Local Government Aimed at Quality of Life in Sustainable Cities

Abstract

The concept of sustainable development has been more and more adopted by countries around the world. As a strategy of introducing sustainable development within local government, we have seen the advent of sustainable cities that aim their actions at an improvement of the local population's quality of life, together with economic development and environmental preservation. The urban ecosystem is created, modelled and changed by humanity on a daily basis, with humans normally making use of unsustainable methods. For a city to be sustainable, there must be an efficient local government, with the aim of ensuring that the locals have a good quality of life, rather than the mere satisfaction of human needs as defended in Maslow's pyramid. Having needs met is not the same as having good quality of life. For this reason, we can see that the main examples of sustainable cities are all in developed countries, whose cities and towns have already surpassed this threshold, aiming their local government at practices which are really sustainable. Through a descriptive and qualitative method, this paper analyses the contribution of sustainable practices in cities towards improvement in quality of life and comes to the conclusion that the introduction thereof is in line with the promotion of local sustainable development, with improvement to quality of life.