Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 16
Conclusions: Creating More Liveable
and Sustainable Urban Places
Wayne KD Davies
The decades around the beginning of the twentieth first century have seen an ex-
plosion of new ideas to improve urban places. These have been designed not only
to solve the deficiencies of current forms of growth but also to resolve a series of
new problems associated with urban places, as well as the effect they are having
on their regions and environment. Many of the most prominent of these new ideas
add an adjectival descriptor to the words urban or city. These shorthand summaries
have been interpreted as a series of city or urban themes, or as a series of clusters of
urban concepts focusing on solutions to particular urban problems. They have been
reviewed in the various chapters, ranging from themes such as New Urbanism ideas
(Chap. 2) to Slow Cities (Chaps. 14 and 15). These themes have been described in
terms of their origins and key features, the problems they are designed to solve, to-
gether with a critical review of their utilities. However, as noted in the Introduction
there other themes that could not be covered except in abbreviated form because of
space constraints, although these were viewed as being more restricted to particular
types of urban places, or are still emerging in the sense that they are in early stages
of development. Yet despite their scope, not all of current urban problems have been
addressed by these new ideas.
All of these themes have primarily focused upon one major idea or sets of ideas
to create better cities but inevitably there are overlaps between some of them. For
example, exponents of Slow Cities also advocate some sustainable initiatives, while
the policies that are described as Green Cities are often incorporated into Sustain-
able City agendas. Yet these overlaps do not detract from the fact that each of the
themes is primarily focused upon a specific content area or approach, in which a
number of distinctive policies have been advocated to improve urban development.
In advocating an individual theme there is always a danger of it being viewed as
being the only one worth studying, or using to develop policies. Certainly in many
cases there may be one major problem—whether sprawl, economic downturns,
