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Planners and politicians increasingly have to find solutions for development pressures that consume less land, generate fewer private car miles, use existing urban resources and conserve energy. One solution advocated by policy makers is to increase the number of homes within city centres as an integral tool of regeneration and sustainability policies (Department of the Environment, 1995. Our Future Homes: Opportunity, Choice and Responsibility — the Government's Housing Policies for England and Wales, White Paper, 27 June. HMSO, London; Department of the Environment, 1997. Planning Policy Guidance note 1: General Policy and Principles, February. HMSO, London; Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1998. A New Deal for Transport: Better for Everyone. HMSO, London; Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 2000a. Planning Policy Guidance Note 3: Housing. HMSO, London; Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 2000b. Our Towns and Cities: the Future: Delivering the Urban Renaissance, White Paper, 16 November. HMSO, London.). Equally, dealing appropriately with the physical legacy of the recent past is a challenging problem. Changes to existing towns and cities, however, open up the opportunities for entrepreneurs to exploit obsolete buildings to meet the needs and aspirations of the present. Indeed, Jacobs (Jacobs, J., 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The Failure of Town Planning. Random House Inc., New York.) identifies that: “time makes the high building costs of one generation the bargains of a following generation. …time makes certain structures obsolete for some enterprises, and they become available to others.” This paper examines the background and process of the conversion of obsolete post-World War II office buildings to residential use. A comparative study of North America (Toronto) and Europe (London) will focus on the experiences of two cities where conversions have registered a significant impact in terms of new homes created and had a positive impact upon the respective city centre.

The debate on the role of urban agriculture in the sustainable city discourse remains unresolved in the conventional literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to review relevant literature to clarify the role of urban agriculture in sustainable cities. The search for literature was guided by themes such as: a) urban agricultural practices, b) indicators for the measurement of sustainable cities, c) economic, social and environmental benefits of urban agriculture, and d) negative effects of urban agriculture on the city. The results from a synthesis of the literature indicate that urban agriculture supports the economic, social and environmental sustainability of cities. However, if the discussion gives credence to only the economic dimension of sustainability, then urban agriculture loses the debate. This is because the economic benefits of prime city land that is used used for non-agricultural purposes (such as commercial or industrial) is profound. However, the social and environmental functions of responsible urban agriculture, particularly in reducing the rift between urbanisation and nature, may be difficult to quantify. These social and environmental functions underscore the importance of urban agriculture in the city landscape. The paper concludes by arguing that focussing on only economic sustainability in the urban agriculture-sustainable city discourse is a travesty of the idea of sustainable development. The paper presents practical steps that can be taken to preserve agriculture in cities towards their sustainability.

Impacted by the compounding effects of climate change and urbanization, cities are facing a panoply of risks that threaten their sustainability. Recognizing the potentially catastrophic ramifications of inaction, local governments are increasingly involved in resilience-building activities that are informed by a vast body of research related to different socio-economic, environmental, and institutional aspects of urban planning and design. However, despite its significant impacts on growth and evolution of cities, limited research exists on how urban form can enhance resilience by increasing the abilities to plan for, absorb, recover from, and adapt to adverse events. As a step towards filling this gap, this paper explores how meso-scale urban form elements can affect urban resilience. This is done through synthesizing theoretical and empirical evidence reported in the literature. The focus is on morphological parameters related to the following urban form elements: neighborhoods, blocks, lots, and open spaces. Results show that existing evidence is mainly related to the associations between ‘neighborhood density, size and configuration of open spaces, and land use mix’ and resilience to ‘climate change impacts’, ‘earthquakes’, ‘social issues’, and ‘resource scarcity’. There is also considerable evidence on the association between design of blocks/lots and resilience in terms of climate change adaptation/mitigation and adaptability to changing circumstances. The analysis also shows that each element influences and is influenced by other elements in the urban system and different elements should not be studied in isolation and the interplay between them should be considered. Existing evidence on conflicts is mainly related to density, but measures related to other elements may also involve conflicts. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for future research towards improving resilience of urban form at the meso-scale.

This paper is focused on sustainability assessment for some of the most prominent global megacities: London, New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Singapore, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo. The alternative city rankings are compared and linkages between different sustainability and smart city dimensions are explored. The paper applied ELECTRE III multi-criteria decision aid tool to a panel of twenty indicators. The proposed approach allowed considering performance under four different policy priorities: environmental, economic, social and smart, changing the focus of the sustainability assessment. The results have shown that Singapore dominates the sustainability rankings under environmental policy priorities. Tokyo leads under economic and social priorities, and London and Tokyo – under smart city priorities. The worst performing cities were Shanghai, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. The paper examines the innovative sustainability strategy and new governance structures that led Singapore to become the most sustainable city under environmental priorities and offers recommendations for the lower-ranking cities of Shanghai, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. The assessment could be a valuable tool for policy makers and investors, and could help identify linkages between different sustainability dimensions, highlighting best practices as well as strategic opportunities in cities with sustainability potential.

Cities are increasingly turning towards specialized technologies to address issues related to society, ecology, morphology and many others. The emerging concept of Smart Cities highly encourages this prospect by promoting the incorporation of sensors and Big Data through the Internet of Things (IoT). This surge of data brings new possibilities in the design and management of cities just as much as economic prospects. While Big Data processing through Artificial Intelligence (AI) can greatly contribute to the urban fabric, sustainability and liveability dimensions however must not be overlooked in favour of technological ones. This paper reviews the urban potential of AI and proposes a new framework binding AI technology and cities while ensuring the integration of key dimensions of Culture, Metabolism and Governance; which are known to be primordial in the successful integration of Smart Cities for the compliance to the Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda. This paper is aimed towards Policy Makers, Data Scientists and Engineers who are looking at enhancing the integration of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data in Smart Cities with an aim to increase the liveability of the urban fabric while boosting economic growth and opportunities.

Citizen engagement is heralded as essential for food democracy and equality, yet the implementation of inclusive citizen engagement mechanisms in urban food systems governance has lagged behind. This paper aims to further the agenda of citizen engagement in the transformation towards healthy and sustainable urban food systems by offering a conceptual reflection on urban living labs (ULLs) as a methodological platform. Over the past decades, ULLs have become increasingly popular to actively engage citizens in methodological testbeds for innovations within real-world settings. The paper proposes that ULLs as a tool for inclusive citizen engagement can be utilized in two ways: (i) the ULL as the daily life of which citizens are the experts, aimed at uncovering the unreflexive agency of a highly diverse population in co-shaping the food system and (ii) the ULL as a break with daily life aimed at facilitating reflexive agency in (re)shaping food futures. We argue that both ULL approaches have the potential to facilitate inclusive citizen engagement in different ways by strengthening the breadth and the depth of citizen engagement respectively. The paper concludes by proposing a sequential implementation of the two types of ULL, paying attention to spatial configurations and the short-termed nature of ULLs.

