Key features of sustainable urban areas and the prospects and challenges of achieving them – Professor David Simon

This lecture, by Professor David Simon, explains key features of sustainable urban areas and the prospects and challenges of achieving them. Starting with a discussion of the diverse meanings of sustainability in different contexts and the various scales to which it is often applied, it argues that only a comprehensive approach that integrates the key economic, socio-cultural and environmental dimensions is likely to have good prospects for success. A conceptual model using the key characteristics of accessibility, green-blueness and fairness is developed to symbolise these dimensions. Similarly, although urban sustainability is a crucial objective, urban areas are not islands of bricks, concrete, steel and glass but part of wider spatial and functional systems. Hence urban sustainability is only really meaningful as part of overall national or societal sustainability.

This corresponds to the following components of the A-Level Syllabus:

AQA: section 3.2.3 Contemporary urban environments, most centrally 3.2.3.8 sustainable urban development but integrating also aspects of 3.2.3 Social and economic issues associated with urbanisation; 3.2.3.4 Urban climate; 3.2.3.6 Urban waste and its disposal; and 3.2.3.7 Other contemporary urban environmental issues.

GCE: section 4 Changing place; changing places, particularly paragraph 18 on Relationships and connections.