Tokens of Goodwill

 The discussion on ecological urbanism in this week’s readings is an interesting one worth discussing, however the basis of these is either purely observational or theoretical with no real plans of action which is upsetting. In the American realm of urban planning we have two primary enemies: the politician and the corporation, who is usually the highest bidder and a defacto dictator of city planning; just look at how much a skyscraper can congest public infrastructure, or raise the the cost of land in a city such as Chicago or New York. The fact that a company can come into a space occupied by millions of people, buy a piece of land, put up a huge building and steal access to sunlight, physical space and determine its usage through the consultation of politicians alone is unjust and immoral. The United States is in a particular bind in this situation with most of our large scale cities being built around this corporation to politician relationship.  San Fransisco has some interesting safe guards in place that give the citizens a size able voice in town planning, but I’m unaware of others that exist within our country. I’d like to see more things like that within the US, but I believe it’s very hard to remove politicians from their corporate relationships when they have so much to gain monetarily from it. I’m not sure where this goes from here but we have to start being a voice for the people we are in service to at the very least. We are not in political offices, but we can continually be democratically chosen by our clientele if we design well for them. I think that starts with going to bat for them and then designing in accordance to those values for which we stand for.