Change We Believe In

The framing and conceptualization of sustainability in urban and suburban areas plan and design is an important aspect to consider when discussing sustainability. Rob Krueger and David Gibbs’ article on “‘Third Wave’ Sustainability? Smart Growth and Regional Development in the USA” (2008)-looks at urban sustainability from the perspective of the “Smart Growth” discourse, which defines urban growth and development as development that is “sustainably aware,” holistic in nature, and that is “environmentally sensitive, economically viable, community-oriented, and sustainable” (Ye et al., cited in Gibbs and Krueger 2008, pg. 1266). They argued that this kind of growth focuses on regional and urban development planning perspectives with the goal much more similar to that of the compact urban planning perspective. Krueger and Gibbs (2008) asserts that the sustainability science framework that is embedded within the smart growth discourse has a contextualized economic and market-based dimen...

Sustainability and sustainable communities are fast growing fields. Part of conceptualizing and defining what a sustainable community is and how it is measured is part of the current discussion on what are the characteristics of a sustainable community. There are various definitions and tools that are used to measure sustainable communities by experts, practitioners and scholars in the fields of sustainability science, sustainable development and environmental sustainability. Agyeman (2005) takes us through various theoretical and policy-based discourses of sustainable development, sustainability science, environmental justice, and environmental sustainability discourses, which emerged since the 1980s when the World Bank redirected its focus to developing countries in providing financial services in the form of large loans to expand their programs in social services rather than solely infrastructural development (World Bank 1980). These efforts, Agyeman noted, led to the establis...