Five domains to ensure sustainable equilibrium in the urban context

The Five Domains: A Paradigm for Urban Management

If we are to have a reasonable chance of managing the growth of the urban habitat, and at the same time achieve a balance of economic development with the conservation of the earth's natural systems, we must expand our definition of the principles of sustainability, and, we must see the problem in a systems context.

Since the beginning of the concepts and the language (i.e., the Bruntland Commission of the United Nations, 1987) sustainable development has consistently been represented as having three domains "the environment, economics, and the socio-cultural context" and, that they must be treated interdependently for a sustainable balance to occur. Many business and governmental leaders have been skeptical about placing any domain on a par with economics. Even those who, sooner or later, will adopt the values of living in balance with nature often find the tools within these three domains to be limited.

The limitations in achieving real sustainability exist whether the scale of the development is at the micro level (such as an individual building or neighborhood), or at the macro scale of habitat (such as a city or a region of urban habitats). The designer, the planner, the developer, the civic official, or the NGO leader who is genuinely interested in facilitating a sustainable solution in the urban context will not find all the networks or ingredients, or all the information, or all the tools and alternatives for solutions within only these three domains.

Consider, for example, a proposed new development which has all the finance necessary, a good environmental plan which protects and restores critical natural ecosystems, and it enhances and improves scores of lives of prospective occupants; but, it provides no dependable means of affordable transportation to places of employment for the residents. The three domains of economics, environment and socio-cultural criteria have been provided, but a fourth domain "the technology of transportation" is missing. In another hypothetical scenario, consider the same development successfully constructed, with adequate transportation technology and successfully inhabited and operated for some years; suddenly, a polluting industrial development is authorized for construction on an adjacent site, resulting in health hazards to the residents of the development. In this case, the fifth missing domain is public policy, or, the regulatory context of the habitat that would have prohibited the conflicting land use.

Within these two additional domains "technologies and policy" there are numerous examples of human invention and/or intervention that can be noted to have either facilitated, or retarded community progress toward sustainability. Two extreme, and debatable, examples are the automobile (technology) and the consequences of its use resulting in threats to the natural systems, and, the principle of humans "owning" land (policy) and the consequential effect of economic speculation on the earth's natural systems. Whether we individually value these conditions, or not, is not the key consideration. A fact of modern life is that technologies exist, that they are influential, and that they will continue to accelerate through human ingenuity. So, too, will the rules and regulations for relations among us, and our access to the bounties of the earth. Both domains are pervasive, affective, and the cause and effect relationships to the other three domains are inseparable from them.

Thus, the recommended Five Domains of Sustainability are Environment, Social/Culture, Technology, Economics, and Public Policy. Further, these domains should be the organizing principles for urban administration, urban design and planning, urban growth management, and regional and urban sustainable development.

These questions are relevant to every community on the globe north, south, developed, or developing - small, large, mega, or intermediate in size. We are leaving the era when the international argument has been over poverty, or rich versus poor. This language is from the industrial revolution, "economics above-all-else" thinking, which symbolizes only one measure among the five domains. The "rich" may have significant economic wealth, but may

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