Local Sustainable Urban Development in a Globalized World

Susan M. Opp, Susan M. Opp, Lauren C. Heberle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754649946
• eBook ISBN: 9781317103714
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'Sustainable development' is a key issue of concern to urban planners across the globe. How it is defined, implemented and measured at the local level remains highly contested and subject to a wide range of external cultural, political and economic pressures. Bringing together leading experts from North America, Europe, the Middle East and SE Asia, this book provides a timely overview of the various methods for understanding and implementing sustainable practices at local levels. In doing so, they present the wide range of local action alternatives available to planners that may be pursued in spite of the constraints generated by globalization processes and highlight the array of public policy options that could reduce the external pressures shaping the possible local alternatives. The book argues that, while local planners and local authorities are willing to act, many are unaware of the range of options available to them. In bringing together these case studies, not only diverse in geographic terms, but also reflecting very different levels of income, general population education, cultural norms, legal systems and government structures, it points out innovations and examples of best practice.

Chapter 1
Alternative Urban Futures: Designing Urban Infrastructures that Prioritize Human Needs, are Less Damaging to the Natural Resource Base, and Produce Less Waste

Raquel Pinderhughes

This chapter addresses the question: how can planners and other urban authorities design and manage urban infrastructure in ways that prioritize human needs, are less damaging to the natural resource base, and produce less waste? The focus is on five urban infrastructure areas: waste, water, energy, transportation, and food systems. Infrastructure refers to “long lived engineered structures, equipment, facilities, and services that are used in economic production and by households which enhance residential and non-residential consumption and production. Infrastructure includes: water systems, solid waste management, drainage and flood protection, roads, mass transit, energy installations, and telecommunications, schools and medical facilities, among other systems” (World Bank 1994).

Infrastructure is an essential element of urban development and a major link between development and the environment. Infrastructure has a dramatic impact on a city’s local and regional land and natural resource base, on people’s daily lives, on the form and quality of urban development, and on the global ecosystem (Rees 1996; De Roo and Miller 2000; Pinderhughes 2004). Adequate infrastructure includes provisions related to both physical infrastructure, such as water supply, sanitation facilities, drainage, roads, solid waste disposal facilities and land management and social infrastructure, such as education and health care facilities (Drakakis-Smith 1995). Adequate infrastructure services are essential to economic activities, coping with density and population growth, improving living standards, reducing poverty, raising productivity, protecting the environment, and promoting social and environmental equity (Ingram and Kessides 1994; Drakakis-Smith 1995). Well-designed and well-managed investments in urban infrastructure development can reduce adverse environmental and social impacts within a city and its periphery, leading to improvements in the natural resource base, public health, and well-being for urban residents (Choguill 1996). Badly-designed and poorly-managed urban infrastructures contribute to environmental degradation, poverty, and social inequality (Drakakis-Smith 1995; Pinderhughes 2004).

One of the most interesting aspects of urban infrastructure from a global perspective is that, although there are very significant differences between cities and regions and between wealthy and poor nations, most urban infrastructure systems share one overarching feature – they have been designed and managed with little regard for their environmental or social impacts. Throughout the world, urban infrastructure systems designed to deliver water, waste, energy, transportation, and food rely on non-renewable energy sources, utilize water and energy inefficiently and wastefully, are based on ever-increasing inputs of non-renewable energy sources, produce air, water, ground contamination, toxic and hazardous waste, and contribute to social and environmental injustices and inequalities.

The fact that infrastructure services related to water, waste, energy, transportation and food are so unfairly and unevenly distributed between countries and regions exacerbates these problems. The richest fifth of the world’s population consume 75 percent of the world’s economic product, while the poorest fifth of the world’s population consume less than two percent. Approximately one quarter of the world’s population living in industrialized countries consume more than 80 percent of the world’s non-renewable resources and most of the world’s food products, while billions of people around the world are deprived of basic needs (Tinbergen and Hueting 1991; Pinderhughes 2004). Although the United States accounts for less than 5 percent of the world population, the nation consumes more than one third of the world’s transportation energy. Contrast this with the entire continent of Africa which uses less than 5 percent of the world’s commercial energy. While people living in industrialized nations are using three to seven gallons of water to flush their toilets, people living in the poorest countries of the world struggle to survive on a daily ration equal to less than a bucket of water per family (Tearfund 2001).

