Mitigating environmental harm in urban planning: an ecological perspective

Abstract

Environmental sustainability is a major focal point of urban planning, yet scholarly discourse often fails to grapple with the environmental contradictions inherent in the reliance on economic growth found within the prevailing sustainable development paradigm. This paper develops an ecological-sociological framework for analyzing sustainable planning best practices, which shape local sustainable planning implementation. A key argument of ecological-sociological scholarship is that sustainable development is an expression of ecological modernization, which erroneously tries to solve environmental problems through economic growth-based strategies. The authors use content analysis to examine the American Planning Association’s 2015 Sustaining Places: Best Practices for Comprehensive Plans and find that its principles and environmental harm mitigation strategies incorporate an ecological modernizationist approach to sustainable planning. The authors argue that embrace of economic growth and underspecification of ecological standards hinder the field of sustainable planning from promoting best practices that mitigate environmental harm in the long term.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• ecological modernization
• mitigation
• sustainable development
• urban planning

Acknowledgments

The authors appreciate the indispensable comments and suggestions we received from Brock Ternes, Paul Stock, Jarron St. Onge, and the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 “Although the national support for municipal climate policy (top-down aspect) differs between the countries, the outcomes are relatively similar in municipalities, which are alike with regard to their extent of ‘climate activism’ (bottom-up aspect)" (Kasa, Leiren, and Khan 2012: 225)

2 https://planning.org/aboutapa

3 http://planning.org/pas/reports

4 Link to the list of all PAS reports published: https://planning.org/pas/reports/archive.htm