Advancing sustainable development and its implementation through spatial planning

Abstract

Current debate on sustainable development, stemming from its ambiguous universality (Campbell 2000) and the difficulties of its concrete implementation (Marcuse and Bartlett in this book) lead one to ask, "Are there better alternative means to achieving a more livable future?" Or, at the minimum, are there appropriate concepts to reemphasize the core aspect of sustainability: the responsible management of scarce resources? In 1972, the Club of Rome released the report Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), relying on computer based dynamic systems modeling growth in human population and industrial production in a global system over the next century. Using selected resources-related indicators, simulations of the future, fed with different scenarios about the carrying capacity of the planet and availability of resources, demonstrated that humanity was about to destroy its living space. More than twenty years later, Meadows (1995) still insisted that sooner or later a scenario of collapse would be inevitable. For him, it is too optimistic to believe in sustainable development, for it is already too late to achieve this goal. As human behavior cannot be changed without obvious need (war, famine, etc.), the structures, pollution, and gaps that the present generation is about to leave to its heirs will inevitably force the next generations to strive for their sheer survival. In such a situation, individual and collective happiness is hardly achievable. Meadows calls this Survivable Development. Using this term, he comes back to the same nomenclature used by the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment at Stockholm (Friends of the Earth 1972). Is survivable development the only way into the future? Are there other approaches, which are more optimistic and try to change the main drivers of decline, overall awareness and behavior of the main users and abusers of planet Earth: humankind? In the following, I present an answer to these questions and outline how this answer might be implemented.