Urban sustainability is the practice of planning for long-term, self-sustaining communities in urban environments. This involves a multidisciplinary approach and monitoring of sustainability goals, including economic, social, and environmental factors. Challenges include existing infrastructure and political barriers, but new communities can serve as models for future sustainable development.
Urban sustainability is the practical application of community planning to ensure long-term, viable and self-sustaining community vitality in urban environments. Sustainability refers to practices that develop an environment in which degradation does not exceed the capacity for regeneration within the system. An example would be a public park. If visitor numbers exceed the park’s carrying capacity, degradation occurs and public officials may need to limit hours or visitors to ensure the sustainability of park features.
Community planners achieve urban sustainability through a policy process that draws on the opinions, inputs, and expertise of community leaders, special interests, and citizens. A multidisciplinary approach is applied to the creation and maintenance of urban sustainability. Experts and officials working in the fields of architecture, transportation, natural resource management, and economic development collectively come together to design solutions to unsustainable practices. Community planners and environmental experts monitor long-term sustainability as the urban environment undergoes demographic and environmental changes.
Urban sustainability goals are sometimes categorized as the triple bottom line, addressing the management of three areas, often referred to as profit, people and planet. John Elkington, founder of SustainAbility, coined the pun in 1994. The triple bottom line philosophy places equal importance on each of these three areas. Businesses and communities pursuing this strategy aim to achieve a long-term balance between economic, social and environmental sustainability.
Disciplines within urban sustainability include architectural and community planning, with an eye to improving sustainable transportation choices. These choices may include promoting pedestrian modes of transport over other modes. Groups of villages, also known as town centers or urban villages, may gain preference with planners over suburban communities. This planning strategy brings housing, transport hubs, commercial enterprises, and social and medical services within walking distance.
The challenges of creating sustainable urban development are significant. Existing architecture and modes of transport can represent a huge economic investment. These structures were built for permanence and can only be replaced at significant expense. From a political point of view, it is a challenging process to get people living in a democratic society to destroy and replace these structures, because this will affect a person’s habit and mode of transportation.
Even large companies and organizations can present barriers to urban sustainability, as they have an investment in current transportation facilities and modes. This is why urban planning is a long process, typically done in a piecemeal way. There are new communities built from the ground up that are free from these barriers to integrating urban sustainability. These communities can also serve as models and laboratories for understanding the human factor in urban sustainability. By observing the real actions of people within these planned communities, planners can uncover data that will lead to more sustainable urban communities in the future.
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