| Could Baltic Cities be Models? |
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Per Werge, Nykøbing Katedralskole The population growth is nearly negative – or will be. Country becomes town Why then care for urban growth? Why let the Baltic Sea Project produce a new BSP Learners Guide handbook for the educational youth on how to plan and organize future urbanisation – and reorganize existing cities? Take a look at this map. Even though the urbanized districts connected to the Baltic Sea only host about 50 million inhabitants, their growth have been remarkable since the beginning of industrilisation - and still are. In all the countries the migration from the countryside to town has not stopped. May be there have been periods of “back to nature” movements of citizens, but in fact these trends ended up by transforming the open landscape into suburbs, green garden cities, crossed and connected by dense physical infrastructure. Generally the agricultural landscapes have been reorganised as urbanised space where 95% of the inhabitants make their income and lives as urban people.  This development is a good reason for taking advantages of the knowledge of what happened to the environment through the urbanisation process; what went wrong, what has been cleaver or will be necessary to create in the future from an environmental perspective, which is the core of urban ecology. The urbanisation process will not take an end. Worldwide the urban population will double within the coming 40 years. There is a need for building as many new towns and cities as existing now. Problems and sustainable solutions The BSP Learners Guide 8 on urban ecology is at the recent stage about to being written by contributors from the different BSP-connected network countries. Colleagues from Russia, Lithuania, Germany, Sweden and Denmark have promised to describe urban problems and solutions of this kind and produce challenging tasks and perspectives for pupils at different school levels. There are still room for more contributors, who know about important and interesting new technologies or strategies etc. to make the future urban design sustainable. Don´t hesitate to contact the national coordinator, if you got ideas and would like to add new perspectives to the book. Or contact me as editor of the handbook: Denne emailadresse er beskyttet mod programmer som samler emailadresser. Du skal aktivere javascript for at kunne se adressen. . Until now there are going to be told bout city planning in general, new energy technology such as Hydrogen and fuel cells and geothermal installations, the future of nuclear power, water runoff controle, design of Zero-cities, fit-towns and more. The book has to be finalised during spring 2009. |