Rebuilding Eden:
Planning & Designing Rural Settlements in a Post Disaster World
Rapid growth of human settlements of any scale and number is cause for the
'settlement' to become ‘the’ habitat
for mankind on this earth. Simultaneous, the world changes at unprecedented rate
hence, anticipating these changes, our preparedness and our adaptation to it is
essential as these changes will shape our destiny and the human, built, and
natural environments in the settlements in which we live.
On the horizon are emerging: the future
of global power where global south economies emerge as powerful, political,
and trading blocks and evolving disputes over territory and resources access;
the future of water – where a ‘blue
economy’ surfaces as the cost of water will increasingly overtake costs of
energy, food and other sectors; the
future of carbon-neutrality,
where escalating
costs of energy production and durable forms of energy and energy
efficiencies will affect economies, and production and construction sectors;
the future of identity where
communication channels, online identities, technologies, and biology fuse in
ways that will affect how we live and challenge our definitions of what it means
to be human; the future of human
settlements where rapid
population growth, resources exploitation, globalization, and work-place
relations re-define urban living.
Once thriving rural (and urban) human settlements collapse in heavy debt,
rural-urban transition cause demographic imbalances, dilapidated built
environments, huge unemployment, deteriorating health, crime and other
social-economic problems.
The
United Nations Human Settlement Programme estimated that half of mankind would
live in human settlements by 2008.
However, our instinct for survival has been set off and a new awakening, a green
awareness and a rethinking, re-orientating of values, of relations, of
life-style patterns, of producing, and of using the earth’s resources are
emerging. We realize that we may have overstepped our contract with the “Garden”
and that we must find new ways to vision and plan new
rural human settlements as user-and environmentally friendly settlements
and adapt to a new situation in
working towards harmony amid the built-, human-and natural environment. This
paper looks at some of the possible scenarios and their implications for
planning of emerging rural settlements.