In today’s society, we are faced with a challenge that will ultimately determine how sustainable our cultural choices regarding our development patterns, transportation choices and consumer-based economy will prove to be.
Suburban sprawl is the product of the combination of all of these choices that continues to negatively affect the environment and threaten the sustainability of our society.
The sustainable response to suburban sprawl is the embracing of smart growth principles as well as the principles of New Urbanism.
This shift in development patterns as well as an overall paradigm shift from consumptionism to conservationism is especially significant in the emerging age of globalization.
As cultures begin to export their economic systems and the associated negative effects of these systems, the embracing of a sustainable form of development and overall environmental practices will help to ensure the overall sustainability of the global community.
Never before has an international effort to reverse the negative effects of unsustainable development patterns and practices been so significant to the health and welfare of the planet’s inhabitants.
The depletion of the rain forests, the desertification of areas due to increased unsustainable industrial practices and the hyper-consumption of non-renewable resources are important environmental issues that must be addressed by the global community.
All of these issues are directly linked with the unsustainable development patterns that have evolved from the practices of the United States. The United States has an opportunity to regain its international status as a responsible leader through the implementation of sustainable development principles.
Through the analysis of the four New Urbanist communities, a matrix has been created that will help developers and designers create truly sustainable communities.
This matrix highlights the six essential qualities that every sustainable community must possess;
(1) a compact and consolidated intensity of uses;
(2) a comprehensive and complimentary diversity of uses;
(3) a contained and consistent extent of uses;
(4) a connected and combined system of communication;
(5) a centered, configured and comprehensible sense of place;
(6) a re-configurable plan that allows for flexibility of uses.
Through the application of smart growth design principles and the embracing of New Urbanism principles, these qualities can be generated in nearly every development that is designed in the new millennium.
The importance of creating sustainable communities has never been more evident in this country than it is today.
We are faced with daily reminders of the negative effects of suburban sprawl as commuters sit in hours worth of traffic delays during seemingly endless commutes, wars are fought over the control of non-renewable resources and access to clean water and productive agricultural lands, communities become faceless and meaningless collections of individualist detached housing that ensures the residents privacy and social segregation and the country faces an obesity epidemic for the first time in its history.
Embracing the qualities of sustainable communities is the most effective tool in combating the negative effects of suburban sprawl that threaten our physical, social, cultural and economic health.
After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared. -Arthur Erickson
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