Here are some more ideas from the World Urban Forum in Vancouver (click "read more" above to see the whole post). I'm back home in Cleveland now, and in the coming week I will continue to post my reflections on the future of cities and lessons for Northeast Ohio.

Many of my thoughts were stimulated by the head-spinning, 150-nation, multi-cultural stew of the forum itself — where rich nations' consumer lifestyles were challenged by poor nations' desperate need for development to meet basic human needs, a conflict which will determine the future environmental, economic, and political stability of the planet.

But even more of my thoughts were stimulated by the city of Vancouver, which is pioneering new ways for advanced, Western cities to think about how to develop sustainably. This is a city whose mayor talks proudly about "eco-density" and reducing the city's ecological footprint. This is a city whose planners have an explicit goal to reduce auto use by making it inconvenient and costly to drive and by investing heavily in quality pedestrian environments, bike facilities, and transit to give people better alternatives. This is a city where the typical commuter is a comfortably dressed person walking down the street with a backpack and a cup of coffee.

Above is a picture of the kind of high-density, waterfront development that makes a vibrant, walkable city possible. These condo and apartment towers have jobs nearby, neighborhood shopping built into the lower floors, schools and day care facilities to serve families with children, public greenspace all around, and well designed connections to the waterfront greenway that runs for miles. (For more Vancouver pictures, go here.)

Sure, Vancouver still has problems. But it's consciously trying to be a different kind of city — a city that can adapt successfully to the challenges of the 21st century. In the next couple of weeks, watch this space for more on the Vancouver vision.

Land use and energy

One of the most thought-provoking sessions at the World Urban Forum was about how to integrate energy issues into the spatial planning of cities. The concept: most cities are highly dependent on imported energy. Energy supplies will likely get much more expensive and less reliable in the future. So smart cities will become more self-reliant, generating more of their energy from local, renewable sources. That will lead them to plan land uses for wind turbines, solar arrays, district heating and cooling systems, and other energy alternatives.

Today, this is seldom done. Land-use planning considers housing, industrial and commercial development, and maybe transportation, but it doesn't take into account the need to reserve land for local energy production.

The session discussed an urban design project, Bridging to the Future, which is sponsored by the International Gas Union. Teams from The Netherlands, India, Japan, and Canada presented scenarios for redeveloping urban areas to achieve energy sustainability. They mapped the energy potential of their regions — the places most favorable for the production of wind, solar, bio-mass, micro-hydro, and other types of energy. And they showed how cities should be far more self-reliant if they remained compact and protected productive lands in the surrounding countryside.

So energy is another important reason (the others include water, food, air quality, urban vitality, infrastructure costs, and biodiversity) to stop urban sprawl and plan land uses at the regional scale.

World vocabulary

Here is a sample of the key words and concepts that were on the minds of delegates at the World Urban Forum:

• Social inclusion: This is perhaps the fundamental concern of people in developing nations. They demand full participation in the decisions that affect them, whether in their own cities or in international deliberations. They want to be treated as assets, not as problems.
• Slums (and slum dwellers): Cities around the world will add 2 billion people in the next 30 years, and most of those people will live a tenuous existence in slums. This unprecedented growth of slums is the world's biggest development challenge.
• Informal settlements: See "slums" above.
• Secure tenure: Many slum dwellers live on land controlled capriciously by ruling elites, often in countries without a well developed legal system of land ownership and rights. So one of the biggest demands of slum dwellers is secure tenure, a right to control a piece of land and have a secure home from which to build a life. (Slum clearance in poor nations sounds a lot like the "urban renewal" that displaced low-income people in American cities.)
• Brown agenda: The agenda to provide basic needs — including shelter, water, and sanitation — for people in developing nations (as opposed to the high-tech green agenda of developed nations).
• Millennium Development Goals (MDG): The international strategy for reducing poverty and achieving more sustainable development.
• Aboriginal people: New term for native people or First Nations people.
• Eco-density: The Vancouver term for gradually redeveloping the city at higher residential densities and superior public amenities to absorb new growth without urban sprawl.
• Leapfrog: Developing nations' opportunity to skip old technologies, such as telephone land lines, and move directly to technologies that are simpler and cheaper to install, such as cell phones.
• Jane Jacobs: The name of the much loved and recently departed urban critic Jane Jacobs was invoked often during the World Urban Forum, not just by her fellow Canadians but by people from many other countries. Indeed, during the forum's opening ceremonies Anna Tibaijuka, executive director of UN HABITAT, called for a moment of silence for Jacobs (as well as for Rafic Hariri, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, who was assassinated in 2005). Her landmark books, such as The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and The Economy of Cities (1969), are still influencing generations of people working for humane, livable cities.
• Two kinds of unsustainable cities impacting the planet: Rich western sprawl cities and poor developing slum cities.

Vancouver's green convention centre

At right is a picture of the construction site for the expansion of the Vancouver Convention Centre. When completed in 2008, the $615 million facility will be one of the greenest convention centers in the world — featuring fish habitat enhancements around the pilings, a six-acre living green roof, seawater heating and cooling, and on-site water treatment.

These green building features will complement existing convention centre's current practices, including energy conservation, recycling of nearly half of all waste generated, and eco-friendly food and beverage service (uses fresh, local ingredients, avoids disposable utensils and dishes, avoids canned goods, and donates leftover food to local charities).

New rhythms of design

The World Urban Forum prompted some deep questions: How do cities function as living organisms? What will it mean to make them truly sustainable for human habitation far into the future? How do we rethink how we live?

The answers came from all over the cultural map, and some were pretty far out. One workshop had speakers from Sweden, Finland, Peru, Thailand, Kenya, Nicaragua, Canada, and the U.S. The U.S. guy was a NASA architect who helped people think about what the design of human settlements on earth can learn from the constraints of design for space flight — where there can be no waste, energy is precious, and one must always be aware of life-support systems.

But the Kenyan speaker brought the discussion back to earth with the quote: "Rhythm is the architecture of being." Design must respond to the inner human rhythms that define us. And we must discover harmonies with the rest of nature. It's all music, the interplay of patterns in time at a deep level.

Thus, the new culture of sustainability might be created as much by drummers as by architects or planners or engineers.