When the word ‘sustainability’ first started entering the standard planning lexicon, it was widely seen as an essentially environmental or ecological concept. Sustainability had to do with the ability of macro-environments to reproduce themselves over the longer term. However, over the years there has been increasing recognition that environmental sustainability requires major changes in human behaviour, including human economic behaviour. In planning, there has been a slow realisation by the profession that much of what urban planners do, has a profound effect on regional sustainability. Among other things, planners regulate settlement patterns. They accommodate and guide growth, and help manage the externalities that derive from that growth. They help plan the housing and infrastructure, including the transportation infrastructure, needed to accommodate that growth. In addition, they regulate the building of housing and infrastructure. All these activities have a huge impact on the sustainability of regions.
The changes needed to promote sustainability are difficult since they so often seem at odds with the demands of economic growth and with the affluent lifestyles that growth allows. Moreover, even if it is possible to move to cleaner and greener models of economic growth, that move will produce winners and losers, and the losers may very well be those already poor. At the local and regional levels, it is clear that low-density settlement patterns, common throughout the western world, have encouraged a reliance on car travel. Planners need to encourage new developments to be denser and closer to workplaces and built using sustainable technologies, but they also need to find mechanisms to retrofit older suburbs so that these places function in more sustainable ways. These changes will prove very expensive.
All over the world, urban planning curricula are being updated and changed to take more notice of the need to promote the sustainability of places. Certainly this is true of the University of Sydney, as this book amply demonstrates with chapters reflecting research projects, academic writing and doctoral dissertations by the academic staff, adjunct faculty, and doctoral students at the Urban and Regional Planning program of the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning.