The media and urban sustainable development

IUESA: Referring to the role and position of the media in urban development, Seyyed Mohsen Tabatabaei, the secretary of IUESA in an interview with Student News Agency said: cities are the place of whole human beings in the world and every advance and findings in urban field can have a direct impact on millions of people’s quality of life.
Noting that more than two-third of the world population lived in the villages 1950, but more than half of the world population became urbanized in 2014, he added, it is predicted that it will reach to two-third by 2050.
Emphasizing that there were only 700 million urbanized people in 1950, he said: this figure reached to 3 billion and 900 million people in 2014 and it will increase to 6 billion and 300 million people by 2050.
Highlighting that urbanization process had serious disadvantages along with positive aspects of this increase, he added: cities are responsible for 75% of energy consumption in the world and 80% of greenhouse gasses and main producers of waste.
Adding that to deal with these challenges and improvement of the quality of life in cities, the idea of sustainable development has been proposed, he said: sustainable city is one that can continue its life because of economic use of resources, avoiding producing further waste, and recycling them.
Considering population, transport, economic situation, climate change, the quality of weather, integrated planning, social capital as principal pillars of urban sustainable development, he said: basically, sustainability focuses on human goals as main core of every solution of urban development and it increases the role of the media for citizens’ training.
Saying that cities have destructive effects on global environment, he said: the only solution to improve the quality of urban services and coping with environmental crisis is the model of urban sustainable development and preparation ground for its implementation is dependent on the media.
Explaining that the major part of sustainable urban development model depends on citizens’ responsibility toward urban environment and this culture can be institutionalize only through the media.