Sustainability: Planning's Redemption or Curse?
World | Environment | Government & Politics | Op-Ed
8 February 2007 - 7:00am
Author: Michael Gunder, PhD
Sustainability is often defined as a balance of the three E's: the
environment, the economy, and social equity. But as planners embrace the
concept, the sustainability "balance" heavily favors one E: the economy.
Michael Gunder warns that planners risk sacrificing the environment and
social equity in the name of sustainable economic development.
For many, the planning profession lost direction, credibility and
apparent societal value during the last quarter of the twentieth
century. Recently, this loss has been partially offset by an increased
concern about planning for the environment. For both planners and many
members of wider society, 'sustainability' has become the defining term
to denote these wider environmental concerns and their appropriate
responses. The striving for sustainability is now a defining principle
of good planning practice. It provides an ideal for which to aim
towards, even if its achievement, not to mention any universally shared
and concise definition of how to achieve it, consistently appears to be
located somewhere over the horizon.
More importantly, this ideal of a sustainable future, understandably,
has wide public support. In a recent article in the Journal of Planning
Education and Research, I argue that sustainability could well be
planning's saving grace. It replaces the discipline's traditional role
of protecting the societal common good with an even wider role of
helping to save the planet for future generations – a role most planners
and members of society, in principle, would want to readily support.
Yet, in the same article, I argue that sustainability could also be
planning's road to perdition, especially without careful reflection on
the part of the profession and its practitioners as to how and in whose
interests sustainability is deployed.
cont'd....
http://www.planetizen.com/node/22812