Trinh 1

Thai Trinh
Professor Rosbach
ENV 2201
October 30 2015
Reflection 1
In the need for change section in chapter 1, the author talked about multiple crisis in the
modern urbanization which include climate change, land use, transportation, energy resource,
pollution, sense of community and economics. And the transportation section was what caught
my attention most since I believe by looking at the transportation; we can correlate to all the
issue that the author mentioned. To be specific, as a person from a developing country in South
East Asia, I have experienced all the burdens that the author mentioned. Since my county is a
developing country, the main mean of transportation is the motorcycle. And this is the issue since
most popular motorcycle design is now outdated and produce large amount of green-house gas,
that in some place visible to human eyes as a concentrated grey smoke running across the street.
That is the reason why people in my country always have to use face mask when they get on the
road. Moreover, since the motorcycle accident is more dangerous than car, which has tons of
security system like air bag, the reported number of death due to accident last year in my country
are 10000 people, comparing to the total population of only 80 million. When I was young, I
believed that these issues could be solved if we can regulate the law and reconstruct the street.
However, when I grew up, I realized that the urbanization in my country are so bad that houses
are 3 meters close to main road in downtown and there are even houses along the high way. With
80 million people for a country with only 332 000 km square, reorganize the urbanization is

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nearly impossible. Therefore, all the issues correspond to each other. One problem occurs can
trigger others, making the process of improving urbanization harder to achieve.
In the new era of sustainability planning, the author describes planning as a series of
systematic actions that guarantee specific goals like environmental protection or urban
revitalization in future. Mostly, planning is for land managing at urban and regional level.
However, now, the planning scales have developed into more general form of three main social
components: the public sector like government, the private sector like business and the civil
society like non-profit organization to counterbalance the first two sectors. This system is well
defined and designed since in the development of planning, urban planner managed to meet
some goals like water, road or building regulation for the sake of human need. Moreover, new
technology like automobile is recruited so as to improve the travelling issue. However, when we
satisfied certain needs, they introduce additional issues, which are also other needs to take care
of, like pollution or energy resource. These planning mostly reside in the business and
government sector that will be countered by the presence of non-profit organization, which can
recognize the additional issues and raise the awareness and further act toward those issues.
In the Sustainable development section, the author talks about the human civilization in
the context of surrounding ecosystems. It is unavoidable that even though people, even from the
ancient time, have a built in feeling of responsible for preserving the environment, they cannot
resist from the rapid flow of modernization. The author mention a term of uneasy balance
between human and non-human worlds to describe the fact that people, when see the profit,
may ignore the non-human worlds impact and develop the massive urbanization. This leads to
domesticated several species, setting fires on forest and made certain species become extinct.
Different points of view were presented. Some were pessimistic, saying that such destruction is

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unavoidable in the development of human society, while some says human can pay more
attention to nature in the process of civilization.