Radical changes are needed for transformations to a good Anthropocene

AbstractThe scale, pace, and intensity of human activity on the planet demands radical departures from the status quo to remain within planetary boundaries and achieve sustainability. The steering arms of society including embedded financial, legal, political, and governance systems must be radically realigned and recognize the connectivity among social, ecological, and technological domains of urban systems to deliver more just, equitable, sustainable, and resilient futures. We present five key principles requiring fundamental cognitive, behavioral, and cultural shifts including rethinking growth, rethinking efficiency, rethinking the state, rethinking the commons, and rethinking justice needed together to radically transform neighborhoods, cities, and regions.

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Theses on the Commons

Minnesota Review ◽

10.1215/00265667-7737255 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2019 (93) ◽

pp. 62-67

Author(s):

Peter Hitchcock ◽

Christian P. Haines

Keyword(s):

Cultural Heritage ◽

Knowledge Economy ◽

Social Reproduction ◽

Status Quo ◽

Institution Building ◽

Final Word ◽

The Status ◽

The Commons

These theses are meant not as the final word on the concept or praxis of the commons but as words inspiring readers to imagine alternatives to the status quo. They cover topics including social reproduction, the knowledge economy, cultural heritage, affective attachments to property, the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, the legacy of communism, and the politics of institution building.

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Communology:

South Atlantic Quarterly ◽

10.1215/00382876-7825576 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 118 (4) ◽

pp. 725-746

Author(s):

Ugo Mattei ◽

Mark Mancall

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Historical Perspective ◽

Status Quo ◽

End Of History ◽

The Status ◽

Private And Public ◽

The Commons ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

The End Of History ◽

Positivist Approach

Against the spectacle of environmental, economic, social, and institutional crises spawned by capitalism, the authors advocate the urgency of a radically new social science: the nascent field of communology. As Marxism did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, communology challenges orthodoxy. This article presents communology’s evolving terminology, historical perspective, and intersections with law, politics, technology, and social sciences. The commons are subversive to the status quo; they do not assume—as given—sovereignty, statehood, boundaries, or territorial or property structures. That is precisely why their study within the positivist approach dominant today is inadequate, often misleading, and even dangerous to projects of emancipation. Commoners constantly struggle for a different world, for a radically inclusive alternative to all patterns of capitalist exclusion, both private and public. Neither capitalism nor socialism, in any of their forms, constitutes “the end of history.”

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Planetary Boundaries and the Challenge to Governance in the Anthropocene

Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas Avançadas do Terceiro Setor ◽

10.31501/repats.v1i1.9928 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 21 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

David Chandler

Keyword(s):

Status Quo ◽

Alternative Possibilities ◽

Planetary Boundaries ◽

Alternative Futures ◽

The Third ◽

The Status ◽

Critical Approaches

This article considers the challenge to governance posed by new Anthropocene discourses of planetary boundaries. The first section introduces the problematic of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch and also as symptomatic of the end of modernist ontological and epistemological assumptions of the divide between culture and nature. The Anthropocene is thus seen to fundamentally decentre the human as subject and the temporal linearity of Enlightenment progress. The second section analyses the implications of this closure for critical approaches to governance, which increasingly accept and reproduce these ontopolitical assumptions. The tasks of governance thus become transformed, no longer seeking to imagine alternative futures but rather drawing out alternative possibilities that already exist in the present. Governance becomes increasingly an act of affirmation rather than a discourse of change and transformation. The third section expands on this point to consider how contemporary governance approaches articulate the status quo in increasingly radical and enabling ways.

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Analysis of Policies of Railway Operators Using SWOT Criteria and the SIMUS Method: A Case for the Bulgarian Railway Network

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su13126948 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (12) ◽

pp. 6948

Author(s):

Svetla Stoilova ◽

Nolberto Munier

Keyword(s):

Status Quo ◽

Urban Systems ◽

Rolling Stock ◽

Railway Network ◽

Second Stage ◽

Railway Infrastructure ◽

The Status ◽

Interactive Modelling ◽

Two Stages ◽

Railway Operation

This study is useful for railway operators as it enables them to verify their decisions against the results of the application of the techniques of strategic planning and multi-criteria analysis. It gives railway stakeholders concise, objective and unbiased information so that they can then make decisions and also allows them to determine the strengths and sensitivity, of the best solution found. This paper presents a methodology for the assessment of the policies of railway operators using Strengths–Weakness–Opportunities–Threats (SWOT) criteria and the Sequential Interactive Modelling for Urban Systems (SIMUS) method. The methodology of the research consists of two stages. In the first stage, the alternatives of the policies for the railway operator are formulated; the criteria in the SWOT group are defined; and the values of the criteria are determined for each of the alternatives. In the second stage, the SIMUS method is applied to rank the alternatives and assess the criteria in the SWOT groups. The criteria are interpreted as objectives and linear optimizations are performed. A comparison between the desired values for each objective of the SWOT criteria and the optimum values of the objective functions obtained by SIMUS was made. The methodology was applied to the Bulgarian railway network. Three policies for railway operation were studied. The total number of 17 railway policies criteria in the SWOT group were defined and assessed—three strengths criteria, seven weaknesses criteria, three opportunities criteria and four threats criteria. The results indicated that the best strategy is A3 (some reconstruction of the railway infrastructure and new rolling stock on some lines), with the highest score of 3.76, followed by A2 (new rolling stock on some lines), with a score of 2.71. The status-quo strategy (A1) has a very low score of 0.43, that the current situation or status-quo cannot be supported. The weights of both strengths and opportunities are both of the same importance with a weight of 0.180. It was found out that the clusters Weakness and Threats are dominant with weights of 0.4 and 0.24 respectively. The results show that the weights are all practically the same, about 0.06, and therefore, no discrimination by importance is possible. The methodology makes it possible to consider the alternatives simultaneously, and in this way, the results will reflect the effect of one criterion on all others, and permit us to quantify the differences between expected and real results.

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