According to Lefebvre's analysis, urbanisation is not only an expansion of urban footprint but, in a broader sense, the radical socio-spatial transformation of society. The cultural setting and its physical manifestation creating distinctive identities within a city are transformed by rapid urbanisation and gentrification. The effects will be analysed in three terms of simultaneous sociocultural-spatial changes; cultural displacement, physical transformation of neighbourhoods, and change in cultural identities. The paper intends to hypothesise whether cultural displacement and altering cultural identities by gentrification and rapid urbanisation will signify gentrified homogenised cities in the future. The paper investigates aspects of multiculturalism and inter-culturalism to mitigate the challenges in sustaining multicultural places in cities. It tries to find the complementary approach of both to generate harmonious multicultural diversities and socio-economic sustainability, keeping the cultural identities intact. One of the examples of rapid urbanisation and gentrification challenging multicultural aspects and altering cultural identities lies in the core of the cultural capital of India, Kolkata in Tangra, Chinatown. The cultural identity of India's only existing Chinatown is changing from 2 to 3 storey live-work based multicultural communities to 30 floors high-rise homogenous gentrified enclaves displacing the diverse cultural communities from the core of the city.

Increasingly guided by the use of ICT, the flow of humans and materials, smart cities and autonomous mobility amalgamate into a game changer in urban planning. This paper critically explores the role of autonomous (driverless) vehicles in plans for urban futures. By looking into the urban plans of 10 European capitals, we investigate the anticipated promises and hazards of autonomous vehicles. Theoretically, the paper draws upon critical urban mobilities studies that invite interlinking carbon reduction, smart cities and mobility planning. By examining these plans, the paper critically evaluates current urban planning for autonomous vehicles by asking whether one can identify any links to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of sustainable cities and communities. A practice-based view on automation is then suggested as a pathway to promote a thorough sustainable mobility transition. It is concluded that none of the plans of the 10 capitals studied require AVs to integrate with public means of transport or to be fuelled by renewable energy sources. Hence, AVs are likely to individualise and intensify the existing automobility regime further and emissions are likely to increase, according to the comparative urban analysis. We therefore conclude that urban policy-making needs to contest the existing techno-centric conception of autonomous vehicles if these are to support the sustainable development goals of cities.

As an integral part of the emerging sharing economy, ridesourcing refers to transportation services that connect community drivers with passengers via mobile devices and applications. The spectacular growth of ridesourcing has sparked a burgeoning literature discussing how it affects the future of cities. This paper presents a systematic review of the existing literature concerning the impact of ridesourcing on the efficiency, equity, and sustainability of urban development. Ridesourcing has a positive impact on economic efficiency. It both complements and competes with public transit, but its influence on traffic congestions near city centers is still unclear. Regarding urban equity, ridesourcing further amplifies the issue of the digital divide and raises concerns over the issues of discrimination and data privacy and security. It is also hotly contested whether prosumers (producers/consumers) are exploited by the sharing economy platforms, whether ridesourcing drivers are reasonably compensated, and how to better protect on-demand workers' rights. Even though ridesourcing has been promoting a green image, its true environmental impact has not been thoroughly investigated. According to the evidence reported in the literature so far, it is unlikely that ridesourcing will reduce private car ownership. Ridesourcing's impacts on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are uncertain based on existing research. This paper outlines the danger of conceptual confusion and the methodological issues in the existing literature. Further research is sorely needed as the future of cities is indisputably tied to the sharing economy and its impacts on shared mobility.

This paper tries to measure morphological characteristics of urban blocks through comparing an existed situation to sustainable development principles for urban form and applying an analytic assessment. The integral aim of this paper is identification of morphologically sustainable urban block and proposing an analytic assessment for measurement of sustainability of urban block. The three main morphological characteristics of urban block are size/length, configuration/grain and orientation. This descriptive-analytic paper uses scientific, empirical and quantitative method of studying of urban form through urban design perspective and French morphological school. The case study of present paper is Dowlatabad neighborhood of Kermanshah city in the west of Islamic Republic of Iran. This formerly informal/semiformal settlement has different problems in three initial characteristics. Approximately 13% of urban blocks are too long, some blocks are very large or very small, some areas have so many 4-way intersections, some areas have low permeability, majority of urban blocks have some cracks and the west side of neighborhood has an improper urban block orientation. Analytic assessment of sustainability of urban blocks of Dowlatabad quarters shows significant difference between adjacent and apparently similar quarters.

The city of Lhasa has experienced urban transformation in recent decades. Accordingly, this paper aims to discover and characterise the urbanisation process of Lhasa, which is the first large, high-altitude city in China to be urbanised. Until 1995, Lhasa mainly served as a regional capital in China with political and administrative functions. Since 2005, the rapid economic development of Lhasa has become a key driver of its urban expansion due to the presence of market mechanisms and the continuous inflow of visitors. After the opening of the Qinghai–Tibet Railway in 2006, the development of urban infrastructures in Lhasa has facilitated the development of the city as well as promoted the health and well-being of its citizens. However, these advancements were accompanied by changes in land use. The land use/cover change reveals the large floating population in Lhasa and underscores the role of high population growth in the economic prosperity of the former agricultural and pastoral areas in the city. The increased amount of air and water pollution, the reduction in the size of agriculture land and the changes in the environment intensify the contradictions between urbanisation and sustainability in a nature-sensitive region such as Lhasa. The paper also proposes some strategies, planning practices and implication on the land use and urban development in the frontier regions of West China cities.

