From planning sustainable cities to designing resilient urban regions

Abstract

In order to be ready for the harsh environmental challenges of the 21st century, cities need a new planning agenda. Defining this agenda is impossible without first revisiting the core concepts of our work: ‘sustainability’, ‘city’ and ‘urban planning’. A four-fold shift in emphasis is vital: from an excessive focus on the development density, to the monitoring and taming of urban metabolism; from a single focus on sustainability to one which also includes resilience; from traditional city to urban region; from policy and land-use planning to strategic urban and regional design. In most parts of the world, the battle for the compact city is lost. However, from the perspective of ecological sustainability, perhaps it was the wrong battle anyway. We should now direct our creative energies at deploying ecological design and clean technologies on a mass scale to our unstoppable, sprawling urban regions.