Editorial
The International Journal of Urban Sustainability (IJUSD) aims to provide a forum for cutting edge research and rigorous debate for understanding of the complex inter-related environmental, social, economic, political, spatial, institutional and physical challenges facing towns and cities. Its premise is that multi-disciplinary approaches provide the space for the range of perspectives related to the full breadth of issues that affect urban sustainable development.
The journal also aims to enhance knowledge and understanding of the interactions between urbanisation processes and patterns and environmental changes at the local, regional, and global scales. It seeks to connect theory and practice in ways that are useful to academics, policy makers, community activists and professionals who are concerned with or engaged in building and governing cities in ways that enhance environmental viability and foster urban equity and well being and engender economic vibrancy and political accountability.
There are many good journals that address urban or sustainability research. However, these tend to be either generic in nature or to focus on specific disciplines or aspects of sustainability. There is a lack of English language journals dedicated to a truly multi-disciplinary and holistic approach to urban sustainability, encompassing not only environmental but also social, economic, institutional and physical domains of urban development as a process of building more inclusive and resilient cities and transforming people's lives for the better.
To achieve these objectives the editorial team aims to develop the journal in partnership with its readers. To this end we shall be developing a discussion blog linked to the different issues of the journal that will provide the space for relevant policy discussion and comments of the readers. We also aim to provide book reviews and commentaries in different languages to enable wider access to the journal across geographical and linguistic boundaries. Finally, the launch of the journal provides an additional opportunity for potential contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.
In this issue
In the introduction, I highlight the multi-disciplinary nature and complexity of challenges facing urban sustainability. This is important in the first issue of IJUSD because there is a tendency for different disciplines to study and address different aspects of sustainability only from their own perspectives without fully taking into account those of other disciplines or contextual conditions.
The other contributions provide an excellent start to achieving our mission and establishing the journal as a forum for high quality debate and analysis; creating the space for mutual learning from a wide range of experiences and perspectives in both southern and northern cities.
Justus Kithia explores how the notion of social capital can attain new relevance by motivating the initiation and accomplishment of measures to overcome the climate change risks faced by coastal East African cities. Focussing on Dar-es-Salaam and Mumbasa, Kithia shows that, while both national and local government in these cities have an important role to play in the adaptation of planning in response to climate change, they lack the necessary capacity to do so. As such the role of resource oriented local groups drawing on well established social networks becomes critical in developing effective adaptation capacity at the local level. The key to successful implementation in East African cities therefore is seen in developing partnerships between state institutions and a network of local groups in a synergistic mutually supportive state-community relationship.
Franklin Odoom examines the political economy of urban transport in Ghana. He argues that the main reason for the rapid rise in the number of cars in the country is due to dominant neo-liberal political economy that relies increasingly on liberalisation policies and road construction. The former, he notes, has facilitated the importation of cars including a large number of old cars that are brought in for commercial use by investors and are driven by overworked and over-stretched drivers. Road construction, on the other hand is seen as enticing people to buy and bring more cars on the road. Both are fuelled by the poor public transportation system. The situation is further exacerbated by a neo-liberal and market led planning regime that permits investment and physical developments according to market requirement rather than aiming to enhance urban sustainability. The result is severe congestion, pollution to the urban environment and associated health problems and a high rate of road accident fatalities and injuries. He therefore advocates more progressive and broad ranging policies covering the harmonisation of jobs and residential location, greater use of public and alternative transport modes (e.g. walking and bicycles) and ultimately working towards a new and more humane economic system.
Christoph Lüthi, Jennifer McConville and Elisabeth Kvarnström, examine community based approaches for addressing the urban sanitation challenge in developing countries. Drawing on successful case studies from Laos, Tanzania and India they promote a new policy approach for urban areas combining urban-focussed Household-centred Environmental Sanitation (HCES) and the rural-focussed Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approaches. Both approaches have a technology neutral position to ensure a better match of adopted technology with local social and economic conditions. HCES emphasises multi-stakeholder involvement within a structured planning framework while CLTS is primarily focussed on behavioural change initiated and driven at community rather than individual levels. The two approaches, therefore, are seen as being highly complementary for facilitating multi-disciplinary stakeholder participation throughout the planning, decision-making, and implementation phases for tackling sanitation service delivery in a sustainable manner in challenging urban and peri-urban contexts.