Assigning labels to cities that evoke desirable features has become increasingly popular in recent years with city administrators promoting various notions of the desired city. This article examines the various labels used to classify cities and identifies the key characteristics that each label tends to highlight. It is contended that as proponents of variously labelled cities pursue certain aspects of sustainability, their focus may be too narrow to cover the broad spectrum of sustainability. A literature review of various notions of desirable cities promoted under various labels suggests that cities of the future would need to be dynamic and intelligent in every aspect of social, economic and environmental sustainability. Therefore, it is important that all aspects of sustainability are considered in envisioning the desired future in which to conceptualize the cities of the future. It can be assumed from the past trends of urbanization that future cities will continue to uphold and build upon common goals and values of existing cities such as promoting pleasant urban form, community engagement, economic opportunities, and technological advancement and cultural diversity. This paper reports on a systematic critical review of literature of twelve popular notions/labels of desirable cities as apparent from a scan of citation indices of peer reviewed articles. It identifies the level of consideration of various aspects of sustainability in the central focus of proponents of each notion. It then maps out the concern for sustainability along ten dimensions of sustainability. The findings of the study demonstrate that not all notions/labels of desired cities consider sufficient breadth of the sustainability spectrum. Similarly, in cumulative terms, the various notions of desirable cities amount to different levels of consideration for various aspects of sustainability. The paper concludes by pointing out the need to ensure that the overall focus of scholars dealing with the built environment at any given time provides a balanced regard to all aspects of sustainability.

Sustainability is a concept characterized by its longevity: it remains, after several decades, a popular concept within public organizations, as well as public discourse more generally. In this paper, we trace various translations of sustainability in urban planning documents of three mid-sized cities in Northwest Europe. Emphasizing the importance of a longitudinal approach to assess the uses and definitions of sustainability, we examine translations of the concept across plans through an analytical framework that considers the hierarchical, sequential and integrative linkages between different urban policy documents to understand how local uses of the concept change or remain similar over time. The examination of change and continuity in the translations of sustainability offers insights into how the different manifestations of the concept are influenced by policies external to the city administrations, as well as by imitations of internal, previous policies. This study adds to previous research on contents of plans in relation to how descriptions of concepts take form in a web of interrelated planning and policy documents over time. This paper does so by showing how sustainability as a concept remains on the agenda by being translated into different times and settings, constantly reused with other ideas, and thereby made continuously relevant.

Premature obsolescence of existing buildings is a significant challenge for sustainable regeneration in cities internationally. Adaptive reuse is one approach to address obsolescence in cities globally. High vacancy can be a crucial predictor of obsolescence, but vacancy is poorly understood and can be 'hidden'. This paper presents a novel quantitative method, called Vacancy Visual Analytics Method (VVAM), to identify vacancy in city populations. VVAM permits detailed visualisation of the location and quantity of vacancy, including Greyspace, a form of hitherto undetectable vacancy. To test VVAM, this paper reports its application to a population of office buildings (n=118) in Adelaide, an Australian city reporting high office building vacancy. VVAM revealed the vacancy distribution did not lend itself to whole building adaptive reuse, despite the universal advocacy for greater adaptive reuse globally. This finding implies whole building adaptive reuse may not be appropriate to address vacancy in all cities. This study recommends policy formation should involve a thorough examination of vacancy across building populations to ensure policy efficacy. VVAM presents a useful tool to critically understand vacancy and inform policy to address urban vacancy, including cities affected by COVID-19 office building vacancy.

Urban development has always been related to water systems throughout history. Suzhou is a city with a proud past that is mostly built out of Chinese ingenuity in making water management a development factor. Its parallel pattern of land and water not only gave rise to the first water city model that displays the unique features of the south of Yangtze River Delta, but is also an active reflection of the planning and management of ancient Chinese cities when dealing with natural, urban development and human activities. The paper tells Suzhou's story about the interaction of water and city from urban morphology and urban governance perspectives. Through re-mapping, it will go into the distinguished periods to explore how the specific urban features (distinguished in natural and artificial waterways) have influenced urban development. Along with the prosperity of the water-cities, massive urban construction and environmental issues are enormous challenges in human process. In the rapid urbanization today, how to balance the historical city conservation and sustainable development? Learning from successful historical experiences, the paper sets the scene for more resilient approaches, to integrate and renovate resources for future developments, enhancing the adaptability and sustainability of cities in response to development-conservation challenges.

Germany looks back at a rapidly changing developmental period in which the western part of the country experienced economic prosperity during the 1950s, whereas the eastern part experienced a different start. This situation persisted till the German reunification in 1989. After reunification, Germany's policies were similar to those of the post-WWII period—it focused on the most important needs such as social injustice in cities and quarters and too much (eastern federal states) or too little (western federal states) living space. In more recent times, urban development programs have actively promoted sustainability and tackled the risks posed by climate change in accordance with the Leipzig Charter (2007). This paper provides an overview of the increasingly diverse financing programs implemented by German authorities and identifies the specific target of each program, in addition to budget size and regional distribution. The six major funding programs discussed were all active until 2019. They reflect the development of German city planning funding programs and clarify the diversity of the cities' needs. On the downside, this diversity led to a complexity that requires community planning experts to search for the program (s) that best suit their community's individual development concept and project. The paper also summarizes the most recent developments in terms of new programs and a leaner program structure. The German funding system continues to adapt as the conditions change.

The environmental dimension of sustainability implies the role of cities, considering their institutional vocation to territorial management and their proximity to the needs expressed by the community. This paper aims to investigate the implementation of a sustainable approach by cities in the realization of environmental policies. The methodology followed is regression (GLS method) that relates the expenses for the environmental policy of a sample of Italian cities (116) to some environmental indicators for the same municipalities (considering 2003–2011). Furthermore, t-test methodology is applied to compare the sample average values to the Italian average values of the selected environmental indicators. The paper takes into account not only a specific phase of sustainability, but it also considers the whole sustainability approach. In fact, the research connects the financial starting point of environmental policy (city's environmental financial commitment) to its environmental impacts (environmental indicators). The results obtained show that the investigated cities, on the one hand, direct environmental expenses to critical factors affecting environmental sustainability but, on the other hand, their environmental policies are not very effective. The research output gives useful information to city managers and politicians in order to focus their environmental policy on a sustainability approach that is effectiveness oriented.

One of the tenets of urban sustainability is that more compact urban forms that are more densely occupied are more efficient in their overall use of space and of energy. In many designs this has been translates into high-rise buildings with a focus on energy management at their outer envelopes. However, pursuing this building focused approach alone means that buildings are treated as stand-alone entities with minimal consideration to their impact on the surrounding urban landscape and vice versa. Where urban density is high, individual buildings interact with each other, reducing access to sunshine and daylight, obstructing airflow and raising outdoor air temperature. If/when each building pursues its own sustainability agenda without regard to its urban context, the result will diminish the natural energy resources available to nearby buildings and worsen the outdoor environment generally. This paper examines some of these urban impacts using examples from the City of London where rapid transformation is taking place as very tall buildings with exceptional energy credentials are being inserted into a low-rise city without a plan for the overall impact of urban form. The focus of the paper is on access to sunshine and wind and the wider implications of sustainable strategies that that focuses on individual buildings to the exclusion of the surrounding urban landscape. The work highlights the need for a framework that accounts for the synergistic outcomes that result from the mutual interactions of buildings in urban spaces.

