The Impact of Sustainability on City Planning

It seems that cities will play the critical role in the race towards sustainability and climate change before it is too late. Because of this importance DuBruto Urban Planning has put together this small presentation to provide a body of knowledge available within a city planning context. The decision making bodies regarding the built environment has been moving in the right direction. Already so called Green Buildings have become almost obligatory when site planning and building plans are considered by municipalities. It is only relatively recently that it dawned upon some decision makers what sustainability really means within the systems approach to big cities.

Soon the full impact of the basic urban inefficiency towards ecological sustainability as is the present situation will become fully realised on the global scale. It seems logical that economic production and transport of goods and services will become directly affected by this. Eventually – in the not too distant future - only ecologically clean products will be allowed to be produced, transported and consumed. The need for this will become reality long before all cities can fully adapt. The question is can cities move towards such a situation, on what scale and how.

The most obvious realisation for this scenario is that it will be possible to convert parts of sprawled cities to function in an ecologically clean and economically profitable way  On general it has already been said elsewhere that only electrical driven transport systems will be able to provide a sustainable urban environment as will be required.

According to Wikipedia a sustainable city, or eco-city is a city designed with consideration of environmental impact, inhabited by people dedicated to minimization of required inputs of energy, water and food, and waste output of heat, air pollution - CO2, methane, and water pollution. The field of industrial ecology is sometimes used in planning these cities.

In the past developmental experts agreed that a sustainable city should meet the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The ambiguity within this idea lead to a great deal of variation in terms of how cities can carry out their attempts to become sustainable. As time goes by it is becoming all the more clear that to achieve a sustainable ecological environment in time the city will play the critical part and that the city as we know it will have to adapt on a scale that requires a new paradigm in this regard.

According to Wikipedia - Ideally, a sustainable city creates an enduring way of life across the four domains of ecology, economics, politics and culture. However, it can now be said that a sustainable city has to be able to feed itself with a sustainable reliance on the surrounding countryside or any other source available. Secondly, it has to be able to power itself with renewable and non-polluting sources of energy. The crux of this is to create the required small ecological footprint, and to produce the required low quantity of pollution, to efficiently use land in this regard; to convert waste-to-energy, and thus the city's overall contribution to climate change will be as required, if such practices are adhered to.

Universal Principles Creating Sustainable Cities

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