Planning for Sustainability

Creating Livable, Equitable and Ecological Communities

Stephen Wheeler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136482007
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

How can human communities sustain a long-term existence on a small planet? This challenge grows ever more urgent as the threat of global warming increases.

Planning for Sustainability presents a wide-ranging, intellectually well-grounded and accessible introduction to the concept of planning for more sustainable and livable communities. The text explores topics such as how more compact and walkable cities and towns might be created, how local ecosystems can be restored, how social inequalities might be reduced, how greenhouse gas emissions might be lowered, and how more sustainable forms of economic development can be brought about.

The second edition has been extensively revised and updated throughout, including an improved structure with chapters now organized under three sections: the nature of sustainable planning, issues central to sustainable planning, and scales of sustainable planning. New material includes greater discussion of climate change, urban food systems, the relationships between public health and the urban environment, and international development.

Building on past schools of planning theory, Planning for Sustainability lays out a sustainability planning framework that pays special attention to the rapidly evolving institutions and power structures of a globalizing world. By considering in turn each scale of planning—international, national, regional, municipal, neighborhood, and site and building—the book illustrates how sustainability initiatives at different levels can interrelate. Only by weaving together planning initiatives and institutions at different scales, and by integrating efforts across disciplines, can we move towards long-term human and ecological well-being.

1

INTRODUCTION

The past century has seen the rise of an urban and suburban landscape that is profoundly different from anything created before. From the office parks, malls, freeways, residential tracts, and abandoned inner cities of many affluent countries to enormous megacities in developing countries, human communities have taken on dramatically new forms and characteristics, with radically new lifestyles and economies. Cities that once occupied a few square miles now cover thousands; populations that once walked most places are now dependent on motor vehicles. People are surrounded by vastly larger quantities of material goods, but often feel the lack of social connection, meaning, or ability to control their world.

Although recent patterns of development have brought many benefits, they are unsustainable in that they cannot be continued in the same ways for very much longer. Today’s development practices—both economic and physical forms of development—consume enormous amounts of land and natural resources, damage ecosystems, produce a wide variety of pollutants and toxic chemicals, create ever-growing inequities between groups of people, fuel global warming, and undermine local community, economies, and quality of life. Since the changes are incremental, it is hard to appreciate how rapidly our world is being transformed and how fundamentally these processes affect our lives and the choices available to us.

One of the main challenges of the twenty-first century will be to bring about more sustainable human communities. The broad and diverse field that has come to be known as “planning” can play a central role in meeting this goal, in that it both establishes overall visions of desired futures and also deals with the nuts-and-bolts of how communities, regions, and countries are built and run, including how they relate to natural ecosystems.

Since the origins of formal urban and regional planning activities more than 100 years ago, results have been decidedly mixed. Much good has been done in terms of improving human welfare, but unfortunately planners themselves have led many unsustainable development practices. They have issued the building permits for suburban sprawl, programmed the monies for ever-expanding freeway systems, set up urban renewal programs that at times have bulldozed vibrant neighborhoods, assisted with the rise of an economy run by global corporations, and, most importantly, failed to be as creative as they might at developing alternative development visions. Planning must do better. It can and should reorient itself in the twenty-first century to focus on the challenge of creating more sustainable communities. This role will acknowledge existing politics and traditions but seek every opportunity to bring about creative change. Though it will not be easy, such sustainability planning can be an exhilarating and meaningful path for new generations of planners, architects, landscape architects, engineers, political leaders, progressive developers, and community activists.

The purpose of this book is to provide a systematic background to the subject of sustainability planning as it cuts across many different specialties and scales. The chapters in Part One examine how the sustainability concept has developed and assumed center stage in global debates, its general implications for planning, how it relates to planning theory, some tools useful for sustainability planning, and some main ways that sustainability might be pursued at various scales of planning. Part Two, new to this edition, investigates particular issues such as climate change, energy and materials use, urban growth, transportation, housing, social equity, and population. The aim is to highlight key issues within these fields that are important to sustainability. Part Three examines international, national, state and provincial, regional, municipal, neighborhood, and site- and building-scale planning in turn. Sustainability efforts of different types are possible at different scales and one main point of this book is that action at all of these levels is necessary, and must become better integrated into a coherent, mutually reinforcing framework if sustainable development is to come about.