The current fabric of urban areas is largely the result of past land development and land-use planning decisions. Historically, there was relatively little consideration of the impact of these decisions upon hydrological systems within and outside urban areas. Despite their close relationship, urban and regional planning and water resources management have typically been carried out separately and guided by different institutional arrangements. The range of impacts of urbanisation on hydrological systems at the city-region scale, and the dependence of urbanised areas upon these systems, call for better integration between the sectors of urban and regional planning and water resources management to ensure the sustainability and resilience of cities and their regions to future changes and uncertainties. This paper evaluates the extent to which planning mechanisms currently support integration between land-use and water resource sectors. The evaluation draws on a comparative analysis of 113 statutory and non-statutory planning mechanisms in three Australian capital city-regions: South East Queensland, and the Melbourne and Perth Metropolitan regions. Results indicate that the function of water at the city-region scale, including its role in supporting environmental connectivity, needs to be better understood and considered by land-use planning systems; improved institutional capacity is required to enable both sectors to deal with future changes and uncertainties related to water resources; and emergent planning trends supportive of the consideration of water connectivity at the city-region scale are yet to be fully implemented. Based on the results, the paper concludes by exploring how the concept of urban metabolism may facilitate better integration between the two sectors, along with the identification of best suited planning mechanisms and needed changes in governance and institutional arrangements conducive to integration.

In this paper the authors reveal the first-of-its-kind method for the design of truly smart city projects and the elaboration of smarter urban planning. The Intelligenter Method is based on the innovative idea of collaborations discovery in urban systems. The Intelligenter Method shows that what makes an urban project or a plan smart is not its sophisticated architecture or complex master planning in a technological environment, but rather qualitative and quantitative collaborations that the urban subsystem being planned or projected can establish with related subsystems, to safeguard sustainability while promoting urban development and improving resilience. The authors of this research are now sharing with the research community the Method they developed to teach intelligenter smart urban planning and projecting. This Method is also applicable to intelligenter urban policy making and regulation drafting. This second part of the methodology is published in a separate paper in this Cities issue with the title “The Intelligenter Method (II) for ‘smarter’ urban policy-making and regulation drafting”.

Centralized infrastructure systems are ineffective infrastructure solutions for a diverse range of contexts, yet they comprise a substantial portion of current and planned infrastructure systems in municipalities throughout the world. The synthesis of a multidisciplinary, two phase review of existing literature on potentially higher performing infrastructure solutions is presented in this paper. In the first phase, the potential economic and ecological advantages of semi-decentralized and decentralized infrastructure systems are explored. The results of the first phase of the study indicated that innovative infrastructure solutions, particularly hybrid infrastructure, can have substantial economic and ecological performance benefits. Hybrid infrastructure is defined in this paper as infrastructure systems that are integrated within buildings and landscapes that also provide non-infrastructure uses. In order to be considered hybrid infrastructure, the infrastructure system(s) must provide a greater quantity of infrastructure services than the quantity of services that are required by the individual building or landscape, and their occupants. Through an analysis of the results of the second phase of the review, the potential ecological, social and economic benefits of hybrid infrastructure are explored, some of which would otherwise be unattainable. The potential effectiveness of several hybrid infrastructure performance assessment methods is also discussed. The results of this discussion have substantial implications for building performance assessment methods and metrics. In particular, refocusing building performance goals and assessment methods to the urban scale can be more effective than current building performance goals and assessment methods. In addition, the results suggest that improving the ecological integrity of ecosystems through building and landscape design can also benefit the economic and social performance of buildings, landscapes, and local communities. Thus, this paper contributes to deepening the understanding of the maximum ecological performance potential of buildings and landscapes. This is accomplished by investigating potentially effective ways buildings and landscapes can contribute to the development of sustainable cities and regions, in ways that improve the ecological integrity of local natural ecosystems.

The role of transformative agency in facilitating urban transitions has received significant attention in the literature given a growing interest in how cities may provide leaderships for realising sustainable development. Existing debate on the co-productive aspect of transformative agency tends to emphasise the progressive role of non-state actors in mobilising urban reform agendas but has had little focus on the progressive form of agency by local state actors. To advance this debate, our paper draws on existing conceptualisations of transformative capacity in the sustainability literature, which accentuates the plurality of agency. Rather than distinguishing agency narrowly in terms of a particular type of struggle outside the =regime, our paper utilises a practice perspective to examine the mixture of strategies employed by various urban actors. Our paper takes this expanded view of transformative agency to study over three-decade of relatively successful green transformations in Surabaya, Indonesia. This reveals how different actors executed confrontative and co-operative strategies to generate socio-political momentum across the city. We argue that our expanded view of transformative agency can clarify the variation of urban movements in the global south, which co-produces governance innovations and supports long-term societal changes needed to facilitate transitions.

Auckland’s first spatial plan (locally known as the Auckland Plan) is the principal document providing strategic direction for the city’s development over the next 30 years. The Auckland Plan aspires to radically transform transport in Auckland, from a car-dominant system into an integrated public transport network, by proposing a series of expensive infrastructure projects, including rail tunnels under the CBD, rail extension to the airport, and an additional harbour crossing. This paper critically assesses the transport strategies proposed by the Plan from a broad spectrum of sustainability perspectives. In drawing on the events leading to the 2009 Auckland local government reform, the Plan making process and the content of the Plan, this paper shows that the Plan’s transport strategy suffers a range of drawbacks, including limited political support, a rushed consultation process and lack of a robust framework for funding public transport projects. These problems raise questions about the Plan’s capacity to drive a ‘transformational shift’ in Auckland’s transport landscape and ultimately contribute to the vision of making Auckland the world’s most liveable city. This paper concludes by recommending Auckland Council adopts a more proactive approach to transport planning focusing on better civic engagement, more strategic mechanisms to incentivize public transport and to overcome institutional inertia.

