Speaking at the Informal Cities symposium in Stockholm on September 7, 2008

Steve Brant will be speaking at the Informal Cities symposium in Stockholm, which is taking place from 6 - 8 September, 2008. Steve's topic will be Informal Global Governance: How Cities Can Get The Resources They Need.

Here is the abstract for Steve's presentation:

It is possible to reverse the "silent human catastrophe" that is under way in cities around the world. The secret lies in formulating a plan that addresses issues related to the design of the larger sociopolitical economic system in which the world's cities reside. While it is possible to use resources local to any one city to relieve life-threatening conditions on a short term basis, long term solutions require reshaping and redirecting the global sociopolitical forces that impact cities from outside. In this paper, I will talk about how the cities of the world can leverage the fact that they are now home to half of all the people on Earth to construct a plan for changing the sociopolitical economic system of the world for the better.

Starting with my knowledge of New York City’s plans to become a more sustainable city, I will discuss the limitations of efforts to find needed resources from within a city or even from within a state. Then, using my knowledge of the infrastructure crisis affecting both NYC and the USA as a whole, I will discuss the imbalance between funds spent on national defense and funds spent on projects to either renovate existing or construct new sustainable infrastructure. I will argue that this imbalance results from a contest between two mental models of how the world works: one based on obsolete beliefs from the past (such as zero sum economics) and one based on sustainable principles (abundance economics) from the future.

I will conclude by detailing a plan for resolving this conflict between past and future-based economics. The plan will leverage modern approaches to communication – both technological and sociological – to demonstrate how the world’s cities can acquire the resources they need from a transformed global economic system. The essence of this plan is the slogan “Every city has a foreign policy.”