Sustainable City

Definition: 
The sustainable city is one that promotes environmental benefits and processes, maintains social capital to support equity and inclusive processes of decision making, and ensures economic viability and opportunity for gainful employment (Fig. 1).

Fig 1. The three realms of sustainability, showing the pairwise overlaps and ideal goal in the center.  This version was obtained from the Eagle, Colorado, city website.

This term refers to an ideal vision for the ways cities should be structured and function in the future.  Strictly, no city will be completely self sustaining, since all require the input of resources from beyond their borders, and depend on spatially extensive environmental processes to clean their wastes.  However, it is possible for cities to become more sustainable.  In addition, sustainability does not imply stasis or fixed structure and functioning.  Rather, sustainable cities would need to be resilient, or adaptive in the face of social, economic, and environmental changes.

Examples:

A sustainable city is characterized by a number of important characteristics.  These can best be understood by contrasting them with a city type that is quite familiar in the industrial and petroleum-based economies of the world.  In those places, the most usual precursor of the sustainable city is the sanitary city.  In a sanitary city:

1)   Environmental hazards and disamenities are dealt with by engineered solutions;

2)   Hazards were segregated via such processes as zoning;

3)   Wastes were removed from the areas where people lived or worked;

4)   Management and planning were problem-specific, that is, were isolated in administrative silos;

5)   Management was by experts, who were housed in public or quasi-governmental agencies;

6)   Management, planning, and action were funded by the public purse;

7)   The government was the sole agency of action; and

8)   The demographic transition was assumed to be a driver of change leading to improved human wellbeing in the urban realm.   

Although the sanitary city has been an important achievement for many people and nations, it is not universally available, nor is it as environmentally beneficial as it might be.  These limits lead to a characterization of the sustainable city.

The sustainable city, as an ideal, contrasts with each of the characteristics of the sanitary city, above. 

1)   Solutions are to be both engineered and based on bioecological processes.  

2)   Hazards should be minimized rather than segregated or shipped downstream or downwind.  

3)   If wastes must be removed or isolated, that should be done in a way that does not disadvantage poor or otherwise marginalized populations or communities.  

4)   Management and planning should address the urban area as a system, not as a collection of isolated problems, to avoid unintended effects or invisible indirect effects. 

5)   Management should involve the communities and populations that will be affected. 

6)   Funding may exist as a mixture of public, private, and volunteer contributions.

7)   Governance will be mixed, involving the formal government, non-governmental organizations, communities, and the private sector. 

8)   Deterministic models of development, such as the emergence of the industrial state, or the universal benefit of a gradual demographic transition, cannot be counted on to deliver the benefits of urbanization. 

Achieving the sustainable city will require new models of urban structure and functioning.  Socio-ecological research can be an important ingredient in assessing the success of transitions toward sustainability, and provide knowledge to all participants in the civic process that establishes and evaluates sustainability plans and goals.

Why Important:
The sustainable city contrasts with realities or visions of the city that have serious limits in terms of social equity and functioning, ecological amenities and services, and economic vitality.  City visions illustrating such shortcomings might be those that emphasize single functions or processes, such as industrial cities, squatter cities, tourist cities, or cities focusing on consumption.  The possibility of the sustainable city motivates an open, civic, decision making process to improve existing or planned cities (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Screenshot of the City of Baltimore, MD, sustainability plan webpage.  The plan identifies cleanliness, pollution prevention, resource conservation, greening, transportation, education, and green economy as goals.

The sustainable city should not be used as a greenwashing technique, signifying attention only to limited improvements, such as energy efficiency, or economic throughput.  The reality of difficult tradeoffs, the need for rigorous monitoring of social and environmental adaptations and their effects on people – not just economic parameters – are a requirement for assessing the degree to which a city is sustainable.  It is admittedly difficult to achieve an open decision-making process to outline a vision of sustainability suitable to any specific city and the region on which it depends.   It may be more difficult still to employ a data-based assessment of how well sustainability is being achieved, and to improve plans and management if the assessment suggests that is needed.  Resilience, the ability of a system to adjust to internal and external socio-ecological changes, is the underlying mechanism by which sustainability as a social vision can be promoted and its degree of achievement quantified.

For more information:

Andersson, E. 2006. Urban landscapes and sustainable cities. Ecology and Society 11: Art 34.

Baltimore City. 2009. The Baltimore sustainability plan. In, vol. 2011. Baltimore City Sustainability Commission, Baltimore.

Birch, E.L., Wachter, S.M. (eds) 2008. Growing greener cities: urban sustainability in the twenty-first century. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.

Grove, J.M. 2009. Cities: managing densely settled social-ecological systems. Pages 281-294. In: Chapin, I., F. S., G.P. Kofinas, C. Folke, eds. Principles of ecosystem stewardship: resilience-based natural resource management in a changing world. New York: Springer Verlag.

Musacchio, L.R. 2008. Metropolitan landscape ecology: using translational research to increase sustainability, resilience, and regeneration. Landscape Journal 27:1-8.

Pincetl, S. 2010. From the sanitary to the sustainable city: challenges to institutionalizing biogenic (nature's services) infrastructure. Local Environment 15:43-58