The paper presents an insight to the household energy consumption in urban Afghanistan, and is based on household surveys conducted in one of its growing cities – Kandahar. The analysis shows that the energy consumed in residential sector has the major share in the total energy consumed in urban Afghanistan. About 72% of the total residential energy is spent for cooking purposes, and firewood is still the predominant form of energy with a share of around 58% for different end uses. Details on current energy process and the energy expenditure for different income levels have been presented. Although the total energy consumption in urban household is relatively lower in Afghanistan, the paper argues that the increase in consumption and transition to modern fuels is likely with increased urbanization, socioeconomic development and improved electricity supply. Against the backdrop of likely increase in energy use, the issue of sustainability becomes significant and therefore, policies are key to ensuring energy development taking into consideration sustainability concerns.

The concept of “healthy city” promotes the physical, mental, social, and environmental well-being of people who live and work in urban areas. Fostering sustainably healthy cities is the prime objective of the National Urban Health Mission (NUHM) in India. However, attaining this goal requires establishing priorities, key concerns, strategies and guidelines for action. This paper aims to assist policymakers by providing critical insights into the health and living conditions in selected major cities in India, with special emphasis on slums. This paper presents evidence that many of India’s major cities face significant deficits in the provision of basic amenities, including shelter, safe drinking water, improved sanitation and electricity. Demographic and health conditions in these cities lag far behind the goals set forth in national policies almost a decade ago. Despite the apparent proximity of city dwellers to urban health facilities, less than one third of the urbanites in India utilize government health facilities.

Taking the dynamics of second tier city of Galway as a case study, this paper sets out to answer two simple and related questions: How important has culture been to the city’s economic and social development, and how integral is culture in maintaining the city’s economic and social sustainability? In order to provide answers, we look at the city’s development in relation to an emerging body of literature concerning creative cities. We focus on production of culture and gauge its assimilation into the economic life of the city by looking at various facets of the city’s economic structure, including the technology sector. The aim of this paper is to look at cultural policy in Ireland under three interrelated domains: Technology; Institutions; and Spatial Culture (encompassing the place of public performance in urban morphology). The case study of a second tier city provides interesting insights for policy and practice as well as cultural/creative activity arising out of place specific circumstances. The paper explores the changing role of culture and concludes by drawing attention to the tensions surrounding the perceptions of ownership of culture and questions to what impact this will have regarding the city’s sustainability into the future.

Mexico City has long been known as one of the world’s largest mega-cities. Although, the city’s growth rates have slowed since the 1980s, this process is not manifested evenly in spatial terms. Peripheral municipalities continue to grow at higher rates, including those municipalities in the southern part of the Federal District that contain its remaining conservation land. This growth is largely, but not exclusively, driven by the ongoing search for housing among lower-income households in the form of irregular settlement. Over time, this incremental pattern of settlement expansion has fragmented conservation land and impaired its ecological functioning. Given their role in land use planning with the reintroduction of elected local governments in the Federal District in 1997, this situation has placed municipalities quite literally at the “frontlines” of this planning and sustainability challenge. This paper examines the approach for managing land use regularization processes related to irregular settlement in conservation land adopted by the municipality of Xochimilco in its 2005 urban development plan, with reference to the experience of a specific case study community. Based on a series of interviews with residents and planning officials, the paper documents the highly-negotiated nature of “normative” planning that focuses on mitigating the impact of settlement in the conservation zone rather than stopping it completely. Given the enormous social pressures to access land for housing, the paper concludes that realistic efforts to preserve the remaining conservation land must involve a more comprehensive approach that better integrates environmental and social equity issues within and among municipal and upper-levels of government.

Cultural assets are vital aspects for any urban development process. Their importance increases considerably in historical areas, where the richness of cultural heritage has the ability to motivate cultural tourism. This paper emphasizes the sustainable development of urban historical areas based on their potential as cultural tourism sites. It argues that to guarantee the sustainability of any development intervention in these areas, a master planning process must be undertaken to balance all of the aspects of development. It tackles the interconnectedness of these aspects as an approach to their simultaneous development. As a focus of study, this paper raises a question about the ability of a ‘heritage trail’—an area of direct interactions between parties sharing in urban development in historic areas—to achieve the sustainability goals of the involved areas. To answer this question, the paper investigates three nodes of interaction stimulated by the heritage trail: conservation and rehabilitation, interpretation, and micro-economic development. To illustrate the validity of the proposed approach, this paper discusses the heritage trail as an approach used in the Cultural Heritage and Urban Development (CHUD) project in the historical core of Saida (Old Saida), Lebanon as a case study.

This paper shows the results of a study carried out on the central area of Irbid, Jordan in order to assess the effect of the modern urbanization process on the degradation and loss of the city’s heritage. This type of work comes as a result of the need to study the interaction between modern and heritage landscapes, which are in a direct physical contact with each other, and thus to address the problems facing sustainable development. This paper investigates a number of urban planning concerns that include: assessment of heritage/modern landscape compatibility, heritage building degradation, urban land use change and its role in the fragmentation and lack of connectivity between historic sites, visual pollution and the effectiveness of the existing urban system infrastructure. For each problem, a complete scientific analysis supported by a detailed mapping system is performed, resulting in recommendations for the necessary engineering solutions. Spatial analysis through GIS, e.g. 3D modeling, focuses on evaluating the current condition of the urban system near the heritage landscape. The paper presents important findings, such as identifying the impact of urban and infrastructural expansion, detected from historical aerial images at different epochs, on the historic center of Irbid. The study emphasizes the urgent need to solve the current problems related to the urban system, to achieve the vision of sustainability, which includes solving traffic problems for improving system accessibility, and reevaluating the policies and regulations to achieve a balanced interaction between the heritage and modern landscapes within the city.

The onus on the planning systems of most advanced capitalist societies to develop a more sustainable urban development pattern has resulted in an ever-increasing emphasis on policies to increase residential densities. As evident by rapidly sprawling development patterns which are now characteristic of most Western societies, individual residential preferences appear to be at variance with this policy agenda. Using quantitative and qualitative research data this paper examines the motives, behaviour and preferences of residents living in new relatively compact residential environments in the central area of Dublin city. This is a group who have made the choice to move into a relatively compact urban area and hence it will be revealing to assess the motives, preferences and future intentions of this residential population. Evidence presented in this paper would suggest that residential preferences are at variance with policy prescription emphasising the need for higher residential densities as, for example, even among those living in new compact urban environments in the central city, there is a clear aspiration for lower-density living. The preference of the majority of these residents to ultimately relocate to lower-density locations would suggest that urban planners and designers still have some way to go before they can claim to have created residential environments that meet liveability as well as sustainability criteria.

