The Social Sustainability of Cities: Diversity and the Management of Change

THE SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY of cities is defined in this book as: “Development (and/or growth) that is compatible with the harmonious evolution of civil society, fostering an environment conducive to the compatible cohabitation of culturally and socially diverse groups while at the same time encouraging social integration, with improvement in the quality of life for all segments of the population” (page 15). Urban social diversity is not a new phenomenon but it poses new challenges, some of which relate to global changes. Whether cities can respond effectively to these new challenges, and the extent to which the same lessons can be applied to different cities, remain open questions.
Most of the chapters in this book are on individual cities: four North American (Montreal, Toronto, Miami and Baltimore); two European (Geneva and Rotterdam); two Latin American (São Paulo and San Salvador); and two African (Nairobi and Cape Town). All of these cities are shown to have potentially serious social divisions, capable of threatening social sustainability, as defined above. In an introductory chapter, the editors set the scene by reviewing the “New Sociocultural Dynamics of Cities”. They present the need to build “inclusive” cities as one of the major challenges of the coming century and argue that while global and national processes and policies may affect the sustainability of cities,
much also depends on local policies and initiatives that on the face of it may seem “banal and prosaic”. Six policy areas central to achieving socially sustainable cities are discussed in turn, namely, governance; social and cultural policies; social infrastructure and public services; urban land and housing; urban transport and accessibility; employment, economic revitalization and the building of inclusive public spaces.
The city chapters explore these topics in their local context. The most obvious social divisions are very different, ranging from the linguistically defined divisions of Montreal and Miami, to the racially defined divisions of Baltimore and Cape Town, to the nationality defined divisions of Geneva, to the class divisions of São Paulo and San Salvador. Most of these divisions are multi-dimensional, however, and in every city there are local policy choices that will help determine the extent to which these divisions threaten sustainability.
The final chapter, by Mario Polèse, identifies seven policy choices that emerge from the city studies and which relate to social sustainability. These are: fluid housing markets and residential mobility; urban highways and the use of cars in urban space; intermodal competition and public transport; fiscal decentralization versus central transfers; metropolitan governance versus local autonomy; the spatial distribution of social housing; should one worry about downtown, urban density and urban form?
This book does not propose any single route to social sustainability. Many of the threats to sustainability are clearly beyond any individual city’s control. There is, however, a common acceptance that building socially sustainable cities is not a utopian dream and that local policies do matter. Moreover, the detailed analyses of local responses to social problems are of considerable interest, whether they are viewed in terms of social sustainability or in more conventional terms.