Ilva employs about 12,000 people, produces over 30% of Italy’s steel, and accounts for 75% of the province’s gross domestic product, all of this in a city where about a third of the workforce is jobless. But residents are worried about things like, “homes infiltrated by a black powder that blows from slag heaps and drifts from smokestacks.” If residents weren’t anxious enough, the Italian National Health Service reported that they are 30% more likely to develop tumors than those of the surrounding provinces.
An example closer to home occurred in 2012 when Chicago’s preservation and economic development planners argued over the proposed demolition of the city’s historic Prentice Women’s Hospital. The preservation planners wanted to preserve the building’s historic character by reusing it after the hospital moved. Their economic development counterparts, though, wanted to demolish the building and prepare the site for a new biomedical research facility. The city’s landmark commission eventually approved the structure’s demolition (“Ethics in a Time of Twitter,” Planning, December 2012, available in the Legislative Library).
Connecticut is no stranger to such ethical dilemmas. In 1976 the legislature created a framework to anticipate dilemmas that could arise before and after the state expands a highway, extends a sewer line, funds an industrial park, or funds other major public improvements. The framework—the State Plan for Conservation and Development—seeks to conserve land and other natural resources by locating these improvements where the roads, sewers, and other supporting infrastructure already exist. (In the early 1990s, Maryland adopted a similar approach and called it “smart growth.”)
There are other approaches to address development dilemmas. To learn more about how other companies have reduced waste (and made money in the process), read Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (2008) or watch this video:
