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Characteristics of sustainable and successful urban areas

Innovation

Many cities are finding creative ways to become more sustainable, and successful. While climate change adaptation and emissions reduction is a challenge, the push from the international community for greater sustainability also presents a chance to improve.

Solutions to curb greenhouse gas emissions, for example, can often have benefits for a town or city’s economy, culture, and social environment. An example is linking higher density mixed use centres to, public transport hubs and networks. This type of development can reduce the need to travel siginificant distances between daily activities. It can also increase the vibrancy of an area through the clustering of residential, commercial and recreational land uses (Dunphy et al, 2003)¹¹. 

From a business perspective, in developed countries, more attention is being placed on the role of cities and urban centres as drivers of innovation, creativity and economic growth in a knowledge-based economy. 

Cities are competing with each other for skilled labour, entrepreneurial companies, and investment capital in their bid to become centres of growth and innovation.  Auckland and Wellington for example, are competing with Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide in an Australasian context.  Australian and East Asian cities are competing with US cities, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The most competitively successful cities are those that are enabling creative and innovative approaches to the global challenges outlined above.

Treating urban areas as systems

Cities can be seen as interconnected systems (e.g. housing market areas, travel to work areas, labour markets, business supplier and consumer networks, utility systems, water catchment areas, green networks, ecological networks). How these various systems interact can result in optimal or suboptimal outcomes. They have ‘inputs’, such as raw materials and energy, and ‘outputs’, such as commodities and greenhouse gas emissions.  There are also ‘stocks’ inside the city and these stocks change over time (such as intellectual capacity, social capital, biodiversity, and nutrients).

From this ‘urban metabolism’ perspective, it is possible to gain insights into what shapes, regulates and governs the flows of inputs and outputs to and from cities. This helps us determine how urban areas can contribute to long term local and global sustainability.

Many national and local governments are focussing on how to minimise the adverse impacts of urban activities on the natural and physical environment. This focus is being driven by a growing understanding that urban areas are integral components of the planet’s natural and physical systems.

An example of taking an eco-system approach to urban development is the Low Impact Urban Design and Development programme, lead by Landcare Research¹². This programme of research and application aims to integrate urban storm water management with natural drainage and filtration methods. Some of the methods include the use of swales, rain-gardens, detention ponds, natural streams, and native vegetation, to reduce the amount of contaminated storm water reaching water bodies.

Moreover, researchers, city planners, politicians, and the public, are recognising that cities are whole systems that equal more than the sum of their parts. Improvements can be made by connecting the economy, environment, culture and technology with sustainable practices and the future in mind.

An example of this sort of ‘system thinking’ is represented in the Integrated Approach to Planning project, led by the transport sector of the New Zealand government. This project investigates how transport, land use and urban design can work together to improve the way cities function.

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Resilience

Resilient urban systems are recognised as important for achieving long term urban sustainability (CSIRO, 2007)¹³. Urban resilience has two main characteristics.  The first is the robustness or strength of an urban system to withstand stress.  The second is the adaptability of an urban system to respond to changing conditions and objectives. Stresses can take many forms including sudden changes in environmental conditions, such as a major disaster, or economic shocks, such as the withdrawal of a major employer in the region. 

One recognised way of creating resilience in an urban area is by designing resilient infrastructure. Resilient infrastructure makes greater use of more localised and diverse ways of providing services like electricity, drinking water provision, storm water amelioration, and wastewater disposal.  Another is ensuring that infrastructure and new development is not located in areas subject to natural hazards such as flooding or erosion.

An example of a localised service is the use of solar technology like photovoltaic panels to enable homeowners to generate their own electricity. This sort of infrastructure can reduce the scale of damage from extreme events to more localised areas. For example, if an electricity supply cut occurs, perhaps as a result of a major storm, resilient infrastructure design can restrict the outage to a few suburbs rather than the whole city.  Improvements in overall network design can also enhance security of supply.

Low impact urban design can reduce the need for storm water piping requirements. This sort of infrastructure design can improve a city’s ability to manage flooding from heavy rainfall.

The Ministry for the Environment is preparing guidance to help communities, councils, and other groups to improve resiliency by adapting to the effects of climate change. Links to this guidance can be found at www.mfe.govt.nz/issues/climate/adaptation. 

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11. Dunphy, R, Myerson, D, Pawlukiewcz, M 2003. Ten Principles for Successful Development Around Transit. Urban Land Institute:Washington DC

Last updated: 5 December 2008