‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

What are the resource transfers that will most affect future decisions?
We can select four among a seamless web of interconnected transfer processes that are largely irreversible, 
and therefore foreclose future options. As such, they are most relevant to sustainability:
1
From public to private interests (loss of future collective control) 
2 From poor to wealthy (loss of individual self-determination)
3 From future to present generations (loss of future social choice and adaptive capacity)
4 From environment to development (loss of natural capital and ecosystem resilience)
The diagram in Box 52 shows four spheres of critical resource or wealth transfers via interrelated 
mechanisms. These socio-political and physical mechanisms can be direct or indirect, intentional 
or unintentional. These transfers can result in negative impacts through either:
•
Direct, physical design (externalities and internalities) or 
• 
Indirect transfers through the ‘design’ of institutional and economic mechanisms
(expropriations, privatization and ‘piratization’)
We do not yet count all the 
direct
negative impacts of design. We have not even begun to count 
indirect
mechanisms (wealth by stealth). Because urban planners do not analyse existing systems 
in terms of resource transfers, there is little accountability for the gradual loss of urban amenity or 
wilderness.
Surely we already hold industry accountable for externalities by now?
Negligent environmental practices of industrial manufacturing have gradually come under scrutiny 
(and some company CEOs have gone to jail). However, while designers and developers can be held 
accountable for structural flaws that caused buildings to collapse, they are not held accountable 
for slow damage to public health, let alone sustainability, through poor design. Yet more people 
die from non-sustainable development than from falling buildings. Other indirect institutional 
systems that have the effect of transferring wealth are sometimes totally immune from scrutiny.
This is partly because our frameworks and concepts have tended to ‘invisibilize’ the idea of a public 
interest. We saw how the idea of a public good has been reduced to an atomistic conception of 
democracy as overlapping, pluralist interest-group struggle [Chapter 12].
12
Civil society is becoming 
an apparition. Simultaneously, corporations, regarded as ‘fictional individuals’, are given the status 
and rights of individuals in law in many cases.
13
Corporations can now even sue nations for imposing 

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Positive Development
environmental standards that are deemed to restrain their opportunities to trade.
14
Civil society, 
in contrast, often lacks ‘standing’ to object to private actions that damage public health or threaten 
democratic rights over the long term.
15
For example, individuals and corporations can be held to 
account for toxic torts if these harm individuals measurably and excessively. However, they can still 
reduce the life spans and future options of an anonymous future ‘public’ with impunity.
16
The rights 
of millions of individuals can thus be outweighed by the rights of one fictional individual.