Master Plan of Portland, Maine

The City of Portland Maine is the small in relative terms for the nation. However, it is the largest city in Maine and its urban area accounts for around a 1/3 of the total population. The master plan of the city has been updated for 2016 from the previous plan made in 2005.  The city lays out general guidelines for the future development of the city. Many of the policies reflect the continual buildup of Downtown, due to high economic and residential capabilities. The city also wants to gravitate away from auto dependency and move to a more pedestrian friendly environment. Also the parks and water front are also scheduled to be improved as public areas. Portland also mentions its desire to buildup, but still keep the feel and atmosphere of a small town, so buildings will be aesthetically pleasing and must fit in with community vibes.

Reaction to Inconvenient Truth

In class we watched Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, a documentary detailing the causes and effects of climate change. It is unfortunate that even after the production and release of several other documentaries like Gore's that the same concerns and topics are discussed. I feel as thought the documentary route is a bit like crying wolf. Every time someone makes a new documentary it encompasses the same vernal bulk of the issue. And because nothing fully detrimental happened in the 10 years since the Inconvenient Truth was released, many people may lean to the notion that nothing will happen again after other films are released such as Dicaprio's Before the Flood. I feel as though environmentalists need to take a new approach on relaying climate change, because with each deadline we give for the "end of the world" we are only hindering our cause. That is because we have broken though many of the declines for change and yet nothing has changed of the average person and thus the average person will loose respect for the notion of climate change. This is something we must work on as a field. We need to find a way to cause a severity and understanding of the lack of time we have without sounding like another wolf scenario.


Source: David, L., Bender, L., & Burns, S. Z. (Producers), & Guggenheim, D. (Director).
(2006). An Inconvenient Truth [Motion Picture]. United States: Paramount Classics.

Luxembourg Urbanization

Luxembourg is already a highly urbanized nation. According to the UN World Urbanization Prospects Report, 90% of Luxembourg's population lives in cities. Of these Luxembourg city is the most dominant with about 1/5 of the nation's total population. It is expected that even more of the nation's population will be in urban centers by 2050 with 94%. This continual shift toward urbanization and Luxembourg's small geographic size could mean we could see the formation of another city state like nation such as Monaco and Singapore.  However, with a relatively slower growing population and the reinvention of its cities, Luxembourg may be able to balance and urbanizing population and the preservation wild spaces.

UN World Urbanization Prospects Report - https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf

Luxembourg sustainability and food security

Based on its small geographic size one may think that Luxembourg would have some issues with food security. However, the small nation has zero levels of malnutrition and the availability of certain food products has been on the rise (FAOSTAT). Also Luxembourg is a large donator to the World Food Program (WFP), a sub branch of the UN that fights hunger. Luxembourg has signed a four year deal with eh WFP and will donate up to 30.8 million euros to help mitigate hunger related problems in impoverished areas(UN new center).




UN News Center - http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=39560#.WB_ymTsxXzI
FAOSTAT - http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#country/256

Luxembourg Sustainability and Health

Luxembourg has a high per capita expenditure on health services in comparison to its surrounding region. The amount of money spent by individuals is just under 8k US$ in comparison to the average of 2k US$ for the Who region. This is one reason why Luxembourg is a healthy nation relatively. Like other affluent nations, the main causes of death are cancers and heart disease. This is similar to that of the US and other highly developed nations. One interesting aspect is that it appears women are greenly healthier than men in this nation. For both raised blood glucose and obesity, men were higher than the WHO region. The male glucose levels was 9.9% and the obesity rate was 24.5% compared to the WHO region of 9.6% and 20.4% receptively. For women the blood glucose level is 6.7% in comparison to the WHO region of 8% and the obesity rate is 22.2% versus 23.1% for the WHO region.