This paper analyzes a model depicting the trend of Chinese urbanization and explores relationships between urbanization and the supply and demand of major energy and mineral resources and between the gross domestic product (GDP) and the urbanization of China. Then it predicts Chinas supply and demand trends from 2005 to 2050. It is predicted that until 2010 Chinas GDP and urbanization will grow at high speed, slowing slightly yet still growing strongly on to 2050. It also argues that the supply of cement, steel, aluminum and coal and the demand of timber, cement and steel have significant effects on urbanization. The paper concludes that China will inevitably face a long shortage of resources if future urbanization is faster than predicted, i.e., China cannot meet the targets of the current urbanization strategy while continuing current energy and resource consumption for its industrialization and modernization.

Rapid economic globalization presents major challenges to the sustainable development of ‘development zones’ in many countries. Development zones in China evolved from the concept of Export Processing Zones (EPZs) in the western world. After China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation, however, they have lost their special preferential status to the overseas investors in terms of promotion of industrialization and inward investment. With the changing global and national circumstances, spatial, economic and social transformations are taking place in these development zones. Given the vast number of development zones in China, the successful integration of these development zones into the regional and urban contexts will have great implications on the economic and social development of China. Based upon a case study of Guangzhou Development District (GDD) which is one of the earliest development zones of China, this paper examines the evolution of development zones in the mainland with particular reference to the development problems associated with their urbanisation in recent years. Although this paper primarily focuses on GDD, the findings and discussion will provide insights for other development zones of China in reviewing their development strategies as most of them are sharing similar development problems.

The immense growth of cities, especially in developing countries, is resulting in the urbanization of both poverty and environmental degradation to a greater degree than ever before. This paper examines the processes of growth and degradation in the Greater Cairo Metropolitan Region (GCMR), currently the world’s tenth largest mega-city. It reviews the region’s growth and selected environmental issues as well as impacts of current efforts on managing the region. The assertion of this paper is that current management policies and bodies lack a comprehensive view of urban governance for the region, which does not bode well for the future environmental and economic sustainability of the region.

Despite the emergence of urban regeneration and sustainable development as parallel strands of British urban policy, there has been little co-ordination between them and an imbalance in action with greater emphasis given to achieving urban regeneration, especially economic regeneration, than to sustainability. It can be argued that all urban regeneration contributes to sustainable development through the recycling of derelict land and buildings, reducing demand for peripheral development and facilitating the development of more compact cities. But below this strategic level British urban policy has yet to fully address the requirement for more sustainable development. This paper addresses this question through an examination of policy in Liverpool and a case study of Duke Street/Bold Street (the Rope Walks Partnership): a mixed use area adjoining the city centre. It is important to place local action within the context of national policies and so the paper begins with some discussion of the extent to which the principles of sustainable development are included within national urban regeneration policies before going on to examine policy at the metropolitan scale in Liverpool and then at the more detailed level of the Rope Walks area. The conclusions suggest that it is economic regeneration and more precisely property redevelopment, that is the main driving force regenerating the area and that there is some way to go before the city or the case study area achieve an environmentally sustainable regeneration process.

The main aim of this article is to put forward various factors, forces, and decisions which have diversified the tendency of urban growth and which have shaped the urban pattern of the city of Gazimagusa (Famagusta)1 particularly after the war in 1974, and to offer alternative policy recommendations, some strategic planning solutions including general design proposals. These are aimed at dealing with the major problems posed by the fragmentation of the urban fabric. It stresses the post-war tendency and problems of urban growth and development, by addressing the social, cultural and demographic, as well as economic and physical changes the city has been facing since then. The paper begins with a brief historical review of the evolution of the urban pattern of the city until 1974 and identifies its urban layout at that time. With the arguments in place, the paper will then provide a framework for understanding and solving the urban problems in the city after 1974 and try to evaluate the positive and negative issues, factors and/or forces which have been shaping its urban structure. Finally, some policy recommendations for planning and design solutions are provided as a basis for the integration of developing, neglected and deteriorated quarters of the city. Particular emphasis is made on the Walled City, Maras (Varosha), Asagi Maras (Kato Varosha)2 as well as the newly developed and developing quarters, which are bringing the city towards sustainable development. Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the publisher version (published version) of this article is only available via subscription. You may click URI and have access to the Publisher Version of this article through the publisher web site or online databases, if your Library or institution has subscription to the related journal or publication.

The aim of this paper is to present an overarching theoretical perspective on the paradox of inequalities and the paradigm shift in mobilities by reflecting on the challenges and opportunities in urban areas faced by the COVID-19 measures. The question of blurring boundaries between the human and the technological aspects and the ways in which they alter the form of communication and action is tackled reflecting on the digital divide and socio- spatial inequalities. In order to connect theory and practice, implications from different cases are provided for shedding light on the expected impacts and scenarios for the changing patterns of mobility and accessibility. The results indicate hybridization of the on-site and online forms of mobilities, as well as new approaches to make culture and leisure more inclusive and accessible. Promoting local integration, emerging forms of local tourism such as staycations, using digital tools to foster co-creation, co-curation, and audience engagement, developing new models of business and consumption reflect the changing patterns of mobility and accessibility. There are avenues for further research that revolve around the questions of inequalities, over-consumption, sociality and sustainability.

Former state-socialist cities were described by the literature as compact and relatively dense urban forms. However, the political transition of 1989–90 has changed the spatial characteristics of these cities, partly due to urban sprawl. Yet, we do not know if such a phenomenon as “sprawl” did exist before 1989. The main aim of this paper is to assess urban expansion in the metropolitan region of Budapest during state-socialism and after the political changes, and measure the intensity of urban sprawl. The main thesis is that urban sprawl did not start with the advent of market forces in 1989–90, but it was already present during state-socialism, however the tempo of sprawl was considerably increased by suburbanization, the dominant form of urban expansion, after 1990. In order to explore the longitudinal land use changes in the Budapest metropolitan region we analyse standardised databases and maps (e.g. military topographic map from 1959, Corine Land Cover database from 1990 and European Urban Atlas from 2012). The discussion is focused, on the one hand, on the growth of urbanized land as an outcome of urban sprawl and the main underpinning factors in different epochs and, on the other hand, on the main driving forces of suburbanization and sprawl. Research results clearly show that urban sprawl has intensified around Budapest after the political changes. This was the result of a complex interplay of socio-economic and political factors, a process driven by the free movement of residents, firms, as well as the reshuffle of the regulatory framework. The study demonstrates that urban sprawl has several negative impacts on social, economic and environmental sustainability in the investigated metropolitan region, which is in line with findings of the literature.

