![Sample our Built Environment journals, sign in here to start your access, Latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5926/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Built-Environment.jpg"})
Abstract
New urbanism, smart growth and the ecological city have been proposed by advocates and others as being the essential equivalent of sustainable development as that term has been broadly defined. This paper focuses on how planners in the USA collectively define these three development approaches in terms of 14 principles of sustainable development. Based on a national survey of practicing planners in the USA, we find that planners everywhere have relatively high, but quite different, expectations regarding what can and should be accomplished under each of the three development approaches. Smart growth is matched most frequently with the sustainable development principles and is also the most understood. The ecological city, while least understood, becomes more frequently matched with the principles as familiarity increases. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these results for our quest to achieve a more sustainable development pattern.
Notes
1. The word ‘community’ was not specifically defined on the survey. In the USA, it is generally and typically understood to mean the municipality at the sub-county level.
2. Regions as delineated by the US Department of Commerce.
3. This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that almost 40% (50 out of 128) of the planning directors and 15% (10 out of 63) of the planning academics also reported not having a post-secondary planning degree.
4. The 2005 survey was sent to 3, 033 planning practitioners and academics, of whom 365 responded.
5. Unlike smart growth and new urbanism, ecological city is not well represented in the US planning literature. There is neither an American Planning Association policy guide (as there is for smart growth; American Planning Association, Citation2002) nor a Planning Advisory Service report (as there is for new urbanism; Barnett, Citation2004), and 2009 electronic searches revealed no books in the American Planning Association's online bookstore and only 11 articles in planning journals with either the term ecological city or eco-city in their titles (compared with 63 and 52two for smart growth and new urbanism, respectively).