word "holistic" to describe the report's cumulative effect? It does give a broad and detailed view of the entire phenomenon, and a non-partisan but also not naive take on the political implications.

The transportation chapter is most important for Panama's hot-button urban issues of the moment, mass transit and the Cinta Costera. One sidebar zooms right in on Bus Rapid Transit systems like the proposed Trasmilenio, citing Bogota as a generally positive example but warning that "there is a risk that misapplication of the lessons of Bogota's TransMilenio will lede to suboptimal, largely failed systems. Even US cities have branded many marginal improvements in bus services as BRT, though these systems lack most of the features that made Curitiba and Bogota such a success." And --- duh now! --- then there is the reiteration of the by now old knowledge that building more roads just attracts more cars, and the simple but profound observation that "the biggest economic impact of cars on cities is the sheer space they take for roads and parking." Panamanians would do well to use this chapter of this report to refine their questions about metro area transportation issues, and not to accept mere vitriolic attacks on bus driver mafias in lieu of real answers.

This book, which can be found at the excellent little bookstore at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Tupper Center in Ancon, was given to me by someone at STRI, a Panamanian citizen and a more accomplished urban gardener that I am, who figured that this would be a worthwhile investment. If you are at all interested in urban policy, it would be a good investment for you, too.

Cool Internet sites
Books, World Watch report on urban environments