This paper focuses on transformation in sustainable urban governance by examining the prospect of fostering sustainable development through top-down urban governance. It takes a case study of urban development in Saudi Arabia, which had been administered through a centralized framework devoid of the environmental assessment of policies and plans. Urban planning documents made limited references to the environment. Consequently, Saudi cities have been ranked low on environmental sustainability. However, recently, due to the political imperative of addressing the problems, low oil prices, and the Arab Spring, there has been a remarkable transformation in urban governance. The planning of some of the major cities has been decentralized and some policies implemented to curb unsustainable development. This article reviews these changes to investigate how top-down approaches might still be relevant in promoting sustainable development. It concludes that there is a need to implement a framework of legislation and administrative procedures integrated with strategic environmental assessment (SEA) to ensure proper sustainable institutionalised urban governance. The findings could serve as lessons for those operating under similar political contexts especially in developing countries.

Cities need to build on their resilience to cope with a broad range of natural and manmade hazards that threaten their competitiveness, livability, and functionality. Recognizing this need, the resilience concept is increasingly used as an organizing principle to guide research design and facilitate a more informed decision-making process. However, despite the abundance of studies on urban resilience, research on the link between urban form and resilience is limited and fragmented. This study sheds more light on this issue by reviewing and synthesizing theoretical and empirical evidence on how physical structure of cities can facilitate or hinder urban resilience. Acknowledging that each city is located within a nested hierarchy of scales that is characterized by cross-scale dynamics, only the macro-level aspects and elements of urban form are analyzed in this paper. These are namely ‘scale hierarchy’, ‘city size’, ‘development type’, ‘degree of clustering’, and ‘landscape/habitat connectivity’. Key criteria and indicators for analyzing resilience of each element/aspect are specified and used to discuss how macro-scale urban form is related to various resilience properties such as robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, modularity, flexibility, adaptability, and efficiency. Findings indicate that urban form has major implications for social, ecological, and economic functionality of cities and can play a key role in enhancing their resilience and sustainability.

Building on the most relevant literature on cultural regeneration and creative cities, this paper provides an integrated framework to investigate the factors exploited by private actors to stimulate the hybridization of urban cultural heritage with creativity and the strategies adopted to engage stakeholders in bottom-up cultural regeneration processes. Two recent Italian cases of cultural regeneration driven by private actors, which exemplify two sharply contrasting urban extremes, have been chosen to validate this integrated theoretical framework of cultural regeneration in the city. Both have been recognized nationally and internationally as examples of best practice: IlCartastorie Museum in Naples and the Farm Cultural Park, Favara. Our results show that private actors mainly draw upon the innovative thinking of the creative class and innovative approaches to stimulate cultural regeneration. The evolutionary processes, and the resulting models of cultural regeneration, are shaped by the visions of these private actors, which are, in turn, influenced by specific urban conditions. In Naples' highly touristic inner city, the managerial innovation of the IlCartastorie Museum is fostered by the Foundation's pro-tourism growth strategy aimed at increasing both social inclusion and the organizational value of the actual museum. In Sicily, Favara's socio-economic marginalization means that its transformation into a creative city has to be supported by a strategy conducive to social inclusion and sustainability, which conjoins the explicit strategy of the private actor with an implicit emerging community strategy. Preliminary managerial recommendations and suggestions for effective private engagement and community involvement in cultural regeneration and creative city building are given.

Cities, as entities, are inevitably exposed to a range of the internal and external factors that shape their urban development and planning. As complex adaptive systems, cities possess different capabilities and opportunities for the re-configuration, transformation and learning from these disturbances. This city profile explores these processes using Darwin, the Northern Territory's capital and Australia's eighth-largest city as an example. The city profile is situated within Urban Resilience Theory. It unpacks the nuanced way geographic factors and spatial isolation; natural disasters, World War 2 bombing, border security threats, natural resource extraction, and tourism have shaped Darwin's urban development. Understanding these nuances and their spatiotemporal dynamics coalesces into the identified system susceptibilities and opportunities for an adaptive and sustainable development presented in this paper. The city's unique urban governance, successive reconstruction, socio-spatial dynamics, history, and challenges make it an excellent case study of city growth dynamics and resilience within the Asian-Pacific region. The profile highlights Darwin's regional planning and the (historic) production of urban space, along with climate change risks and adaptation, increasingly inaccessible housing and unaffordability, economic growth challenges and demographic dynamics.

Achieving sustainability goals within urban regeneration processes has become essential for our future. This is a particular challenge in post-conflict areas, where among the sustainability factors /economical, ecological and social/, the social one is the least represented, and at the same time the most important one due to the disrupted social structure. In this paper industrial heritage, which is thought to be a heritage category unburdened by issues resulting from a conflict, is discussed as a potential catalyst in conducting a successful socially sustainable urban regeneration in post-conflict contexts. The hypothesis states that endangered industrial heritage sites, due to their societal, historical, architectural, and technological values, present a fruitful base for incorporating sustainability principles and can be seen as a catalyst for urban regeneration of post-conflict areas in the future.

Given that on-site upgrading is the “state-of-the-art” policy for squatter settlements and given that Favela Bairro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is one of the most celebrated of these upgrading programs, this article addresses these three questions: how well did the infrastructure improvements hold up a decade after they were completed?; What happened during those ten years that reversed some of the positive impacts found in an evaluation study right after the upgrading was completed?; and, What can we learn from that?. Specifically, this paper assesses the state of the infrastructure of the 88 informal neighborhoods (favelas) improved by the Favela-Bairro-II (FB2) program between 2000 and 2008. The assessment found that, after a decade, the condition of the infrastructure in the upgraded favelas was no better than the infrastructure in the non-upgraded favelas. Climate change and lack of social cohesion undermined the sustainability of the upgrading. The improvements which deteriorated the most were street pavement, street lighting, drainage, and sewerage systems. Greatest deterioration occurred in larger favelas, those located on steep slopes and those with higher levels of violence and crime. No correlation was found between population density and deterioration of infrastructure.

