The challenge of attaining a sustainable urban morphology for South East Queensland

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. Self-containment, at least in urban planning terms, relates to the level of travel trips that are internal to the locality. Any locality that has a majority of all its travel trips occurring internally is deemed to be self-contained, though this assertion is not uncontested (Cevero, 1995; Ewing et al., 1996; Healy & O'Connor, 2001). Hence, the colocation of employment, retail, leisure and residential uses to satisfy the majority of local needs are critical to self-containment. Perhaps more important, however, is the mode of transport for these trips and the provision of high quality, high frequency and highly accessible public transport offers greater sustainability gains than car use (Yigitcanlar et al., 2005).

2. Over the last decade and a half, urban commentators (McLaren, 1992; Cevero, 1995; Jenks et al., 1996; Newman & Kenworthy, 1999; Williams et al., 2000; Williams, 2005) have generally used the term sustainable urban form to depict the growing debate concerning the economic, social and environmental costs of existing urban morphology. This is a manipulation of the term form and is used to describe both urban structure and the fine grained strategies of implementation, which are more correctly associated with urban form.