Challenges to Urban Sustainability
Challenges to urban sustainability refer to the obstacles and issues that cities face in maintaining a balance between economic, social, and environmental well-being. These challenges can include overpopulation, inadequate infrastructure, pollution, and resource depletion. Addressing these challenges requires integrated planning, efficient resource management, and the promotion of sustainable practices to ensure the long-term viability of urban areas.
5 Key excerpts on "Challenges to Urban Sustainability"
eBook - ePub- Yvonne Rydin(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 Sustainable Development and the Urban Agenda Introduction Sustainable development is now widely acknowledged to be an important policy goal, possibly the most important policy goal. This curious and not always well-understood mix of environmental protection, sustained economic activity and social welfare has become the public face of much policy activity. Its profile has been raised by the continuing and growing evidence of the scale and significance of climate change, by the enduring nature of profound social inequalities and even by the reversal of economic fortunes as economies slide into recession. Sustainable development offers the prospect of a very different world and this includes our urban areas, our towns and cities and the built environments that they comprise. Urban areas are central to all aspects of sustainable development. They are centres of economic wealth-creation and yet, at the same time, locations of social deprivation. They can be associated with all sorts of environmental degradation – loss of green space, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions linked to energy use, waste generation and excessive water consumption to name but a few key aspects – and yet offer the scope for considerable resource efficiencies. This raises the prospects of changing our urban areas to contribute more fully to sustainable development rather than undermine it. Change can, of course, occur within the existing physical fabric but there has been increasing interest in using the processes of urban development to drive change. Understood broadly, urban development can encompass new build, demolition and rebuild, refurbishment, regeneration and area improvement. These all have considerable potential for reshaping the built environments of urban areas. This book looks at the role that urban development can play in delivering sustainable development...
eBook - ePub- Cedric Pugh(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...A concentration on ‘sustainable cities’ focuses too much on achieving ecological sustainability within increasingly isolated ‘eco-regions’ or ‘bio-regions’. Seeking ‘sustainable cities’ implies that each city has to meet the resource needs of the population and enterprises located there from its immediate surrounds. But the goals of sustainable development are the meeting of human needs within all cities (and rural areas) with a level of resource use and waste generation within each region and within the nation and the planet that is compatible with ecological sustainability. It is unrealistic to demand that major cities should be supported by the resources produced in their immediate surrounds but entirely appropriate to require that consumers and producers in high-consumption, high waste cities reduce their level of resource use and waste and reduce or halt the damaging ecological impacts of their demands for fresh water and other resources on their surrounds. Although the discussions and recommendations about ‘sustainable cities’ have much of relevance to reducing the depletion of environmental capital caused by production and consumption in cities in the North, they concentrate too much on individual city performance. What is more important for sustainable development is the local, national and international frameworks needed to ensure the achievement of sustainable development goals worldwide, including the appropriate frameworks for cities. What sustainable development implies for city authorities A commitment to sustainable development by city authorities means adding additional goals to those that are the traditional concerns of local authorities. Meeting development goals have long been a central responsibility of city and municipal authorities...
eBook - ePubUrban Social Sustainability
Theory, Policy and Practice
- M. Reza Shirazi, Ramin Keivani, M. Reza Shirazi, Ramin Keivani(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This book covering multiple fields such as urban governance, mobility, architecture, urban space, urban heritage, urban policy, eco-urbanism, neighbourhood planning, and housing shows that urban social sustainability is multidisciplinary and multifaceted. This collection brings different disciplines together, but certainly does not cover all possible ones: there are still several disciplinary areas in the built environment in which the social sustainability dimension remains unexplored, or is in early stages of development, such as urban health, architecture (interior space), zero-carbon urbanism, etc. Despite covering different disciplines, this volume only has one case from the Global South that is under-represented in social sustainability research. Broadening geographical coverage of social sustainability discourse, to gain a more context-related and nuanced understanding from the social dynamics of cities and societies, remains a gap that needs to be filled in future studies. Diversifying social sustainability research in terms of geographical coverage, supported by empirical data from the field, could also push the limits of the ‘normativity’ of the social sustainability concept and bring more analytical input into the discourse. As noted in Chapters 1 and 2, unlike environmental sustainability, which refers to tangible and verifiable environmental facts, social sustainability moves quickly into normative territory so that qualities and criteria suggested for improving social sustainability standards are contested, open to interpretation, and place specific, with no consistency...
eBook - ePubDesign Activism
Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World
- Alastair Fuad-Luke(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Global–Local Tensions: Key Issues for Design in an Unsustainable World This chapter charts how our world is changing in order to highlight the key issues that all designers need to engage with now and tomorrow. The extent and speed of these changes to our global environment, to the human condition and to the man-made and natural world are astounding. All trends point to a reduction in biodiversity and a deterioration of the life-giving support provided by global ecosystems. One species – humans – are causing the demise of tens of thousands of the estimated 5–10 million species that inhabit planet Earth. If all humans were benefiting from this exploitation of natural capital then the global human consciousness could sleep easier. But in reality there are billions of people in abject poverty living in conditions where improving quality of life (QoL), and thereby the potential for human development, remains a considerable challenge. There is a daunting task ahead, during the early to mid-21st century, to try to balance the Earth’s ability to provide biological sustenance with a growing human population, and to simultaneously nurture a ‘better life’ for humans. This task is made immeasurably more difficult against a background of climate change. Significant changes are taking place within the global ‘commons’ – such as climate change, 1 changing sea levels, 2 water availability from the hydrosphere 3 – and within more local socio-economic, political and bio-regional circumstances (see for example the challenge in China). 4 Change is global and local, and inseparable, because even local economies are caught up in the global economy and the phenomenon of globalization. Aside from this global–local dualism, there is another major dualism that needs to be highlighted...
eBook - ePub- Peter P. Rogers, Kazi F. Jalal, John A. Boyd(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 2 CHALLENGES OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT C ONCEPT OF S USTAINABILITY T he concept of sustainability explores the relationship among economic development, environmental quality, and social equity. This concept has been evolving since 1972, when the international community first explored the connection between quality of life and environmental quality at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. However, it was not until 1987 that the term “sustainable development” was defined as “development that can meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987.) This definition established the need for integrated decision making that is capable of balancing the economic and social needs of the people with the regenerative capacity of the natural environment. Sustainable development is a dynamic process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs. According to the Brundtland Commission, sustainable development, in the final analysis, must rest on political will of the governments as critical economic, environmental, and social decisions are made. There are many definitions and concepts of sustainable development as depicted in Table 2-1. Besides, there is a vast literature on sustainable development, which also provides other definitions, concepts, principles, criteria, indicators, and references (see: http://www.iisd.org/ie/info/ss9504.htm and http://www.gdre.org/sustdev). Reviewing these and other relevant references constitutes a major task in trying to understand the meaning and significance of the term “sustainable development.” Table 2-1...
