Will the whole world become a city?



Wednesday, 12. September 2012 | 11:00 Uhr

Speaker

Dieter Laepple

Organisation

HafenCity University Hamburg

Reporting

Professor Dieter Läpple from the HafenCity University underlined that the 21st century is obviously the Century of the City. The population will be facing the transition to a predominantly urban world. It is expected that in the coming decades, more people will live in urban than in rural areas. However, 95 percent of the urban population growth will not take place in Europe or the Americas, but in developing countries in Africa and Asia. This in turn means that many of the urbanites will be living in slums. Not only is the epicenter of poverty shifting to urban centers, environmental problems, such as air pollution, are also concentrated in cities. We have to reflect on the possibilities of bringing production back to the city. Ways have to be found to foster urban agriculture to ensure food security, especially for the urban poor. Cities have to overcome their dependency on fossil en-ergy by becoming more energy efficient and by learning to power themselves with renewable and decentralized produced energy. But first and foremost, we have to redefine our concept of moderni-ty, to open up new opportunities for cities and towns. Future cities will have many different faces and forms. In the coming transformation processes, it will be crucial to open up new opportunities to offer the inhabitants of future cities an equitable, sustainable and prosperous future.

Dieter Laepple

Dr. rer. pol, Economist, Professor, born in 1941 in Waiblingen near Stuttgart. After a training for technicians and university graduate as an engineer degree in economics and social sciences at the TU-University and FU-University of Berlin. Teaching and research activities in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Aix-en-Provence / Marseille and Leiden (NL). Since 1986 professor of urban and regional economics and from 1993 – 2007 Head of the Institute of Urban and Regional Economics and Sociology at the Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg (TUHH). Since October 2007 Professor emeritus of International urban studies at the HafenCity University and Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.
1984 Visiting Professor at the University Aix-en-Provence/Marseille,
1992/92 Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Science Center North Rhine-Westphalia; 1996/97 Visiting Professor at the Institute “Alfred Grosser” at the “Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris” (“Science Po”); 2009 Research Fellow at the “Institut d’Études avancées de Paris” amongst other fellowships.
Member of the German Academy for Urban and Regional Planning. Urban Expert and a member of the Advisory Board of the Urban Age-Program of the London School of Economics. Member of the Board of Trustees of the International Building Exhibition IBA Hamburg; Member and Co-chair of the scientific advisory board of the “Singapore-ETH Center for Global Sustainability (SEC)”.
Prof. Laepple won the Award for Urban Culture of the Architectural Association (“BDA Hamburg”) in 2007.

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