Sustainable urbanism is both the study of cities and the practices to build them (urbanism), that focuses on promoting their long term viability by reducing consumption, waste, and harmful impacts on people and place while enhancing the overall well-being of both people and place. Well-being include the physical, ecological, economic, social, health and equity factors, among others, that comprise cities and their populations. In the context of contemporary urbanism, the term "cities" refers to several scales of human settlements from towns to cities, metropolises and mega-city regions, which include their peripheries, suburbs, and exurbs.Michael Neuman and Angela Hull, editors. 2011. The Futures of the City Region. London: Routledge, . Sustainability is a key component of professional practice in urban planning and urban design, along with its related disciplines of landscape architecture, architecture, and civil and environmental engineering. Green urbanism and ecological urbanism are other common terms that are similar to sustainable urbanism; however, they can be construed as focusing more on the natural environment and ecosystems and less on economic and social aspects.Mostafavi, M. and G. Doherty, editors. 2010. Ecological Urbanism. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller Also related to sustainable urbanism are the practices of land development called Sustainable development, which is the process of physically constructing sustainable buildings, and the practices of urban planning called smart growth or growth management, which denote the processes of planning, designing, and building urban settlements that are more sustainable than if they were not planned according to sustainability criteria and principles.
Terminology The origin of the term sustainable urbanism has been attributed to Professor Susan Owens of Cambridge University in the UK in the 1990s, according to her doctoral student and now professor of architecture Phillip Tabb. The first university graduate program named Sustainable Urbanism was founded by professors Michael Neuman and Phillip Tabb at Texas A&M University in 2002. There are now dozens of university programs with that name worldwide. As of 2018, there are hundreds of scholarly articles, books and publications whose titles contain the exact words sustainable urbanism and thousands of articles, books and publications that contain that exact term, according to Google Scholar.
In 2007, two important events occurred in the USA that furthered the knowledge base and diffusion of sustainable urbanism. First was the International Conference on Sustainable Urbanism at Texas A&M University in April, which drew nearly 200 persons from five continents. Second, later in the year, was the publication of the book Sustainable Urbanism by Doug Farr. According to Farr, this approach aims to eliminate environmental impacts of urban development by supplying and providing all resources locally. The full life cycle of services and public goods such as electricity and food are evaluated from production to consumption with the intent of eliminating waste or environmental externalities. Since that time, significant research and practice worldwide have broadened the term considerably to include social, economic, welfare and public health factors, among others, to the environmental and physical factors in the Farr book; thus taking it beyond an urban design field into all of urban planning, policy and development.Tigran Haas, editor. 2012. Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond: Rethinking Cities for the Future. New York: Rizolli Approaches that focus on the social and economic aspects use the terms fair cities and just cities. The United Nations has incorporated sustainable urbanism into its global sustainable development goals as goal 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities.
There are a range of organizations promoting and researching sustainable urbanism practices, including governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, professional associations, universities and research institutes, philanthropic foundations and professional enterprises around the world. Related to sustainable urbanism is the Ecocity or Ecological Urbanism movement which is another approach that focuses on creating urban environments based on ecological principles, and the resilient cities movement which focuses on addressing depleting resources by creating distributed local resources to replace global supply chain in case of major disruption.Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer, 2017. Resilient Cities; Overcoming Fossil Fuel Dependence. Washington DC: Island Press, 2nd edition As resilient cities thinking has evolved, it too has gone beyond climate change to incorporate resilient responses by hybrid urban-natural ecosystems such as city regions to natural disasters, war and conflict, economic shocks and crises, massive migration, and other shocks.
Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature, by Doug Farr (2007) The architect and urban planner Doug Farr discusses making cities walkable, along with combining elements of ecological urbanism, sustainable urban infrastructure, and new urbanism, and goes beyond them to close the loop on resource use and bring everything into the city or town. This approach is centered on increasing the quality of life by affording greater accessibility to activities and places within a short distance and by increasing the quality of products that are offered.
