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UNITAR Roundtables
Speaker: Hans van Ginkel Professor and Rector, United Nations University
"Towards Sustainable Urban Futures"
Date: 20 June 2007
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Roundtable Topic The future of humankind will be an urban future. Within the foreseeable future two thirds of our planet’s population will live in cities. The core question here is: what kind of “cities” will these be? The next two billion world citizens are expected, directly or indirectly, to increase the population of the cities in developing countries, which are the least prepared to “house” so many new inhabitants. Opposition between the rural and the urban tends to disappear in an amalgamation of the rural and urban in new settlement patterns, which looks rather like the Milky Way, with nodes and channels of different densities. To address effectively the patterns and processes of this “new urbanization,” we must re-conceptualize the urban, re-think the ways in which we explore the futures of the life of humankind on our planet, and also find new ways to guide and govern the future of our “cities”.
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Professor
Hans van Ginkel is Rector of the United Nations University, Tokyo,
since September 1997. He was President of the International
Association of Universities (IAU, Paris) from 2000 to 2004 and is a
member of the Academia Europaea, Honorary Fellow of the Institute
for Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences (ITC, Enschede), former
Vice-chair of the Board of Trustees of the Asian Institute of
Technology (AIT, Bangkok) and Rector of Utrecht University in the
Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. cum laude from Utrecht University
(1979) and honorary doctorates from Universitatea Babes-Bolyai
(1997), State University of California (2003), University of Ghana
(2005),