Urbanization And Sustainability

Urbanization presents one of the most pressing and complex challenges of the 21 century. How cities are designed, managed and used is likely to shift substantially based on demands created by two powerful trends. One trend involves a growing awareness of a threat to the sustainability of the Earth’s natural environment; the second is the rapid rise in the number of people moving into and living in cities. Combined, these trends call for massive development of new buildings and infrastructure, along with new social and cultural institutions, to accommodate vast numbers of city dwellers without irreparably harming the natural environment. Human development since the Industrial Revolution has had serious impacts on the environment, and the

Sustainability has performed more of a balancing act than promoting any real change of direction to development. The most pressing problem with this model is that it offers relatively little understanding of the inherent trade-offs found in the simultaneous pursuit of these goals. Coupled with this, the picture it provides is too abstract to appreciate how sustainable development unfolds at the urban level, but also to acknowledge the political dimension of the process. By definition, cities are not sustainable, urban dwellers and economic activities inevitably depend on environmental resources and services from outside their built-up

But indicators can also be ordinal variables or ranks. The foci on quantifiable data of national states or local governments are due to the means and capacity; to conduct the necessary measurements and statistical analyses that are required to develop these indicators. Just as well as the Gross Domestic Product alone can’t assess the outcome of economic development, the concept of Sustainable development can’t be confined in numerical data. When selecting indicators the nature of the indicator as well as the hierarchal level has to be considered in order to make a right analysis. Another implication of sustainable development reports today is how specified the data presented should be. Since a more simplistic presentation could allow for a comparison. Another aspect that is important to include is the fact that the indicators are inter-linked; within and between systems. The inter-relationship between different indicators is therefore just as important as the indicators themselves. Crucial for the process of collecting data on indicators is transparency and that it can be easily understood, especially when data is compared between cities or states. Most research is based on a national basis not on a city-level which is why it is difficult for cities to address the sustainability problem. Time and spatial scale which needs to be