An Urbanist Manifesto

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on what urban areas can do to bring about environmental sustainability, and identify the values and practices that must be stopped, the principals that should be honored, and the interconnected strategies through which our urban area can fashion themselves into fully sustainable cities.

Abstract: Humanity is now entering the Anthropocene Age, which the future will be able to judge either by global geologic evidence of humanity’s failures or by the successful creation of a sustainable urbanity. It is clear that the present US political administration, and many rural areas around the world, can or will not work to accomplish this, so the present article focuses on what urban areas can do to bring about environmental sustainability. To accomplish this, we will need to deal not only with creating models of environmental sustainability, but we must also create economic, governance, quality of life and urban planning models supportive of both urban and environmental sustainability. This manifesto endeavors to identify the values and practices that must be stopped, the principals that must be honored, and the interconnected strategies through which our urban areas can fashion 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 a future of geologic time and space.