People in wealthy, industrialized nations are able to consume the vast majority of the world’s natural resources and produce the vast majority of the world’s waste at such an enormous scale because chains of production extend throughout the planet and, the social and environmental impacts of these productive and consumptive chains are hidden from their view in low-income communities, rural areas, fenced-off industrial locations, and countries far from their national borders (Ryan and Durning 1997). Since wealthy, industrialized countries import the vast majority of resources they use and export much of their waste, people in industrialized countries benefit from transferring the social and environmental costs of their wasteful production and consumption activities to the poor, developing countries and people that supplied them in the first place (Adriaanse et al., 1997; Puckett et al., 2002).

Although the concept of development refers to processes that are supposed to lead to improvements in the living conditions of people, in practice the development paradigm is associated with planning and economic capacity building strategies that develop infrastructures primarily designed to increase economic growth and profit, not quality of life (Rees 1998; Pinderhughes 2004). One of the greatest tragedies of the development paradigm and its associated planning processes is that six decades of development planning and immense increases in urban and industrial development, economic activity, and economic growth around the world have benefited only a small proportion of the world’s population. More than one fifth of the world’s population still lack access to safe drinking water and four hundred million people still lack access to sanitation services (United Nations Centre for Human Settlements 1994). Almost two-thirds of the urban populations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean have no hygienic means of disposing of human waste and an even greater number lack adequate means to dispose of waste water (Human Settlement Programme 2001). Anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent of urban solid waste in developing countries is left uncollected. Globally, two billion people still have no access to modern energy services and more than one billion people breathe unhealthy air daily. Approximately 1.3 billion people live in areas that do not meet World Health Organization (WHO) standards for airborne dust and smoke. About one billion people live in cities that exceed WHO standards for sulfur dioxide. An estimated three million people die each year from air pollution- two thirds of them are poor people, mostly women and children who die from indoor pollution caused by burning wood and dung (Moosa 2002). In the past four decades, the number of people living in cities in conditions of absolute poverty has continued to increase. Millions of urban residents have incomes so low they cannot fulfill the most basic nutritional and housing requirements. Even after spending the bulk of their income on food, people in poverty suffer from hunger and malnutrition.

Worldwide hegemony of the post WWII development paradigm has meant that despite differences between nations, regions, levels of development, abundance, or scarcity of resources, almost every city in the world now suffers from problems related to dispersed and unbalanced patterns of natural resource and energy consumption, air and water contamination, solid waste accumulation, chaotic growth patterns, traffic congestion, decreasing open space and farmland, environmental degradation, and profound social inequality, poverty, and environmental injustice (Couch 1990; Gossaye 2000; Pinderhughes 2004). In both wealthy and poor nations, and despite differences in levels of industrialization, almost all infrastructure projects related to water, waste, energy, transportation and food systems create environmental and social problems. The negative impacts of toxic exposures from infrastructure projects, such as waste treatment plants, landfills, incinerators, oil refineries, coal plants, freeways, etc., are experienced disproportionately by poor people.

Sustainable Development: Prioritizing Human Needs, Reducing Damage to the Natural Resource Base, Producing Less Waste

The environmental and social problems created by problematic models of urban development, growth, and infrastructure planning are being challenged by advocates of sustainable development. In the last few decades, sustainable development has become the most popular concept and buzzword in contemporary urban planning circles. Yet despite the rhetoric about the need for sustainable development, the vast majority of planners in cities throughout the world continue to support an almost constant replication and expansion of unsustainable economic activities, infrastructure development, and consumption patterns. The vast majority of urban planning practices and procedures continue to foster divisions between economic activities and nature and increasing social inequality within and between groups of people, countries and regions; the result is increasing environmental degradation and social inequality at every level, juxtaposed by increased rhetoric about the need to protect precious environmental resources and reduce poverty through sustainable urban development.

But no matter how passionate the commitment to sustainable development, planners will not be able to move beyond rhetoric until they begin to consistently support and promote alternative paradigms, processes, and appropriate technologies designed to deliver urban infrastructure services in ways that reduce environmental degradation, social inequality, and poverty at a large scale. Fortunately, alternative paradigms and processeses have already been developed.

