Concept of a Sustainable City

Since the early 1960s, when Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring attracted world-wide attention, there has been an ever-increasing awareness of the extensive damage to the environment caused by various forms of pollution. An avalanche of literature has been published since the 1980s on the pervasiveness of environmental decay ranging from local to even global scales and culminating in the widely cited Brundtland Report (WCED 1987). Sustainable development has clearly taken on a global dimension, but in recent years it is has increasingly been acknowledged that there is a close mutual interaction between local and global processes. Localities (e.g. cities, villages) are open spatial economic and ecological systems impacting on their surroundings and on the earth as a whole. The recognition that much of the sustainability debate has an urban orientation is also based on the fact that cities are large consumers of natural resources and major producers of pollution and waste. For example, the cities in OECD countries consume approximately 60 to 80 percent of total energy demand (see OECD 1995). The role of localities is even more pronounced, when we recognize that cities are also the major sources of new technology, economic growth and new environmental initiatives. Consequently, the role of the city is increasingly that of an animator and coordinator of creative quality-of-life strategies. And this role is likely to be reinforced in the future (Gibbs 1994; Girardet 1992b).