Although much of the focus of the book is on North American planning, it attempts to take a global perspective, bringing in examples from Britain, the European Union, Asia, and elsewhere. Similar sustainability problems exist in many parts of the world, not least because the same technologies and modes of development are spreading everywhere. Many of the potential solutions to current problems are similar as well. Every part of the world can learn from the others, and the most rapid and creative change will come about if we do learn in this way.

Though many existing books discuss sustainable development in one way or another, the intent here is to more fully develop sustainability planning theory in a way that is broadly accessible and useful to students, practitioners, and lay readers alike. I would also like to invite readers personally to become more actively involved in planning for sustainability, whether through projects in their homes, yards, neighborhoods, and local ecosystems, or within larger-scale political, economic, and social systems. All of us can play some role in bringing about a more sustainable society, and doing so may be one of the most satisfying and meaningful activities we can undertake.

THE NEED FOR CHANGE

To start with, we need to take note of the nature and variety of current sustainability problems. We have around us an ongoing disaster that—partly because it takes place in slow and incremental fashion, and at scales and in places seemingly removed from our daily lives—is little discussed by the media, politicians, or most citizens. In part our development crisis is one of environmental damage, leading to phenomena such as global warming, resource depletion, and the loss of species that are difficult or impossible to reverse. In part this crisis is one of misguided urbanization, leaving us with the fragmented landscape of subdivisions, freeways, malls, commercial strips, and office parks that cover vast quantities of land and form the daily reality for many of us. In part it is one of transportation, having to do with rising traffic congestion and overdependency on motor vehicles. In part it is a problem of economic development, having to do with the worldwide promotion of high levels of material production and consumption, the growing power of global corporations, and the decline of smaller-scale businesses that could form a more locally oriented, socially responsible economy. In part we have a challenge of housing, which is frequently scarce, unaffordable, or inappropriately designed and located. In part we face a crisis of poverty and growing inequality, which leaves enormous numbers of people worldwide without access to decent-paying work, good schools, health care, or other necessities of life, while promoting overconsumption among the insular and politically powerful rich. And in part we have a crisis of spirit in which our values, empathy, and methods of understanding both individually and collectively are not what is needed to create a more sustainable world.

All of these problems are interrelated. Though much effort is underway to address them, such crises are not being acknowledged adequately by current political and professional leaders, and must be tackled in far more comprehensive ways if we are to heal the damage of the past and head in more positive directions in the future.

One of the best ways to appreciate the unsustainability of current development patterns is to observe them firsthand. For example, my wife and I recently traveled up Highway 101 in California, a freeway running much of the length of the state. While we were still more than 30 miles away from the main Bay Area cities we began to see the outposts of suburban and exurban sprawl. “For Sale” signs appeared on either side of the road, and many fields were no longer being farmed—an indication that speculators were holding them waiting for prices to rise. As we traveled onwards through what was once some of the richest farming country in the world, the road soon became surrounded by a varying mixture of ranchettes, housing subdivisions, warehouses, office parks, strip commercial developments, big-box stores, golf courses, and motor vehicle dealerships. A chaotic, low-density exurban world, in other words, dominated by large-scale corporate activity and with little sense of place, sensitivity to the environment, or social cohesion.

Crossing a row of hills we descended toward San Jose and neighboring towns—the area known as “Silicon Valley” and envied the world over as a prototype of successful economic development. Whereas the great cities of the past created attractive squares, boulevards, and residential districts, Silicon Valley is organized around tacky commercial strips, crowded freeways, and generic office parks. There is very little public space in this landscape. Housing is astronomically expensive, roads are congested, and air and water pollution are both significant problems for the region. Workers routinely must commute 60 miles or more to their jobs. Many work for low wages in poor conditions. Rather than being the world’s success symbol, by many tokens the development of this area has been a failure.