Efraim Ben-Zadok evaluates the formulation and implementation of process tools for Sustainable Community Planning (SCP) in Florida. He argues that process lies at the heart of the sustainability paradigm since it determines effective implementation of plans and shapes long term community capacities for sustainable development. Three sets of process tools are examined in respect of regulation, evaluation and educational aspects of sustainable community planning in the five communities that participated in the Florida Sustainable Communities Demonstration Project. He concludes that these were successfully implemented but that discretionary implementation and regional planning were two major weaknesses. The former leading to short term tradeoffs between key stakeholders and the latter being seen as crucial for reconciling differences between communities and for effective anti-sprawl and sustainability policies.
Moving on to more technical tools for spatial optimisation Yanguang Chen provides a new model of urban population density indicating latent fractal structure and highlighting its potential for improving urban sustainability. He focusses on Hangzhou in China for his case study and concludes firstly that complex systems such as cities can be modelled with multiple mathematical equations. As such there is not one best model for urban density, but different models reflecting different states of urban evolution. His suggested model he argues can be used to predict the spatial complication of urban evolution from simple to complex and then to an even more complex structure. Secondly he notes that the correct fractal dimension is one of the preconditions of spatial dimensions of cities. Thirdly he argues fractals and spatial complexity play a fundamental role in the study of urban sustainability. Cities he notes are complex spatial systems. Therefore, without the theory of spatial complexity, we cannot fully comprehend urban systems, thereby seriously hindering our ability to comprehend or address the challenges of urban sustainability.
Fenmeng Xi, Hong S. He, Yuanman Hu, Rencang Bu, Yu Chang, Xiaoqing Wu, Miao Liu and Tiemao Shi apply a regional assessment and predictive model, SLEUTH, to explore the potential influences of different ecological protection policy scenarios in the Shenyang-Fushun metropolitan region of China. They conclude that a managed urban development scenario is the most appropriate policy approach for the study area but only if urban sprawl can be effectively controlled to balance reindustrialisation, economic development, and ecological protection. Realising such a scenario, however, requires that city governments at different levels adopt explicit eco-sensitive policies such as density planning, smart growth and city boundary policies complemented with detailed ecological protection policies to control urban growth and environmental pollution.
In the expert view point commentaries, Katie Williams explores the underlying concepts and scope of urban sustainability and provides a framework for future research. She poses two basic questions: Firstly “do we know what the sustainable city is?”, and finds that precise conceptualisations are rare and contested. In reality, she argues, most disciplines working in the field construct their own notion of what the concept means for them without much crossover between them. Secondly she asks “do we know how to bring about sustainable urban development?” In response she proposes that there are multiple pathways to achieving urban sustainability emanating from multiple visions of sustainability. Often she notes there is a dualistic division between technical and social approaches. The challenge for the next decade, she argues, is to genuinely move past this dualistic thinking. Therefore, the two most critical challenges for the future are “understanding the ‘vision’ (or visions) and developing a deeper understanding of the multi-faceted processes of change required to achieve more sustainable cities.”
Adrian Atkinson also highlights the lack of communications between three different discourses on urban sustainability that are in fact closely related to each other. These are access to energy to increase economic growth, climate change and the decline of petroleum or ‘peak oil’ syndrome. He goes on, however, to argue for a more radical paradigmatic shift. He challenges the effectiveness of current efforts, which he describes as ultimately being piecemeal approaches to achieving urban sustainability in the current neo-liberal development paradigm of continuous growth and consumption with ever increasing requirements for energy and car use. He therefore argues that inevitably we have to move towards a new locally based development paradigm, be it as a result of peak oil conditions and/or effective global binding agreements for reducing GHG emissions and energy consumption, if we are to maintain the ceiling of 2 degree rise in climate temperature. The new development paradigm he argues will entail a radical shift in consumption and production towards more locally based activities with major implications for the restructuring of cities. He concedes, however, that this is currently way beyond the social imagination and thus the greatest problem in the coming decades will be the psychological adjustment needed to move out of the liberal consumer mentality and approach to life, to one which accepts that one's sphere of life is reduced down to the locality in which we find ourselves and that the re-invention of civilisation itself will require intense cooperation between neighbours.
The papers presented in this inaugural issue of IJUSD challenge and provoke us to think more critically about the way we perceive and achieve urban sustainability. They present us with alternative perspectives on adaptation and transport policy in East Africa and service delivery across a range of cities in the South, highlight the importance of process tools for long term development of sustainable communities in Florida, discuss technical modelling tools for optimising urban density and ecological protection policies in China and provide incisive commentaries on priority research areas and development paradigms for the future. There are other important areas relating for example to mitigation, environmental legislation, governance and the politics of sustainability, participation and community development, impact of globalisation on livelihoods and local economic development, sustainable place making, etc., that have not been touched upon or only partially examined. I look forward to addressing these and other areas of concern in forthcoming issues.