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Hoping to repair its tarnished reputation, Mexico City finds new ways to go green. CNN's Harris Whitbeck reports
Comparative Indicators for Policy Reform
University of Michigan and University of Maryland
A project of the Collaborative Science and Technology Network for Sustainability of the Environmental Protection Agency
and the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute
Newman, Peter W. G., Kenworthy, Jeffrey R.. American Planning Association. Journal of the American Planning Association. Chicago: Winter 1989. Vol. 55, Iss. 1; pg. 24, 14 pgs
Abstract (Summary)
Physical planning policies for conserving transportation energy in urban areas were evaluated by comparing how motor gasoline is used in 32 cities worldwide. Data on 10 US cities were extracted and analyzed before comparing them with data from the global sample. The data were collected over a 5-year period primarily by visiting each city and with follow-up correspondence. Gasoline consumption per capita in the US cities varied by up to 40%, mainly because of land use and transportation planning factors, rather than price or income variations. The same patterns appeared in the global sample, though more extreme. Average gasoline consumption in US cities was nearly twice as high as in Australian cities, 4 times higher than in European cities, and 10 times higher than in Asian cities. Allowing for differences in gasoline price, income, and vehicle efficiency explained only half of these discrepancies. Physical planning policies, especially reurbanization and a reorientation of transportation priorities, were suggested as a means of reducing gasoline consumption and dependence on automobiles.
Call#: Van Pelt Library HE305 .N483 1999
Call#: In Process In Process
Portland's support of cycling pays off
View from Jonathan Maus' bike in Portland traffic
According to Bicycling Magazine, Portland, Ore., has the highest number of bike commuters in the country. Ethan Lindsey reports on the industry that's grown up around all those riders.
Nothing inherent in the discipline steers planners either toward environmental protection or toward economic development - or toward a third goal of planning: social equity. Instead, planners work within the tension generated among these 3 fundamental aims, which is called the planner's triangle, with sustainable development at the center. This center cannot be reached directly, but only approximately and indirectly, through a sustained period of confronting and resolving the triangle's conflicts. To do so, planners have to redefine sustainability, since its current formulation romanticizes the sustainable past and is too vaguely holistic. Planners would benefit from integrating social theory with environmental thinking and from combining their substantive skills with techniques for community conflict resolution, to confront economic and environmental justice.
8 February 2007 - 8:This editorial is based on an article that was originally published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research (JPER), Vol. 26, No. 2 (208-221). The full article is available online at Sage Publications.00am
Author: Michael Gunder, PhD
Sustainability is often defined as a balance of the three E's: the environment, the economy, and social equity. But as planners embrace the concept, the sustainability "balance" heavily favors one E: the economy. Michael Gunder warns that planners risk sacrificing the environment and social equity in the name of sustainable economic development.
DOI: 10.1177/0739456X06289359
© 2006 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning
Sustainability
Planning's Saving Grace or Road to Perdition?
Michael Gunder
School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland, New Zealand
This article explores the concept-sustainability-as a transcendental ideal of planning purpose and value. The article critically argues that sustainability largely has been captured and deployed under a narrative of sustainable development in a manner that stifles the potential for substantive social and environmental change, all of which constitutes new purpose, legitimacy, and authority for the discipline of planning and its practitioners while potentially sustaining or creating adverse social and environmental injustices. These are injustices that planning traditionally attempted to address but now often obscures under the primacy of the economic imperative within dominant institutional interpretations of the sustainable development narrative.
Key Words: sustainability • regulation • legitimacy • ideology • injustice
DOI: 10.1177/095624789801000201
© 1998 Environment and Urbanization
Sustainability is not enough
Peter Marcuse
Division of Urban Planning, School of Architecture and Planning, Avery Hall, Columbia University, NewYork 10027, New York; fax: (1) 212 864 0410; pm35@columbia.edu
This paper critically reviews the concept of sustainability, especially as it has come to be applied outside of environmental goals. It suggests "sustainability" should not be considered as a goal for a housing or urban programme - many bad programmes are sustainable - but as a constraint whose absence may limit the usefulness of a good programme. It also discusses how the promotion of "sustainability" may simply encourage the sustaining of the unjust status quo and how the attempt to suggest that everyone has common interests in "sustainable urban development" masks very real conflicts of interest.
The conceptual integration of planning and sustainability: an investigation of planners in the United States
Edward J Jepson Jr
Received 30 July 2002; in revised form 6 January 2003
Abstract. The author reports the results of a survey of more than five hundred local planners in the United States. The purpose of the survey was to measure the extent to which an ecological definition of sustainable development is reflected in planners' views and opinions. Through statistical and other quantitative analyses of the results of the survey, it was found that the conceptual integration of sustainability is most related to the planners' academic background, the state public policy context in which they work, and their general level of support for the concept. Although there is much consistency between planners' views and sustainability there remain several areas of conceptual conflict, primarily in relation to nonurban issues (that is, agriculture and natural open space) and private market forces that affect the use of land.
DOI: 10.1177/0739456X9901800305
© 1999 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning
Environmental Justice and the Sustainable City
Graham Haughton
As the debate on sustainable development and environmental justice has gathered momen tum, considerable attention has been paid to identifying key principles. In this paper, I highlight a number of core principles and then move on to examine differing styles of policy approach, which have gained favor among different sources, for moving toward the sustainable city from market-based neo- liberal reformism to deep green ecologically centered approaches. I highlight four broad categories of approach to sustainable urban development and begin linking those to the core principles of sustainable development.
Since 1978, the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) has worked to show urban communities locally and all across the country how to develop more sustainably. With smarts, creativity and innovation, and before the term sustainable development was even widely used, CNT has been demonstrating its unique brand of sustainable development: development that is good for the economy and the environment; makes better use of existing resources and community assets; and improves the health of natural systems and the wealth of people-today and in the future.
CNT's organizational model is part think tank, part incubator. While the organization carries out complex research and analysis, it's the application of that research for the benefit of real neighborhoods and real people, especially those most in need, that really drives the organization to excel. Sometimes this application is about changing markets, and other times public policies. Sometimes it requires changing both.
Over the years, CNT's work, especially in the areas of energy, transportation, materials conservation and housing preservation, has paid off by fueling a generation of community development institutions and learning, garnering CNT a reputation as an economic innovator and leader in the field of creative sustainable development.