Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
9 - Urban design and transport
Peter Newman
Australian cities are under pressure as a result both of global climate change and their
heavy dependency on oil. The goal of sustainable urban development is to reduce the
ecological footprint of the population while simultaneously improving the quality of
urban life. Our cities are currently among the world's worst consumers of transport
energy. Car dependency is inherent in policy thinking across the nation but there are
growing efforts to change this. We need to create viable population centres that will
support enhanced public transport systems. This means increasing the population
density of parts of the cities. New funding and policy are needed to move cities towards
sustainability. Australian building approval processes need to specify reduced energy
and water use and ways need to be found to involve community members in owner-
ship of the transition to sustainability.
Sustainability arises from a new sense of limits, that the globe's ecosys-
tems, resources such as oil and the climate system, are being overstretched.
Most of this impact is coming from the world's cities. Sustainability
approaches such limits with a positive mindset, believing that opportunities
can be created to achieve economic and community gain while reducing our
ecological and resource impacts. In this way sustainability in settlements can
be seen as an opportunity to reduce our ecological footprint whilst simulta-
neously improving the quality of urban life.
There are three main limits that have emerged in Australian settlements
in recent years:
•
Wa t e r
, where nearly every major city in the country has had to
institutionalise processes to reduce water consumption, and some
scenarios of serious long-term supply difficulties due to greenhouse-
induced climate change have emerged for our cities
