The Penn Resolution: Educating Urban Designers for Post-Carbon Cities

Changing climate patterns and diminishing supplies of inexpensive oil require us to design our cities in radically different ways. Reducing energy usage and carbon emissions is necessary to limit global warming, address severe weather events and rising sea levels, and face the threats of reduction of food production, loss of biodiversity, and dependence on unreliable energy suppliers. These problems are urgent, global, and closely linked. Their convergence forces us as profession- als concerned with building cities to rethink our basic premises, mission, and vision.