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Surprise at city awards for climate battle
Sept 23rd, 2014: Siemens and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) announced the winners of the City Climate Leadership Awards 2014 at a ceremony held on Monday night in New York City. The Awards honor cities all over the world for excellence in urban sustainability and leadership in the fight against climate change. The winning cities in the ten award categories are:
Amsterdam (Finance & Economic Development)
Barcelona (Intelligent City Infrastructure)
Buenos Aires (Solid Waste Management)
London (Carbon Measurement & Planning and Air Quality)
Melbourne (Adaptation & Resilience)
New York City (Energy Efficient Built Environment)
Portland (Sustainable Communities)
Seoul (Green Energy)
Shenzhen (Urban Transportation)
Read here the entire press release
In the international network circle of AiREAS (citizen’s driven healthy city cooperation, that started in Eindhoven and focuses on air quality and human health) people reacted with surprise that highly polluted London was awarded for Air Quality.
AiREAS is not submitted for these or any other award. We are hence not surprised. If you don’t buy a ticket don’t expect to win the lottery. It is not the state of pollution that matters but the effort a city does to solve the issue for human health and vitality. We @AiREASnl and City of Tomorrow (@STIRfoundation) reason using 4 paradigms, not just one. The award winning cities have every right to be highlighted, in their fragmented technologically innovative way.
What people tend to forget is that cities are the old conglomerates of “industrialised” financial and technological dependencies. People who live in cities enjoy the centralized facilities but depend for their basic needs (water, food, energy, clothing, etc) entirely of the system’s dynamics of the city with the surroundings, still totally based on money. To get access to money the citizens need to work or speculate. Due to system automation cities only develop consumers but not labor. Cities sustain themselves with growth, change, inflation or go broke.
Big enterprises such as Siemens depend on these huge city’s investments in technological solutions so award those that excel in this, rather than those (such as Eindhoven) that develop living lab solutions with their own population and entrepreneurship. In large cities systems prevail over human, responsibility driven interaction, simply because financial flows give old power to the political and economic structures. They however cover just part of the solutions.
Local responsibility is extremely cost and bureaucracy saving, very challenging even for the local creative forces that get involved in their own sustainable city progression with the development of a circular local economy, yet demanding a new local leadership mentality. It requires facilitating support from the policy makers, is not directly taxable nor instantly part of the global economic reality, so no reward system is in place yet to back it up. Local value systems appear in the city based on value creation and sharing. These subsystems detach from the large economies producing a power shift in the city.
That’s why solutions like Sustainocracy and AiREAS are not (yet) receiving global awards simply because they do not fit marketing communication plans. They just solve key local issues through co-creation, they don’t buy or sell them.
Four paradigms
Of the 4 paradigms available to cities, economic lobbies and fragmented power positions around public dependencies tend to push to a single focus, the one of technological innovation only, offered by the big global players. “Smart Cities” is not (yet) about people but mainly about (business) systems. From an overall global sustainable progress point of view we see that the other 3 paradigms need to be respected too, else the cities enter into chaos anyway. These other complementary 3 are however not money driven, hence hardly ever highlighted:
- Chaos: cities have to accept the collapsing of old obsolete structures and economic efficiencies to open up for overall renewal based on other types of innovative solutions (people, planet, profit) in a more holistic approach.
- Awareness: cities have to allow and help their self aware and responsible citizens to develop solutions of their own and connect to the evolution of their own community. This requires freedom for experimentation and innovation from inside the community. It opens up a new economic reality of cocreation, universal ethics, commitment and best practice from within.
- Harmony: cities need to learn to focus on harmony between nature, people, authority (rather than power) and their own regional self sufficiency.
Those cities that develop themselves using all the four paradigms (Sustainocracy) become strongholds of human evolution that contribute to the whole as well as the regional self. They become pearls of co-existence, harmony and flexibility. Then they will be rewarded by evolutionary progress and need to address the challenge of growth (in population) because of a livable, integral attractiveness, fulfilling the “sustainocratic dream” of sustainable human progress within, among others, climate awareness.
Jean-Paul Close – Sustainable progress starts at individual level and expands through value driven cooperation
Jean-Paul
The problem, the consequences and the solution
The problem:
The statement below is also referring to pollution, city convergence, life style, mobility, hunger, migrations, financial manipulations, power abuse, etc.