In the rest of this chapter, I provide a very brief pragmatic summary of some of the most accessible and viable alternative processes and appropriate technologies available to planners and other urban authorities who want to support sustainable urban infrastructure development in the areas of water, waste, energy, transportation and food. The summary provides readers with an understanding of the structural changes that need to occur in order to move away from infrastructures that are environmentally and socially problematic and towards more sustainable forms of urban infrastructure development.

Urban water management

In the area of urban water management, inefficiency and overuse of water in wealthy, industrialized countries must be addressed by decreasing drawdown of the water supply. This can be done by immediately reducing water consumption for agriculture and landscaping, installing grey water systems which capture and reuse water, treating wastewater for reuse using constructed wetlands and living machines, and integrating energy and water efficient processes and technologies into households.

The state of Vermont installed a bioremediation wastewater treatment system that uses a series of tanks containing plants and other organisms to naturally clean wastewater at a highway rest area serving 500,000 people per year. A conventional wastewater treatment system would have cost over a million dollars, compared to the living machine they utilized which cost only $250,000 to install. Sewage is biologically treated and then recycled back into the toilets to be used as flush water. Another advantage was that the living machine can be moved to different locations as needed.

A firm in Budapest, Hungary designed a municipal backup waste treatment system that has the capacity to treat raw sewage generated by urban residents on a floating arboretum gravel barge. This floating greenhouse uses polycarbonate panels set in galvanized steel trusses to hold thousands of plants, bacteria, microorganisms, zooplankton, snails, crabs, and fish in an enclosed sunlit managed environment which breaks down and digests organic pollutants in municipal and industrial wastewater.

In Sumida, Japan, the municipality introduced rainwater management strategies to address water shortages and problems related to flooding. During the wet season, users can rely on community-level rainwater collection systems to provide water for firefighting and other non-drinking uses. During the dry season, rainwater users can connect to the municipal water system. In each of these examples, the community benefits not only through an increase in the fresh water supply, but also through an improved environment.

Developing countries face very different challenges, the most important of which is to develop infrastructures that provide clean water for all urban residents utilizing sustainable water management strategies to deliver adequate and safe water supply.

Urban waste management

In the area of urban waste management, economic activities in prosperous nations must be restructured around a resource recognition approach that is designed to significantly reduce waste in production and distribution processes through reduce, re-use, and recycling processes. Policies which encourage materials exchange, reprocessing, and pollution prevention must be promoted in order to facilitate large and small institutions and businesses to trade, sell, and/or give away unwanted materials to one another in order to use them as raw materials in manufacturing or reuse in their existing form. Reusing metals, paper, glass, plastic, textiles, organic waste, and water will result in reductions in the demand for energy, raw materials, fertilizers, foreign exchange and fresh water sources. The use of plastics must be significantly reduced, particularly in packaging. Planners and other urban authorities must immediately put zero-waste goals, and the strategies needed to get there, into place in their cities. Moving towards zero-waste could be a major source of employment and business creation on the local and national levels (Pinderhughes 2006).

Litigation in the Supreme Court of India resulted in the formation of a committee charged with investigating all aspects of solid waste management in India’s largest cities and requiring cities to segregate wet waste (the biodegradable fraction) and treat it appropriately. Small-scale composting programs that developed from the new policies led to community-based waste collection and composting projects, new job opportunities, enhanced environmental awareness, new public-private partnerships, and the utilization of appropriate technologies. One cautionary note: as we encourage recycling and reuse, wealthy nations must be prevented from using the guise of “recycling” to send their toxic and hazardous waste to poor nations who do not have an infrastructure in place to responsibly process these wastes.

Urban energy management

In the area of urban energy management, planners and other urban authorities must move cities towards energy systems that are flexible and adaptable to different regions and needs, emphasize energy efficiency, increase reliance on renewable energy sources, and ensure affordable, consistent access to modern energy sources for all households. The emphasis must be on efficient use of both renewable and conventional energy supplies in all sectors. Cities must begin to use a diversity of energy sources provided by various combinations of renewable power sources (wind, solar-thermal electric and photovoltaic power), hydroelectric, biomass, and geothermal power. Intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar technologies can provide as much as one-third of total electricity requirements cost-effectively in most regions without the need for new electrical storage technologies. Studies done in the United States predict that while using only 0.6 percent of the land area in the United States, primarily in North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana, wind power could generate about one-fourth of the total US electricity output. The world’s largest wind park, located in Middelgrunden, Denmark, is funded through a creative partnership between users and the public sector that provides energy to over 100,000 households.

