Pathways to Urban Sustainability Challenges and Opportunities for the United States (2016) / Chapter Skim
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3 Principles of Urban Sustainability: A Roadmap for Decision Making
3 Principles of Urban Sustainability: A Roadmap for Decision Making
Pages 27-39
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From page 27... ...
The environment has finite resources, which present limits to the capacity of ecosystems to absorb or break down wastes or render them harmless at local, regional, and global scales. If development implies extending to all current and future populations the levels of resource use and waste generation that are the norm among middle-income groups in high-income nations, it is likely to conflict with local or global systems with finite resources and capacities to assimilate wastes.
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From page 28... ...
The results do show that humans' global ecological footprint is already well beyond the area of productive land and water ecosystems available on Earth and that it has been expanding in the recent decades. DESCRIPTION OF PRINCIPLES Urban sustainability has been defined in various ways with different criteria and emphases, but its goal should be to promote and enable the long-term well-being of people and the planet, through efficient use of natural resources and production of wastes within a city region while simultaneously improving its livability, through social amenities, economic opportunity, and health, so that it can better fit within the capacities of local, regional, and global ecosystems, as discussed by Newman (1999)
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From page 29... ...
. In practice cities could, for example, quantify their sustainability impacts using a number of measures such as per capita ecological footprint and, making use of economies of scale, make efforts to reduce it below global levels of sustainability.
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From page 30... ...
The effort of promoting sustainable development strategies requires a greater level of interaction between different systems and their boundaries as the impacts of urban-based consumption and pollution affect global resource management and, for example, global climate change problems; therefore, pursuing sustainability calls for unprecedented system boundaries extensions, which are increasingly determined by actions at the urban level. This is to say, the analysis of boundaries gives emphasis to the idea of "think globally, act locally." Principle 2: Human and Natural Systems Are Tightly Intertwined and Come Together in Cities Healthy people-environment and human-environment interactions are necessary synergistic relationships that underpin the sustainability of cities.
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From page 31... ...
. Principle 3: Urban Inequalities Undermine Sustainability Efforts Reducing severe economic, political, class, and social inequalities is pivotal to achieving urban sustainability.
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From page 32... ...
This is particularly relevant as places undergo different stages of urbanization and a consequent redrawing of borders and spheres of economic influence. Sustainable solutions are to be customized to each of the urban development stages balancing local constraints and opportunities, but all urban places should strive to articulate a multiscale and multipronged vision for improving human well-being.
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From page 33... ...
Phase 1: Creating the Basis for a Sustainability Roadmap Adopt Urban Sustainability Principles This is the first step to establish an urban sustainability framework consistent with the sustainability principles described before, which provide the fundamental elements to identify opportunities and constraints for different contexts found in a diversity of urban areas. FIGURE 3-1 An urban sustainability roadmap.
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From page 34... ...
Phase 2: Design and Implementation Catalyze and Engage Partnerships with Major Stakeholders and the Public Urban sustainability requires durable, consistent leadership, citizen involvement, and regional partnerships as well as vertical interactions among different governmental levels, as discussed before. Furthermore, the governance of urban activities does not always lie solely with municipal or local authorities or with other levels of government.
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From page 35... ...
Practitioners starting out in the field would be well served by adopting one or more of the best practice standards (e.g., United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Urban Sustainability Directors Network Sustainability Tools for Assessing and Rating Communities, and International Organization for Standardization Sustainability Standards) rather than endeavoring to develop their own unique suite of metrics as their data would be more comparable between cities and would have some degree of external validity built in.
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From page 36... ...
cities experienced unprecedented reductions in population, prominently driven by highly publicized perceptions that city environments are somehow innately unsafe. However, recent scientific analyses have shown that major cities are actually the safest areas in the United States, significantly more so than their suburban and rural counterparts, when considering that safety involves more than simply violent crime risks but also traffic risks and other threats to safety (Myers et al., 2013)
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From page 37... ...
Successful models exist elsewhere (such as British Columbia, Canada's, carbon tax) , which can be adapted and scaled to support urban sustainability action across America.
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From page 38... ...
. Once established, urban metabolism models supported by adequate tools and metrics enable a research stream to explore the optimization of resource productivity and the degree of circularity of resource streams that may be helpful in identifying critical processes for the sustainability of the urban system and opportunities for improvement.
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From page 39... ...
Science can also contribute to these pathways by further research and development of several key facets of urban areas including urban metabolism, threshold detection of indicators, comprehension of different data sets, and further exploration of decision-making processes linked across scales.
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