Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of planning facilitates good urban management and provides a stable
groundwork for good governance to stand on?
In contrast to the aforementioned efforts to rate the sustainability of
urban agglomerations, there are a number of theories that claim to create or
promote sustainable urbanism; these are new urbanism (NU), smart growth,
transit-oriented development (TOD) and sustainable urbanism. However,
little evidence exists to support the link between following a certain theory
and achieving precise progress on the sustainability charts. Developing
countries, especially in Africa, are urbanising at a very fast rate. What about
the cities to be built? What are the concepts that should govern urban plan-
ning of these new settlements? What lessons could be learned from rating
existing cities to plan more successfully sustainable cities?
This chapter attempts to study this link and to analyse the relationship
between adopting sustainable urbanism theories and scoring high on the
green indices with a focus on energy efficiency. The chapter will analyse
the urban pattern of highly ranked cities and correlate it to sustainable
urbanism theories. It includes a matrix of relations highlighting the most
important aspects or concepts that should be adopted to improve the energy
efficiency score of a city. It further applies this matrix to one of Egypt's new
cities to provide a forward vision for improving QOL within the Egyptian
context.
3.2 Quality of Life Is a Right
QOL has been the domain of development discourse for the past decade.
It has been widely recognised that measuring progress in terms of gross
domestic product (GDP) is not sufficient. According to the ecological econo-
mist Costanza [2], although QOL has long been an explicit or implicit pol-
icy goal, adequate definition and measurement have been elusive. Diverse
'objective' and 'subjective' indicators across a range of disciplines and scales,
and recent work on subjective well-being surveys and the psychology of
happiness, have spurred renewed interest.
It is widely accepted now that seeking better QOL should be the ultimate
goal of development plans and not just concentrating on economic prog-
ress. Currently, there is a shift away from depending on the GDP as a mea-
sure of material well-being. Consequently, there are a number of indices
proposed and used by different organisations to score and rate cities and
countries according to their QOL. These various indices were discussed
in Chapter 1: Quality of Living by Mercer [3], Quality of Life Index by the
Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) [4], nations' ranking according to QOL [5],
Your Better Life Index by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) [6], and City Prosperity Index by UN-Habitat.
