Menno Schokker
Literature about sustainable development and sustainable urban area development (SUAD) is vast and complex. Some of the classics, one of them being the report of the Brundtland commission, states that sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs" (Brundtland, 1987). All definitions of sustainable development require that we see the world as a system, a system that connects space; and a system that connects time. Originating among others from this sustainability concept is another classic: the ‘sustainable urban development reader’ (Wheeler & Beatley, 2004). They divide the concept into seven dimensions: (1) land use and urban design, (2) transportation, (3) urban ecology and restoration, (4) energy and material use, (5) environmental justice and social equity, (6) economic development and (7) green architecture and building. Another classic publication in the Netherlands is ‘Duurzame gebiedsontwikkeling: doe de tienkamp’ (Puylaert et al., 2011). They make the concept even vaguer by dividing it into thirteen (!) dimensions, such as water, soil, health and security, history and identity and flexibility. In essence, so they state, SUAD is about acting properly by choosing the right balance of all these dimensions for each urban area development specifically. Energy and resources then, is but one of many dimensions in SUAD.
However, the most important aspect of sustainable development is here totally forgotten. As the Brundtland commission stated, sustainable development require that we see the world as one system. The built environment is part of this system. When one tries to define SUAD, system thinking should be incorporated. When one does, it will become clear that energy and resource scarcity, as the main drivers of permanent climate change, is the most urgent of all dimensions and thus should have top priority in every urban area development. If we do not, as climate change is proven to have catastrophic consequences for many developing countries and ecologies, we will still continue with creating local prosperity at the expense of the global system. In other words, by balancing the sustainable dimensions for every SUAD, while not prioritising energy and resource scarcity, it can merely be ‘sustainable’ for the project development itself, not for the world. Leading to the statement that when energy and resource scarcity is not prioritized, an urban development cannot be called sustainable. Both SUAD reports discussed in this paper here fail miserably.