Comparison of similar principles New Urbanism emerged in the 1980s and was an early touchstone for sustainable urbanism, since it is based around bringing activities and land uses closer together, increasing urban and suburban densities, being more efficient in terms of infrastructure provision and transport energy use, and having more within walking distance. There were significant critiques of New Urbanism and its more international term Compact city that found it was a limited approach.Michael Neuman. 2005. “The Compact City Fallacy” Journal of Planning Education and Research, 25(1):11-26 Its principal conclusion was that the sustainability of a city could not be measured by form alone, and that processes were critical to measure sustainability. The criticism of New Urbanism is that it attempts to apply 19th century urban form to 21st century cities and that New Urbanism excludes economic diversity by creating expensive places to live that are highly privatized and controlled. Also, critics believe that, while the New Urbanism contains many attractive ideas, it may have difficulty dealing with a wide range of contemporary issues including scale, transportation, planning and codes, regionalism, and marketing.
Sustainable urbanism bridges the gaps of New Urbanism by including the factors listed in the lead paragraph of this Wikipedia entry.
Smart growth is a related approach to sustainable urbanism. As conceived by urban planners, it helps achieve greater jobs–housing balance, but it is likely to leave the sense of place unaddressed. While New Urbanism may fulfill that dimension of sense of place, it is not viewed as an approach that will lead to communities that are energy self-reliant. The ecological city approach seems to complementary to the other two approaches in terms of their respective areas of strengths and weakness.
Green urbanism probably contains the most similar ideas with sustainable urbanism. They both emphasize on interplay of cities with nature, as well as shaping better communities and lifestyles. However, the principles of green urbanism are based on the triple-zero framework: zero fossil-fuel energy use, zero waste, and zero emissions. Sustainable Urbanism, on the other hand, is more focused on designing communities that are walkable and transit-served so that people will prefer to meet their daily needs on foot.
Defining elements of sustainable urbanism
Compactness
Compactness, or density, plays an important yet limited role in sustainable urban development because it can support reductions in per-capita transport energy use by increasing walking, cycling, active transport and public transit use. The relatively low density of some urban and especially suburban and exurban development is too low to support efficient transit and walk-to destinations. Such low-density development is a characteristic of urban sprawl, which is the major cause of high dependence on private automobiles, inefficient infrastructure, increased obesity, loss of farmlands and natural habitats, pollution, and so on. For these reasons, sustainable urbanism tends to promote more compact development with greater intensities of use and greater variety of uses and activities in a given urban area.
Research has shown that low-density development can exacerbate non-point source pollutant loadings by consuming absorbent open space and increasing impervious surface area relative to compact development. While increasing densities regionally can better protect water resources at a regional level, higher-density development can create more impervious cover, which increases water quality problems in nearby or adjacent water bodies.
Increasing neighborhood population density also supports improved public transit service. Concentrating development density in and around transit stops and corridors maximizes people's willingness to walk and thus reduces car ownership and use. Sustainable urbanism seeks to integrate infrastructure design increase with density, because a concentrated mixed-use development required less per capita infrastructure usage compared to detached single-family housing.Michael Neuman, 2011. “Infrastructure Planning for Sustainable Cities” Geographica Helvetica, 15(2) 100-107
Biophilia and Biophilic Cities The Biophilia hypothesis was introduced by E. O. Wilson. It refers to the connection between humans and other living systems. Within this concept, humans are biologically predisposed to caring for nature. Biophilic cities are those that bring nature into the city by increasing parks and open spaces, green and blue corridors, and networks that link them. Increasingly, biophilia refers to habitats that support other species, sustainable food production and urban agriculture. Thus, biophilia and biophilic cities are an underlying component of sustainable urbanism.Timothy Beatley, 2010. Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning. Washington, DC: Island Press
Sustainable corridors Sustainable corridors are similar to a wildlife corridor in that they connect one area to another efficiently, cheaply, and safely. They allow people to pass from their immediate proximity to another without relying on cars or other wasteful and inefficient products. It also relies on accessibility to all people in the community so that the mode of transportation is the most convenient and easiest to use for everyone. Sustainable corridors also include biodiversity corridors to allow animals to move around communities so that they may still live in and around cities.
High performance buildings High performance buildings are designed and constructed to maximize operational energy savings and minimize environmental impacts of the construction and operation of the buildings. Building construction and operation generates a great deal of ‘externalized costs’ such as material waste, energy inefficiencies and pollution. High performance buildings aim to minimize these and make the process much more efficient and less harmful. New York City Department of Design & Construction put out a set of guidelines in April 1999 on High performance buildings that have broad application to sustainable urbanism as a whole worldwide.