Every climate COP is important. The annual UN climate summit, however, has long since moved beyond its 'environmental' objective to become a negotiation on a new industrial revolution, in which the future shape of the world is defined, from the relations between countries and blocs to the forms of energy allowed in the transition to the rules of international finance.

The 28th UN climate conference, which closed in Dubai on 13 December, a day later than the official calendar, was marked on the post-Paris Agreement agenda as particularly decisive, even more so than those that preceded it (Glasgow in 2021 and Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022), because it was the one during which the first Global Stocktake, the roadmap check on how the fight against climate change is going, was being written.

The year 2023 has been a dramatic year for global warming, marked by extreme events on every continent and record highs in atmospheric and ocean temperatures that have even caught the scientists themselves off-guard. The year 2023 has gone down in history as the hottest year in the history of human civilisation, the scientific community has reaffirmed with a series of reports (including UNEP's Emission Gap 2023 and IEA's World Energy Outlook) that the window for avoiding the worst effects of the climate crisis is closing. 

For these reasons, prior to the summit the bar for considering Dubai as a successful COP had been set in a formula: a clear agreement on phase out, the gradual elimination of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) from energy systems, had to come out of COP28. After two dramatic weeks of negotiations, the final result written in the Global Stocktake came close to this goal, though without achieving it.

In climate diplomacy, words are important, so the linguistic nuance of the Dubai agreement is decisive. Instead of agreeing to phase-out, the 198 countries gathered at COP28 agreed to 'move away from fossil fuels' in a 'fair, orderly and equitable manner', accelerating action in this critical decade to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, 'in line with the demands of science'.

The key element of this form is the time reference: climate action cannot only have 2050 as a target, but must accelerate starting from this decade. 

Other decisions taken at COP28 include tripling the capacity from renewable energy sources and doubling the average annual rate of energy efficiency by 2030. The Global Stocktake also mentions the other forms of energy allowed for the transition: nuclear, hydrogen, CO₂ capture and storage (but only for sectors where it is difficult to cut emissions in any other way). Finally, COP28 recognises the role of 'transition fuels' for energy security. It is not written explicitly, but it is a reference to gas, a phrase that effectively separates its role from the other two (coal and oil). 

The Global Stocktake has no immediately applicable legal value in individual countries: its meaning is political. For the first time, after 27 COPs at which the subject was evaded, it is recognised that the fight against global warming requires doing without fossil sources of energy.

In this sense, the result can be called historic, all the more so because it was achieved under the political leadership of one of the countries most economically dependent on these energy sources: the Emirates. COP28 had started under negative auspices, not least because of the host country's choice to entrust the chairmanship, and thus the leadership of the negotiations, to Sultan al Jaber, the CEO of the Emirates state oil company, ADNOC. The conflict of interest between referee and player could not have been more obvious, and was underlined by a number of news items that emerged during the summit.

The BBC discovered that al Jaber had also used the COP28 meetings to strengthen trade agreements on fossil fuels. The Guardian released a recording of a video in which al Jaber argued that the phase-out of fossil fuels was not necessary to contain the temperature rise below 1.5°C (a position bordering on denialism). Reuters had circulated a letter from OPEC, the organisation of oil producing countries (including the Emirates), which called on its members to oppose any agreement on phase out. Given these conditions, the end result of the Global Stocktake is remarkable, and should be seen as a text from which to restart the fight against climate change.

The political significance of the Global Stocktake can only become concrete action if governments live up to the commitment they made in Dubai, starting with the compilation of the next NDCs, the Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement.

According to that treaty, signed in 2015, signatory countries are required to cyclically (every five or ten years) publish these NDCs, which contain all their climate commitments, and to update them by making them more ambitious.

The current NDCs are not sufficient to stop the climate emergency, and would not allow the temperature increase to be kept below either 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial era (as called for by science) or below 2°C (as called for in the Paris Agreement). They will have to be updated by next year, that will be a first check on the effectiveness of the Global Stocktake. The next climate conference will be in Baku, Azerbaijan, another country (the third in a row) dependent on oil and gas exports. One of the topics of the upcoming COPs (Baku 2024 and Belém, Brazil, 2025) is climate finance: for developing countries or emerging economies to move away from fossil fuels requires large amounts of resources and technology transfer. On this point, the Dubai text was evasive and left the question open for future conferences.

