Forging New Urban Policies for the 21st Century

As humanity has entered what has been called both the Anthropocene Age and the Urban Age, we need to be globally conscious of how we may be able to successfully create a sustainable urbanity. While our various national political systems have taken a number of actions to combat global warming and other features of sustainability, these actions have clearly been inadequate to the task, so the present article focuses on what urban areas and their governments, which contain within their borders both the vast majority of our planets population and economic products, can do to bring about environmental sustainability. To achieve this, planners will need to both create models of environmental sustainability, and also create economic, governance, quality of life and urban planning models supportive of both urban and environmental sustainability. This article undertakes to identify the interdependent strategies through which our urban areas can forge themselves into fully sustainable cities. The development of a new shared economy to replace the current primacy of global laissez-faire capitalism, the need to establish democratic urban governance worldwide, to put enhancement of quality of life ahead of GNP growth, and the establishment of urban planning and design guidelines will provide a path towards global sustainability of our common human heritage into our collective, global future.