Achieving the complimentary goals of energy efficiency and expanding markets for renewable energy technologies will require the passage of new planning and policy initiatives that encourage innovation and investment in renewable energy technologies and, prevent subsidies that allow for artificial reductions in the price of fossil, nuclear, and hydro fuels. Bringing renewable energy to urban households could be another major source of employment and business creation on the local and national levels (Moody-Stuart 2002; Pinderhughes 2006).

The positive impact of alternative forms of energy production can be seen in China, Nepal and India where millions of families rely on bio-mass fuels produced in thousands of biogas digesters. Apart from providing a better and more reliable fuel for cooking, biogas digesters greatly improve public health by reducing respiratory ailments associated with smoke inhalation, improve air quality, reduce ground water pollution, deforestation, soil erosion, and greenhouse gas emissions, and produce higher quality manure from animal dung.

Officials in the country of Yemen, among the poorest nations in the world, have expressed interest in using solar water heaters in major cities. Despite the hot, tropical, sunny weather in the coastal, southern and eastern regions, most of the nation’s hot water heaters are fueled by expensive fossil fuels. Using solar heaters would reduce reliance on fossil fuels, reduce emissions, and allow precious national and local funds to be used for much needed infrastructure development and social programs.

Urban transportation management

In the areas of urban transportation and land use, urban planners and policy makers must begin to support land uses that have considerably lower impacts on the integrity of ecosystems. They must promote transportation modalities that use energy sources which are renewable, produce no more emissions and waste than can be accommodated by the planet’s restorative ability, and pose fewer problems to public health. Land use planning should focus on supporting urban development at a human scale and providing urban residents with affordable, high quality transportation choices that are viable alternatives to the one passenger automobile. Automobile use must be reduced considerably using public policies and planning initiatives that support the use of mass transit and cycling and discourage use of the private automobile. With regard to the popularity of automobiles, it is essential to develop infrastructures that support alternative fuel sources for light motorized vehicles such as biodiesel, methanol, ethanol, hydrogen, and methane (biogas) derived from biomass; as we proceed we must be attentive to the significant problems associated with growing grains for fuel. It is also critical that we require manufactuerers to make changes to the structure and fuel efficiency of the vehicle itself.

Planners in Abidjan, Cote De Ivoire developed a management plan designed to improve the quality, speed and efficiency of bus transit in the capital. The system uses special bus lanes, new road links, and new bus depots, terminals, bus stops, and footbridges to facilitate movement and pedestrian safety.

In Singapore, planners created incentives for reduct...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Boxes
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Sustainable Urban Development: Local Strategies as Global Solutions
• 1 Alternative Urban Futures: Designing Urban Infrastructures that Prioritize Human Needs, are Less Damaging to the Natural Resource Base, and Produce Less Waste
• 2 Employing Information and Communication Systems in Planning Processes to Increase Efficiency in Sustainable Urban Development
• 3 Absolutely Positively Wellington: A Model for Smart Growth
• 4 Environmental Quality and Land Use Plans, a New Development in the Netherlands
• 5 From a Standard-Oriented to an Integral Quality-Oriented Approach
• 6 Town Planning Models: A Look at Polish Cities and Sustainable Development
• 7 The Efficiency of Land Use Conversion
• 8 Moving Toward Urban Sustainability: A Comparison of the Development of Sustainability Indicators in Seattle and Minneapolis
• 9 Assessing Sustainability in Urban Planning: The Potential and Limitations of Indicators as a Means to Measure and Monitor Outcomes of Policy Implementation
• 10 Measuring Sustainability: The Role of Ecological Footprinting in Assessing the Impact of Development
• 11 Regional Environmental Capacity for Sustainable Growth: A Historical Approach
• 12 Sustainability of Urban Transport: Common Strategies and Individual Actions
• 13 Mobile Vendors: Persistence of Local Culture in the Changing Global Economy of Bangkok
• 14 Educational Changes for Sustainable Cities: Autonomous Knowledge
• 15 Educating Architects to Address Urban Problems in Building Design
• 16 Education into Citizenship: Environmental Education, Participatory Democracy, and the Precautionary Principle
• 17 Public Participation in Achieving Sustainability in Central City Neighborhoods
• 18 Balancing Economic Growth and Social Equity: Less-Educated Workers in High-Tech Regions
• Conclusion Roles and Realities
• Index