In the old American West immortalised by the great cinema, the houses, emporiums, bank and saloon were distributed, compact and accessible, around Main Street, the main arterial road of the village. This urban model, however, became obsolete and residual, in the United States and elsewhere, after World War II. With the advent of the family car, the large suburbia of single-family houses surrounded by greenery became the paradigm.

An ideal of security and well-being, as well as a status symbol, called into question after the ‘Glorious Thirties’ by social and urban planning issues. Over the years, the enormous land consumption due to sparse housing density has come to look more and more like an environmental aberration. Not only that: the atomisation of living is inextricably linked to the fraying of social ties, to a widespread feeling of loneliness, and to a sub-optimal distribution of services, especially with regard to the weaker segments of the population, such as the elderly.

In order to counter the 'sub-urban' narrative, the American New Urbanism movement attempts to assert a vision of city development that makes greater density and the encouragement of pedestrian spaces the parameter for addressing both construction and urban redevelopment. Its foundation is officially traced back to 1993 with the association's first congress. Peter Calthorpe, Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Moule, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Stefanos Polyzoides and Dan Solomon, American architects, urban planners and sociologists, are recognised as the founders, while Peter Katz (author of ‘The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community’, 1993), will be entrusted with the coordination of the movement. The Congress for New Urbanism is held annually (the 31st CNU was held at the end of May in Charlotte, North Carolina), to debate theses and cases of pedestrianisation, planning and management of public spaces, and strengthening the sense and involvement of the community (referred to as ‘placemaking’), among the association's more than 1,600 members.

The limitation of space for the car and the densification of pedestrian-friendly services represent for New Urbanism the compass by which to measure the development of a district with a heterogeneous and inclusive vocation, which seamlessly organises residential buildings, work and commercial spaces and finds in the old ‘Main Street’ the hinge around which to orient the sociality and identity of the place.

An urban planning vision that sometimes espouses support for the policy of ‘mixed-income housing’, spurring the introduction of rent-controlled residential quotas to foster social diversity, and supporting lobbying initiatives with public decision-makers to promote a more accessible and cohesive city for all. The preservation of the genius loci, motivated by the need to reinforce a sense of belonging as well as to counterbalance the exorbitant appetites of property developers, leans towards the defence of typical ‘small town’ constructions, but is combined with a renewed sustainable awareness that urban space can no longer be regarded as an infinite resource, nor can it be eternally concreted over.

The best-known projects of New Urbanism are to be found in the Southern United States. Seaside, Florida, is considered the first. Designed and built starting in the 1980s on private land following the planning of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the coastal town covers 32 hectares, estimated to be the optimal area to ensure effective pedestrian mobility, and includes, in addition to residential units, schools, a civic centre, an interfaith chapel as well as cultural and recreational venues. 

Kentlands, Maryland, is another exemplary case study. Characterised by a compact urban grid, with dwellings without front lawns, it combines residences of heterogeneous styles (Victorian, Colonial and Neoclassical) and rethinks the layout and access to the garage: no longer a block flanking the building and accessible from the front façade, but an integrated volume accessible from alleys at the rear.

The application of the principles of New Urbanism, however, goes beyond the construction of new neighbourhoods: with sprawl retrofitting projects, entire suburbs in Georgia, California, Maryland, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Arizona have been rethought according to the lens of greater density: recreating small centres and hubs within polycentric areas, increasing the efficiency of public transport, eliminating parking on the street front, planting green spaces, and diversifying building types for the benefit of greater inclusiveness. 

Despite its notoriety, and a fascination with the European urban planning model claimed as an explicit case study, New Urbanism will never acquire a position in Europe free of criticism. The first is generally linked to an identification of the models proposed by New Urbanism with the phenomenology of ‘gated communities’, compounds of dwellings that, by virtue of the security perimeters that delimit them, prohibit access and the use of spaces and services to those who, often for reasons of census, live outside this specific community.

Another objection relates to a passatist idea, at least according to detractors, of the architectural languages of reference, which would see traditional American architecture as a model that is still current, to the detriment of a lack of closeness to contemporary demands. Mistrusts that the great distance in mindset between the old and new continents might at least partially explain. Think of the debate on the city of fifteen minutes, much debated in Europe after Covid: a model, mutatis mutandis, that better than any other could build a bridge and open up points of contact and instances of comparison between the two sides of the ocean.