Visions of the sustainable city coalitions and conflicts

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Visions of the sustainable city coalitions and
conflicts

• Karin Bradley
• 2005-12-02

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Content

• Planning for sustaianable development in the
  Nordic countries
• New Urbanism and sustainable development
• Perspectives on urban development coalitions and
  conflicts

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New Bearings for the Nordic Countries Planning
for Sustainable Development

• Aims
• - Show how planning on national, regional and
  local levels can be used to promote sustainable
  development
• - Complement the Nordic strategy for sustainable
  development (2000) with planning perspectives

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Local sustainable development/Agenda 21

• A clear link between environmental issues and the
  economy as well as political issues
• A clear global dimension where local issues are
  related to global effects
• Cross-sectoral integration of environmental,
  social and economical issues in planning,
  decision making and the working process
• A conscious effort to engage citizens in the
  planning process, for example through NGOs, labor
  organizations, schools, companies etc.
• Working with local issues with a much greater
  time horizon (three or more generations)

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Ecological footprint

• The Ecological Footprint (EF) is a measure of the
  consumption of renewable natural resources by a
  human population, be it that of a country, a
  region or the whole world. A population's EF is
  the total area of productive land or sea required
  to produce all the crops, meat, seafood, wood and
  fibre it consumes, to sustain its energy
  consumption and to give space for its
  infrastructure. The EF can be compared with the
  biologically productive capacity of the land and
  sea available to that population.
• (Wackernagel Rees)

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Ecological footprints in hectares (1999)
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Scott Campbell (1996)
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Conclusions from the study

• Uniform picture of the sustainable society
• The mixed and compact city, small scale retail
  and service, well-delimited urban areas, unbroken
  green areas, revitalized industrial areas,
  efficent public transportation and multimodality,
  well-preserved local cultural heritage and new
  eco-efficient buildings

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Conclusions from the study cont.

• Sustainable development has meant more emphasis
  on environmental aspects, increased public
  participation, cross-sectoral planning, efforts
  to integrate social, economical and environmental
  concerns in planning

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Further conclusions from the study and questions
it has raised

• Lack of social and cultural aspects
• Lack of global perspectives
• Planning for sustainable development a
  bottom-up and municipal business?
• Integrating social, environmental and economical
  concerns a radical task or only lots of
  compromises?
• Sustainable development the catchword of the
  90s and early 00s, but does it still have meaning
  for the future?

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Sustainable cities

• There is no single model for sustainable cities.
  They could be compact, polycentric, linear or
  dispersed. It all depends on the context, the
  socio-environmental ethic you employ, factors as
  transportation, eco-cycling, biodiversity.
• No scientific evidence that compact cities are
  more sustainable.

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• However you could outline principles for
  sustainable urban development, for instance as
  incorporating
• Inter-generational equity
• Geographical equity (or transfrontier
  responsiblity)
• Intragenerational equity
• Inter-species equity
• Procedural equity
• (Haughton, 1995)

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New urbanism

• American movement aiming at creating lively
  urban neighbourhoods with strong sense of
  community, safe, walkable and transit-oriented
• Mixing of functions, mixing of traffic modes
• Local history, culture and economy

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The Disney town Celebration, USA
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Jakriborg, Sweden
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Background to and assumptions in new urbanism

• Marriage of Traditional Neighborhood Design
  and Pedestrian Pocket/Transit-Oriented
  Development
• Fear of loss of community
• Emphasis on human scale
• Nostalgic
• Modern urban planning seen as unnatural
• Totality approach Design Codes, Transect,
  Charette

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Sandercock (1998) on Celebration

• All houses must have a front porch, to promote
  neighbourliness, and all will be within walking
  distance of the school and downtown area. Those
  who currently moving in fully expect that other
  new residents will have a similar outlook on
  life. It seems to me that it will attract people
  with the same values, says one new resident
  (quoted in Katz, 1997). And if it does not, there
  is no shortage of rules to ensure conformity. All
  curtains visible from the street must be white,
  or off-white. Residents may not work on cars or
  boats in the street. All visible shrubbery must
  be appropriate and approved by Disney.
  Neighbourliness, you might say, is mandatory.
  (p. 194)

