JANEZ STANOVNIK,     Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), Ottawa, 3 October 1977

Distinguished delegates and ladies and gentlemen: There are few areas which show such tangible results of economic growth as that of human settlements. Growth over the three decades since the Second World War cannot be better illustrated than from an aircraft looking down on the cities which have all acquired “doughnuts” around their traditional centres. This is equally true for this continent and for the old continent over the Atlantic Ocean. It is in these human settlements that economic growth is seen in its true dimension. It is through human settlements that people experience the beneficial results of increasing production, known to us as economic growth.

Settlements are built to last for years to come, for decades. Whatever we build today establishes a solid infrastructure for the rest of our lives and probably for those of our children, and maybe even of our children’s children. Settlements in a way predetermine what will happen tomorrow. It is a particularly sensitive area because if we are wrong in our calculations, in translating our visions into brick and stone, we may very well lay the foundations of future tension—if what we have done comes into conflict with actual trends. It is important that we approach this subject with the utmost care and feeling of responsibility not only to our own generation, but also to the generations to come. I would, therefore, like to invite you to have a true sense of history and responsibility.

I often meet people who say: “How far into the future can you really see? Ten years? Twenty years? All the rest is Utopia.” Perhaps so, but if we cannot predict the future there are certain elements of the future of which we can already be quite sure. If there are any of you who have doubts about the dimension of change, may I invite you to gather with me for a short trip back into the period after the Second World War—into the early 1950s, for instance—and mentally foresee what will happen during the 25 years up to 1975. You would have been amazed if I had told you that we would conquer the law of gravity, that we would reach to the moon. You would have been surprised if I had told you that we would decipher the genetic code. You would have been surprised if I had told you that in these 25 years, whatever happened on the earth—in whatever corner, would immediately be seen and heard everywhere else. That we would increase our production approximately threefold. That the production of steel in our Economic Commission for Europe region would increase threefold from 200 million to 600 million tons. That the increase in the use of energy would be threefold and that we would burn in these 25 years as much energy as the human race had burned since Adam and Eve. In 25 years. That there would be fantastic economic growth without parallel in human history. Because never before have we had a period of 25 years of uninterrupted economic growth at the high rate of 5 per cent, or even more—never before. But there would not only be successes, there would be problems. We would end these 25 years with 4 billion people as against 2 billion in 1950. There would be other problems. There would be inflation.

And in the early 1970s we would face one crisis after another. There would be an environmental crisis, a population crisis, a food crisis, a monetary crisis and an energy crisis. All these would be the subjects of big international conferences. There would be a very important conference in Vancouver where we would reflect on this process of urbanization.

At the beginning of this century there were only 11 cities with one million inhabitants and 6 out of these 11 were in Europe. The number had grown to almost 200 in 1975, of which more than half were in the developing world. I would have had to foretell in 1950 that there would be a terrific difference between cities in the developed world and those in developing countries. Cities in the developed world would be the consequence of industrial growth, but cities in the developing countries would not grow necessarily as a result of economic progress; they would grow because there was no employment in agriculture. They would be more a sign of pauperization than of progress and would create growing problems.

However, this forward view would show that the food problem might be overcome as a result of the marvellous discoveries of science. There would be other problems, among which, of course, would be the problem of energy—a matter of the greatest concern. So great would be the problems by the beginning of the 1970s that the majority of mankind would demand a new international economic order, an order which would be built on the principles of justice, equality, sovereignty and interdependence.

On the basis of past progress and problems, we should now take a look into the future. Shall we have more of the same? Or shall we have a different kind of development in the future? There are material and political factors at work which tell me—and this is a personal view—that the future will not be just a continuation of the past. The Moloch of gross national product will cease to be all-powerful. There will be demands for a somewhat different kind of development for a different kind of growth.

But before we say anything about what the future might hold, it would be wise to consider why things have been happening in the way they did. Why did this tremendous progress occur? Why has progress created such terrific problems? The economists will tell you that a singularly important factor influencing economic development has been technology. So important that we all thought technology could resolve everything. Everything was dependent on technology—only technology was dependent on itself. Technology seemed to be autonomous, independent of the human will which gave it direction.

Developments in technology have become so energy-intensive that what we have considered as being the results of technology might very well be considered as the product of energy. Only 1 per cent of the driving force in modern manufacturing industries is human energy, while 99 per cent is geochemically stored and transformed energy. Why have we used so much energy? The immediate answer is that it was so cheap, relatively speaking. Labour was becoming increasingly expensive while energy was cheap. Market forces had fixed the relative prices of human and natural energy. Organized labour was powerful in the industrialized countries and was able to gain for the workers an increase in the distribution of income. The bargaining power of the developing countries, on the other hand, was weak. As a result, the prices of primary materials, and particularly of energy, were depressed over this period while the prices of the goods we produced with the same energy in our manufacturing industries were growing.

Statistics in the ECE study* on energy economy and efficiency show beyond any doubt, for all the industrialized countries, that prices of energy have been either stable or declining while prices and wages in the industrialized countries have been constantly growing over this period. As might have been expected, energy was freely substituted for human labour.

We have developed various energy-intensive structures in the economy, and we have moved from one source of energy to another. These developments have profoundly affected human settlements. It is not only industry that has become energy-intensive. Everything has become energy-intensive.

Settlements are widely spread out because one of the marvels of the abundance of energy is the private automobile. The private car has become a necessity to move us from the places where we live to the places where we work. Therefore, transportation has become an integral part of the way in which settlements are planned and built.

We have been using energy so abundantly that, representing only 25 per cent of humanity, we burn about three-quarters of the total energy used today. If everybody in the world wanted to have the same per capita consumption of energy as we have today in our region, then the developing countries would have to consume nine times as much energy as they actually do. The unequal distribution of energy reflects the great inequalities which prevail in the world today.

We are deliberating something which concerns not only us, it concerns everybody. The developing countries very rightly ask how they will industrialize if we burn all the geochemically stored energy beforehand. While considering problems in the regional framework, we must be constantly aware that those we are faced with have profound global implications and touch on the sensitive questions to be answered in considering demands for a new international economic order. If the future cannot be just more of the same, but should be in many respects different from the past, the question arises: What kind of economic development are we to have in the future? Firstly, economic growth, not zero growth. There must be growth, but growth with distribution. In the past, we believed that if there were a higher GNP, the product would be automatically more evenly distributed. This has not happened. There must be a deliberate policy effort to arrive at a more just distribution within and between nations. If economic growth is to make the slightest contribution to our...