This paper presents some existing approaches to urban thinking: resilience, systems thinking, emergence, complexity theory and assemblage, in an attempt to understand ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’ at the level of an African City. The focus area is Windhoek, the capitol of Namibia; a vast arid country, situated on the south-west coast of Africa, and home to one of the oldest deserts in the world. The planning paradigm in Windhoek continues to follow a suburbanisation strategy with a focus on the provision of equal technical services across the city, not realising that this urban model, with middle-class residents in mind, continues to promote exclusion of township residents in lieu of Western ideals. The research follows a broad assemblage approach to uncover the often-hidden relationships between social, environmental/ecological and economic systems at play in the city. The research is presented in the spirit of moving beyond the dichotomy of First World ‘models’ and Third World ‘problems’, to encourage policy approaches that seek to really learn from ‘developing’ countries. Globally the majority of urban transformation is happening in informal areas at a rate that calls for radical shifts; shifts in our perceptions of the ‘informal’; our thinking and approach to urban planning; as well as our planning ethics.

This paper mapped and explored the intellectual structure and the mainstream research on stakeholder theory in the urban context and urban management through co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and social network analysis. We found two main intellectual structures: “Urban Strategy” and “Urban Marketing”; which emphasize issues related to environmental management, environmental performance, and collaborative urban governance. “Urban Strategy” is focused on meeting urban stakeholders' expectations through value creation. While “Urban Marketing” manages urban image attractiveness. We also identified three mainstream research themes: “Sustainable Urban Strategy” that arises from “Urban Strategy” and emphasizes sustainability; “Urban Marketing” also doubles as a mainstream research theme with the same features; and “Power of Networks” reveals how sustainable urban governance relates to relational capital, social capital, and partnerships in an urban context. The interface of the intellectual structure and mainstream research with stakeholder theory is discussed using constructs such as value creation and salience. We conclude with implications for policy-makers, local communities, scholars, and urban planners.

Improved sustainability of cities requires equitably distributed and ecologically safe, if not restorative, infrastructure systems, as well as reduced reliance on resources from beyond urban boundaries. To shape infrastructure systems in a sustainable and equitable manner, knowledge about the sources and demands of the resources they convey is necessary, as well as the technologies which ensure their efficient use and safe return to the environment. This paper undertakes a basic urban metabolism assessment to examine resource consumption in the City of Cape Town. It examines the type and quantity of resources which fuel the city and its people, in order to highlight prospects for the sustainability of Cape Town. Key findings from resource profiles of Cape Town show that annual energy and water consumption, which are feared to be approaching system limits, have actually shown decline in consumption since 2007 and 2011 respectively. The key intervention to reduce energy consumption and resultant carbon emissions lies in reducing low-occupancy private car usage, while the key limitations to reducing raw water abstraction through wastewater reuse is the limited ability to store and redistribute it. Comparing maps of resource access to maps of material stocks shows that while the city periphery experiences low resource access, resource stocks are potentially quite dense. The spatial location of resource stock, flow and consumption represents a useful tool for detailed urban planning and service delivery, and is a gap in need of researching. Although flows of food are difficult to track, estimates suggest that 11.6% of the food processed in Cape Town is grown within municipal boundaries and interventions for keeping nutrients in the system should be explored. Examining the flow of people between suburbs over time shows that migration dynamics are entrenching poverty in already high poverty suburbs, as people with economic means are more likely to move to better serviced suburbs than invest in their current ones. This presents a need for the city to invest in these underserviced areas, so as to retain personal investment. Key recommendations for urban and resource planning are the integrated analysis of resource nexuses using system dynamics modelling, as well as integrating departments within the municipality, to enable more holistic intervention strategies. To aid this, research into a baseline examination of differential spatial and temporal flows of resources at suburb level is currently underway.

This paper explores the mental-models of Swedish planners in order to understand the extent to which they support the ideals of sustainable transport. Focussing on three critical challenges: forecast-led versus vision-led planning; tackling congestion; and, public acceptability; the findings, drawn from in-depth interviews, demonstrate mostly advanced thinking. However, implementation can be at odds with these mental models, highlighting important lessons for other cities. There is a disconnect between the objectives of reducing car use and the continuation of investments in increasing road capacity, and a difficulty in transitioning from forecast-led planning to back-casting. Political controversies and public acceptability for measures to decrease car use are an added challenge.

Indicator systems help organizations worldwide to understand their progress toward sustainability. But few systems include measures of the built environment, the primary area of agency for local planners seeking to contribute to sustainability. This paper uses the U.S. as a case study to explore the challenges of, and prospects for, filling that gap. Its main questions are: 1) Can a scan of existing built environment indicators yield a catalog of high-quality indicators that measure sustainability comprehensively? and 2) What gaps and challenges arise and how can they be overcome? The study triangulates answers through a review of sustainability literature, a scan of existing indicators, and consultation with panels of indicator experts. Results suggest that U.S. built-environment indicators do not robustly track local progress toward sustainability, confirm deficiencies in the equity dimension, and provide recommendations that allow communities in the U.S. and internationally to more successfully track their local progress toward sustainability goals.

The Intelligenter Method is based on the innovative idea of collaborations discovery in urban systems. The Intelligenter Method shows that what makes an urban project, masterplan, policy, or regulation smart is not its sophisticated architecture and master planning, nor complexity and legal engineering in a technological environment, but rather qualitative and quantitative collaborations that urban subsystems being studied can establish with related subsystems and stakeholders. Furthermore, this safeguards sustainability while promoting urban development and improving resilience. This Method is also applicable to intelligenter urban planning and city projects. This first part of the methodology is published in a separate paper in this Cities issue with the title “The Intelligenter Method (I) for making ‘smarter’ city projects and plans”.

It is often said that human population and urban growth are the main concerns in environmental degradation. Growing human populations require more food and development, but does it interfere with the sustainability of Earth's ecosystem, or is human population growth detrimental to human welfare, due to limited resources on our planet? Human welfare encompasses a wide variety of factors, and cannot truly be improved by an increase in consumption. Consumerism produces a cycle, in which people work more to earn more to consume more. In a world where happiness is determined by wealth and property (what is purchasable), fundamental changes in the perspective of the individual are necessary in order to decrease the consumption of the limited resources and preserve the natural environment. These changes need not be radical or weird, rather, they could be introduced gradually and address the root of our current destructive manner. First, we must understand the cause of our current human predicament. Why are we now more alone, more selfish, consumer-oriented, destructive, and irresponsible? Then, to control this selfish human instinct to exploit, we need to find fundamental solutions, one of which is proposed in this paper.