REMAKING THE URBAN SOCIAL CONTRACT: Health, Energy and the Environment September 17, 2015 The politically tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S. resulted in national, state and local governments promulgating policies designed to address a host of societal issues, including a degrading environment (e.g., National Environmental Policy Act of 1969), unaffordable health care for the poor and elderly (e.g., Medicaid and Medicare in 1965), and energy conservation (e.g., fuel efficiency standards in 1975). Although a broad commitment to meet these societal issues created a broad social contract among the people, the contract is becoming unraveled and contested even as important advances in these three areas have been undertaken in the past decade.
The challenges to the old social compact are most visibly played out in the nation's metropolitan regions, which generate 85% of the gross domestic product. Attacks on government regulation of health, energy and environment issues coupled with the recent contraction of the economy and challenges to the validity of sc ientific inquiry have created a political situation in which metropolitan regions and cities are grappling again with redefining, revising and remaking the social contract that prevailed for nearly half a century. With particular emphasis on the social contracts and political agreements on health, energy and environmental policies of the last 40-50 years, the 2015 UIC Urban Forum focuses on the substantive and philosophical shifts in the urban social contract and examines the remaking of urban social contracts today.
White papers for the 2015 UIC Urban Forum: The Overview White Paper From its origin, the notion of social contract seems to be related to different features of the collective (public?), sometimes based on society and others in specific institutions. From Socrates' argument about the need to obey human law to ensure the organization and functioning of society to a critical contemporary understanding of social rules as possible instrument of social control, theories about the social contract have historically accompanied the philosophical and political debate about the role of state and the making of public policy. This paper suggests that the contemporary shift in the balance of political and economic power represents an opportunity to review social contract theories from the understanding of the changing role of the state in the rise of economic power (and urban policies). David Perry and Natalia Villamizar-Duarte, Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago.
White Paper 1: The social contract on health issues William Kling and Emily Stiehl, School of Public Health, University of Illinois at Chicago
White Paper 2: The social contract on environmental issues Anthony Townsend, New York University
White Paper 3: The social contract on energy issues Howard Learner, Environmental Law & Policy Center
White Paper 4: NGOs, Governments, Private Providers of social and regulatory services. David McDonald, Queen's University
For full abstracts on the white papers visit www.uicurbanforum.org.
