By MediaGlobal
21 June 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: The world is urbanizing more rapidly than ever before. By the end of this year, for the first time in history, as many people will live in cities as in rural areas. The challenges and opportunities that result from this shift in the balance of human habitation will be at the center of the World Expo 2010, when participants from all over the world will gather in Shanghai, China, to share ideas and inspiration in the quest to make the world’s growing cities healthy, vibrant and environmentally sustainable centers of human development.
The Expo’s theme of “Better City, Better Life” embodies the fundamental objectives of the United Nations, said Dr. Awni Behnam, Commissioner General for the United Nations Pavilion at the Expo. Behnam is designing the pavilion together with a UN-HABITAT team headed by Anna Tibaijuka, the program’s Executive Director.
“Better cities, better life — it’s an all-encompassing vision of how we can cater for the happiness of people, which is the ultimate aim of the charter of the UN,” Behnam said. “The happiness of people comes when they have the facilities and the means to be productive, to be able to live from their environment, with their environment.”
Throughout human history, cities have been the wellsprings of civilization, seats of learning and cultural exchange. In an increasingly crowded world, sustainable urbanization is integral to human development, prosperity and peace.
“If we have sustainable urban development, we would have the kind of environment where children will grow with security. They would have their food, they would have their education, they would have their future,” Behnam said. “That’s what sustainable development is all about is ensuring the future. We have done what we have done, and we have made our mistakes, but if we have sustainable urban development, then we write a check for our children.”
The United Nations Pavilion will be organized around the message of “One Earth, One UN.” It will address environmental sustainability, social development, culture and learning, and the development potential of creative economies, highlighting the potential for global cooperation in each field.
“If you take one example — the creative economy,” Behnam explained, describing how creative economies, which include the entertainment, media and craft industries, create “the passion and the happiness” needed for social and economic stability. “In order for that to come out to the forefront, you need that initial cooperation” between developed and developing countries, he said.
The theme of environmental sustainability is central to the UN’s participation in the Expo. Overcrowded cities lead to deteriorating social conditions and environmental destruction, particularly in coastal areas, where the majority of urbanization is taking place. “Soon 75 percent of the world will be living within 100 kilometers of the ocean, so there’s this nexus between urbanization and the impact humans have on the ocean. And that impacts the climate,” Behnam said.
The design of the UN Pavilion will incorporate the collaborative aspects of combating climate change, ushering in a new era of global cooperation. “When it comes to environmental degradation, when it comes to climate change and the increasing changes in weather patterns, developed and developing countries will share the same experiences, Behnam said.
“For once we are all in the same boat, it’s not some rich and some poor who have to find solutions, but we all as humanity have one objective—to find a solution and to be creative in order to find a solution. So I think here is an opportunity for solidarity, for unity, that [doesn’t] come from division between rich and poor but comes from saving our own humanity.”
Behnam is working with the United Nations Development Programme’s Special Unit for South-South Cooperation to incorporate the UN’s growing expertise in promoting partnerships between countries of the global South into the design of the pavilion. The Expo, the first ever to take place in a developing country, can help promote a new vision of South-South cooperation, Behnam said.
“It’s an opportunity for the developed countries to contribute, to use their experiences, their technology and their advances. At the same time there’s an enrichment, where the South-South benefits do not stay in the South but they spill over in[to] the North.”
“They say that the Expo is the Olympics of development,” Behnam noted, adding that cities play an integral role in the vast scope of human advancement, and must be designed to encourage the exchange of culture, knowledge and ideas.
“We are not individual self-sustaining parts. We all are feeding into a single project and that is the ultimate end of how to create happiness in people that would lead to peace,” he added.
The UN Pavilion will be designed to capture this vision. It will be “an ‘experience pavilion,’ a pavilion that is interactive, not passive, a pavilion that can actually engage the 70 million visitors with the emotion of what the message is all about,” Behnam said.