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Rod Burgess
of the environmental, social and global sustainability benefits derived from the
concentration of urban functions’.
Compact cities and global urban sustainability
The current resurgence of interest in policies for compact cities dates from the late
1980s and has largely been propelled by the search for the global sustainability goals
on climatic change and resource use embodied in the Brundtland Commission
Report (WCED, 1987) and the UNCED Agenda 21 proposals (1993). In this context
these theoretical and policy developments differ from earlier efforts in two ways.
First, in contrast to modernism they reassert a fundamental environmental rationality
for architecture, planning and design. However, in contrast to the earlier
environmentalism of the Garden City and Regional Planning Movements (Howard,
1898; Geddes, 1968; Mumford, 1938), their principal preoccupation is with the
environmental and socio-economic consequences of energy production and
consumption for urban development—an issue never seriously considered or
understood by either early compact city theorists or modernists. The second
difference was the recognition of a global rationale. This ineluctably had to be
considered everywhere at all spatial levels of practice and policymaking and was
derived from the realities of rapid globalisation and the ‘totalisation’ of
environmental problems. Urban architectural, planning and design practice had to
be ‘green and global’. It is the failure to appreciate the significance of these two
dimensions that often accounts for much of the reluctance to come to terms with
contemporary arguments about the compact city and sustainable urban form.
Interest in compact city policies over the last ten years has been almost
exclusively limited to the experience of developed countries (US, Europe, Japan,
and Australia). There are a number of reasons for encouraging interest in the
compact city debate in developing countries.
Perhaps the most immediate is the global scale of the environmental problems
to which the policies are addressed. What makes the current relationship between
humanity and nature (Global Environmental Change) and society and space
(Globalisation) different from past conditions is that they both manifest a sort of
‘totalisation’ of human and environmental activities. Sustainability requires that
the impacts of urban development activities should not involve an uncompensated
geographical or spatial displacement of environmental problems or costs onto other
countries, or draw on the resource base and waste absorption capacity of the ‘global
commons’ to levels which undermine health and which disrupt the dynamic
equilibrium of the global ecosystem. Given the fact that less than a third of the world’s
population live in developed countries (a proportion which is set to decline further),
it is clear that the success or failure of these policies will depend on their
simultaneous application in developing countries. Indeed, given differences in
resource use at a global level, the benefits of the successful application of compact
city policies in any one part of the global economy could be wiped out by the
emergence of unsustainable settlement patterns in another part. Irresponsible energy
policies in the US, resistance to increases in fuel taxes in Europe, and the attempts
of developed countries to maintain their energy consumption levels at the expense
of developing countries using markets for carbon trading permits are currently
causing great concern. In this context it is imperative to consider the implications
of urban development, wherever it takes place, in a global context.
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