The search for the sustainable city in 20th century urban planning

Summary

A new city has emerged in the 1990s, designed to achieve urban ‘sustainability’. The notion of sustainable urban form has its roots in the Garden City movement at the turn of the century. The ‘garden’ cities of the 1900s and the ‘ecological’ cities of the 1970s were proposed as alternatives to the pathology of modern urban form. Just as cities provide a place for humans to live, so they destroy ecosystems and become unfit habitats for the human spirit. The city must be made more vital, humane, efficient, beautiful, self-sufficient, and natural through a return to a more compact form, its impact on the environment must be decreased. These themes have re-emerged in the sustainable cities of the 1990s, advanced on behalf of future generations and planetary ecology. The sustainable city is a compact city. Calthorpe's ‘Transit-Oriented Developments’ (1989) are hailed as sustainable because their walkable streets free residents from reliance on automobiles and their high density preserves surrounding wildlife habitat. The European Commission (EC) rests a sustainable future for Europe (1990) on the twin pillars of urban compactness and urban regeneration. Nash (1991) believes that sustainable global urbanization would consist of 1.5 billion humans living in 500 compact cities. He calls his vision ‘Island Civilisation’. The sustainable city is also a city of regenerative processes. Girardet (1990; 1992) thinks it has a ‘circular metabolism’, as distinguished from the ‘linear metabolism’ of contemporary cities. McDonough (adviser to President Clinton on ‘sustainable development’) theorizes inThe Hannover Principles (1992) that in order to make civilization sustainable, urban form will have to be based on the principles of nature, which makes no waste, maximizes biodiversity and is sustained by the sun. The urban form designed by McDonald (1993), conceptualized with ideas from chaos theory, contemplates a sustainable city within a sustainable watershed and a form ‘holistic’, ‘diverse’, ‘fractal’ and ‘evolutionary’. Lyle (1994) believes that the sustainable cities of the next century will be based on the ‘green infrastructure’ of ‘regenerative systems’. The commonality linking these landmarks of sustainable urbanization is the ideal of bringing the city into a vital symbiosis with nature. The sustainable city is a ‘green’ or ‘living’ city. The search for the sustainable city in the 20th century has not been Utopian buttopian, a quest to create a form of city suited to optimal development of the Earth island.