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Poundbury, UK
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Seaside, Florida, US
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Critiques to new urbanism

• Idealising community feeling, but neglecting its
  backsides (Young 1990, Harvey, 1997)

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Harvey (1997) on new urbanism

• Community has ever been one of the key sites
  of social control and surveillance, bordering on
  overt social repression. Well-founded communities
  often exclude, define themselves against others,
  erect all sorts of keep-out signs (if not
  tangible walls). (p. 3)

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Sandercock on new urbanism

• This is the flight from metropolis to
  community, an attempt to turn away from the
  challenges of the present, and return to an
  imagined pre-industrial golden age of extended
  families living in small villages, engaged in
  face-to-face relations. But this ideal fails to
  acknowledge that pre-industrial life was in fact
  embedded in a highly unequal, feudal,
  patriarchal, and imperialist society. That there
  is clearly a demand for such nostalgia as a way
  of life indicates a crisis in the transition from
  modern metropolis to postmodern cosmopolis. (p.
  194)

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Critiques to new urbanism

• Idealising community feeling, but neglecting its
  backsides (Young 1990, Harvey, 1997)
• Lacks gender, ethnicity and class analyses
  (Sandercock, 1998)

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Critiques to new urbanism

• Idealising community feeling, but neglecting its
  backsides (Young 1990, Harvey, 1997)
• Lacks gender, ethnicity and class analyses
  (Sandercock, 1998)
• Preserving local traditions and local economy
• Counter to regional enlargement which has meant
  larger freedom for many societal groups

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Sandercock on new urbanism

• Unlike the gated communities which are also
  mushrooming around the US, these examplars of the
  New Urbanism, like Seaside and Celebration, are
  more subtly exclusive communities of like-minded
  people seeking, in some cases literally, a return
  to the imagined world of their childhood. (p.
  194)

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Critiques to new urbanism

• Idealising community feeling, but neglecting its
  backsides (Young 1990, Harvey, 1997)
• Lacks gender, ethnicity and class analyses
  (Sandercock, 1998)
• Preserving local traditions and local economy
• Counter to regional enlargement which has meant
  larger freedom for many societal groups
• Exclusive enclaves have so far not proven to be
  more environmentally friendly or improving social
  integration (Robbins 2004)

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Robbins (2004) on new urbanism

• Few, though, of the many and different projects
  New Urbanists claim as theirs have been actually
  realized and none have met the goals set out in
  their various charters and written texts. (p.
  212)

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Critiques of new urbanism cont.

• An image of being sustaianable. There is no
  urban structure that is per definition
  sustainable. Context-dependent
• North-American perspective, but with global
  ambitions
• Simplifying the alternatives modernism/sprawl OR
  new urbanism. There are MORE alternatives

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A simplification!
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Robbins (2004) on new urbanism

• Finally, at it its core is an authoritarianism
  similar to that of modernism. The New Urbanist
  belief that their design solutions are the one
  and only answer to the problems that beset us is
  not only a conceit but it is a dangerous conceit.
  In their unquestioned belief in their own good
  works, New Urbanists try to close off discussion
  of alternative visions of urbanism and urban
  design. They try to limit the range of diversity
  of the discourse about a subject that can only be
  strengthened by more, rather than fewer,
  potential approaches to what has become an
  increasingly intractable problem what to do
  about our cities and suburbs. (p. 228)

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Strengths of new urbanism

• We DO need to make our cities more sustainable
  and energy-effective and TOD and mixed use is one
  way to do it
• Ability to bring diverse actors together
• Often better than conventional North-American
  urban development

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How is sustainable urban development interpreted
in your home countries?