Awareness break through
The consequences
Need I say more? It is in our self interest to do something about it. Consequence driven investments damage economies and societies while proactive attention may give an innovative boost that keeps us busy for centuries. The Dutch have experience since we suffered our own water catastrophy in 1953, killing 1500 people. The implications now would be devastating, affecting 47% of the country. Time to act?
Solution:
The easiest way to “solve” this is to wait for the problem to pass by itself.
This is NOT the solution, despite being the easiest way to address the problem
This is NOT the solution either. Power abuse around money in fact stands solutions in the way.
The problem will indeed solve itself over time but scientists, economists and religious leaders now tend to agree that by that time there will be no human beings left to assume responsibility for our species.
10 years ago I stopped blaiming the world for unawareness and lack of sense of responsibility. For most individuals the issues are too abstract and mindblowing to picture one’s own responsibility. Surrounded by definitions of economic patterns and efficiency tools I could not find any definition for sustainable human progress that I could relate to myself. So I created one.
Just try to adhere in commitment to this and things will change, for you and your surroundings
The commitment to myself and my natural surroundings evolved into the STIR Foundation, the cooperative venture AiREAS and FRE2SH and the STIR Academy for 21st century society and entrepreneurship. It changed my life and many others that got involved in these ventures. We can now involve the world by providing guidance, tools, inspiration and innovation.
The STIR cycle for sustainable excellence and progress
Try it. It will change your lofe and that of your surroundings, always for the better.
Jean-Paul Close
Sudden repositioning of societies
The sudden global leader’s swap from growth to change is not necessarily motivated by a moral burst of awareness but a self reflective sense of self preservation
When we read news issues on the internet these days we see a significant change. For decades the climate change, pollution issues, migration and poverty problems, water and food manipulation, misuse and shortages, etc had been denied and overruled with reassuring messages by the economic forces that were looking for unlimited growth. Now we see that denial has changed into acceptance of the problem with the tsunami of scientific reports and studies proving the damage we are doing to our environment and subsequently to our selves. Within 250 years scientists expect that there will be no economies anymore because there will be no human beings left to uphold this invention to value transactions.
Formally recognizing the problem is a first step to finding solutions even through we are still far away from letting go of the ideology of economic growth in favor of the sustainocratic economy of balance. So why this sudden change in political leadership and media coverage?
The problem world leaders encountered recently was not their sudden burst in sense of responsibility for our planet or people. Their problem was that the drive for unlimited economic growth was getting them into a position of severe competitive aggression among each other. It is a natural phenomena that when growth is blocked tension rises until it explodes, unless an escape is found. If one is nit sure that one can win a competitive encounter one should not even enter the battle but challenge the opponent(s) by changing strategy. The current moves demonstrate that global leaders have become aware of the potential point of singularity (eminent collapse, war and chaos) of their economic potential caused by the dependence of their systems on resources of the other powerful nations. When these resources are suddenly blocked in an encounter then politics is not about showing strength but finding each other’s weaknesses.
Leadership changes to finding ways to become self sufficient enough to minimize the dependence on other nations of the world and hence reduce the amount of weaknesses that can be misused in times of stress. Recognizing the need to transform and re-position one’s own society sufficient innovative impulses can be generated to build up strength again. Finding a new balance with nature through the acceptance rather denial of the global issues and threats can than provide labor and local economic development for many decades ahead. It takes the tension away from the world while leadership turns into itself instead of against each other.
Since world war II the focus was placed on growth. The tension has been building up gradually producing an exponential increase in recessions, depressions, chaos and threats around the world. Now time has come to change and focus on co-creation, harmony and symbiotic relationship with our environment on a local for local basis. What world leaders do is re-position their own society in a natural way causing the shift of attention to happen also in business, science, media expression, etc. This is what we can observe now and it shows the results of an intense and sudden shift at policy makers level based on self preservation rather that morality. The next five years will be extremely relevant to see the changes have their effect on the societies, the human beings and the system complexity that governs us. Will it be sufficient or a prelude for more to come, adding perhaps a new phase of moral awareness and true stability in nations?
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 