Sustainable Urbanisation: Bridging the Green and Brown Agendas

THIS BOOK EXPLORES how action for sustainability at a local level can move towards global action. It emphasizes the need to reconcile the problems of urban environmental degradation (the Brown Agenda) and the prevailing pattern of exploitative use of the earth’s resources (the Green Agenda), two programmes that, in the past, have competed mostly rather than been complementary. In addition to the theoretical debate, the book includes more than 70 case studies from all over the world where this approach has already been implemented. These cannot simply be transferred to other contexts, but each of the case studies offers general lessons to be learned. Sustainable Urbanization is a book intended not only for decision makers at various levels and community leaders but also for anyone who is concerned with, and engaged in, environmental and development issues. Numerous contact details, information boxes, bibliographic sources and web references help readers to obtain further information about the case studies and other important issues in the book.

The book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter establishes the context of the problem by defining the links to closely related issues such as globalization, poverty, environment and rural–urban linkages, and points out the challenges sustainable urbanization has to face in today’s world. It offers some new perspectives on the subject by introducing a model of “five dimensions of sustainability”, which provides a better understanding of the complexity of urban sustainability.

The second chapter provides an historical review of sustainable development; it looks at the progress made towards urban sustainability since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, and discusses the role cities play in implementing sustainable development. By examining Agenda 21 and the Habitat Agenda vis-à-vis the Green and Brown Agendas, the authors point out the numerous features that the two Agendas share, and stress the need to combine both for mutual reinforcement. Chapter 3 explores in more detail the five dimensions of urban sustainability illustrated in Chapter 1. It looks at the principles underpinning each dimension, and their practical application, by drawing on different local experiences around the world. The final chapter assesses the lessons learnt, and uses these to raise local strategies and action to higher levels. The chapter examines the barriers that hinder the efforts made so far to institutionalize and expand local action for sustainability, and puts forward possible strategies to be considered in order to overcome them.