As we reached the southern border of Oakland it became apparent that the region’s development boom had not touched that city’s lower-income, African American neighborhoods. The blocks we passed by were characterized by empty lots, dilapidated houses, and boarded-up factories. This land, urbanized 50 to 100 years ago, has now been abandoned by many employers and wealthier residents, leaving these impoverished areas to cope with a depleted tax base, toxic contamination, declining schools, crime, and a lack of jobs.

We finally reached home after traveling in heavy traffic for two hours through an urbanized landscape that showed few signs of the beauty, culture, livability, and ecological richness that attracted many people to the Bay Area in the first place. Rather than using its great wealth to create livable, equitable, and ecological communities, our society had done much the opposite. Similar patterns of unsustainable urban development are occurring the world over, though they take somewhat different forms in different places and times. Radically different alternatives are needed.

In contrast, a growing number of communities offer at least partial examples of development that is much more socially and ecologically healthy. The downtown revitalization of Portland, Oregon, the transit systems of Paris, Toronto, and Curitiba, Brazil, the pedestrian districts of Copenhagen and most other European cities, the ecological wastewater treatment marsh of Arcata, California, the democratic budgeting process of Puerto Alegre, Brazil, the relative social equality of northern European countries, the wind farms of China and Spain, and many other examples offer hope for the future. Many such cases will be described later in this book. These examples suggest that different ways of developing our world are possible, and that the action of dedicated individuals can make a difference.

To better understand the overall situation, let us look at some key implications of current development trends more closely.

Climate change

In the early twenty-first century it has become increasingly clear that global warming is the most serious sustainability problem we face. By the early 2010s measurements were beginning to show atmospheric CO₂ concentrations above 400 parts per million (ppm), up from around 285 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, the rate of increase in humanity’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was accelerating, not decreasing. With more heat, water vapor, and energy in the atmosphere, extreme weather events are becoming more common worldwide. Computer models show likely temperature rises of at least 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) by 2050 even if GHG emissions are reduced substantially and heating of between 2 and 5.5° C (3.6 to 10° F) by 2100 under various scenarios.¹ Paleoclimatic data suggests the strong possibility that even hotter temperatures, up to 16° C (29° F) or more, could be reached after that.² Corresponding sea level rise is likely to be between one and two meters this century. Effects on crops, water supplies, and coastal cities would be bad enough, but an even worse impact is likely to be acidification of the oceans (which absorb about the half the carbon dioxide we emit). By killing much life in the seas, we may sow the seeds of our species’ destruction.³ Clearly, heading off dangerous climate change is now our top sustainability priority. Doing so, however, means change in almost every other dimension of social and economic development.

Land use and suburban sprawl

Another main though less apocalyptic set of problems concerns land use. Although most pronounced in motor vehicle-dependent communities of the United States, Canada, and Australia, suburban sprawl is advancing almost everywhere else as well. The problem is not just that this style of development tends to be low density—some sprawl may occur at moderate to high densities—but that it possesses many other characteristics that increase GHG emissions and work against the evolution of livable, walkable communities. Sprawl development is often fragmented (the landscape becomes a mosaic of inwardly oriented projects that don’t relate to one another or are separated by oversized roads), discontiguous (developments leapfrog out into the countryside), homogeneous (each project contains only housing, offices, or stores), poorly connected (street networks are characterized by cul-desacs, loop roads, or other poorly connected patterns), and ecologically destructive (new development fails to take into account natural landscape features and helps generate pollution and excessive resource use). All of these characteristics undermine livability and sustainability. Though certain forms of suburban sprawl have been known throughout history, by far the largest amount has been built since the Second World War. Factors leading to this rapid suburban and exurban expansion include a continual rise in motor vehicle ownership, government road-building, subsidies for suburban homeownership, race and class prejudice, and ideals of country living based on the English tradition of the picturesque country estate.⁴ As researchers such as Harvey L. Molotch, John R. Logan, Mark Gottdiener, and Marc Weiss have shown, sprawl has also been facilitated by “growth coalitions” of development interests and politicians which have orchestrated suburban development.⁵ In the early1920s Sinclair Lewis’s fictional Babbitt epitomized this boosterish growth mentality, seeking suburban expansion with very little sense of the true social and environmental costs.⁶ A century later, attitudes are much the same in many communities throughout the world.

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