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The discourse of sustainability is currently in vogue. The reason for this
is probably connected to the widespread sensation among the public,
technicians and political leaders that certain environmental and social
dysfunctions, far from being reduced with economic development, have
actually been intensified. However, when we move beyond this basic level of
sensations, any trace of a consensus disappears: there is no agreement as
to the causes or the solutions we should adopt to overcome these dysfunctions.
Indeed, there is not even agreement on the true scope or
seriousness of the symptoms. The result is that a number of expressions
have been proposed, such as sustainable development
and
sustainability
,
which are intended to contain the solution to all problems without in most
cases defining what their substantive content might be.
The analytical part of this white paper is intended to provide an overview of these dysfunctions in relation to urban planning, while the proposals must necessarily outline some action strategies. Doing this without previously defining what we mean by sustainability may seem inappropriate, but it is in fact the most solid option. Inasmuch as sustainability is identified with the solution, it is much more appropriate and convenient to begin by describing and characterising the problem, i.e. the current unsustainability, before moving on to seeking solutions, which would appear to have a political dimension that goes beyond the scope of this document.
The description and characterisation of the unsustainability of today's cities, both in Spain and throughout the world, is a leading topic of recent urban research, and it has been touched on in the introductory chapter. For a methodological viewpoint, we will focus on analysing (breaking down) the various different aspects of this unsustainability to assess each of them in turn. By taking this approach we do not mean to suggest that a sector approach is appropriate for addressing urban unsustainability; on the contrary, it is a way of unmasking sector approaches that are disconnected from one another and have been predominant to date, since they should be coordinated to enable us to arrive at the integrated response that such a complex problem demands. Indeed, our aim is to set out a general structure, a system, into which all the individual issues are inserted, to offer a vision of all the spheres where coordinated action is needed in order to reduce urban unsustainability.
Before we go on, we should distinguish between three concepts that are often conflated under the environmental-policy umbrella:
The main difference between environmental hygiene and sustainability lies in the location and scope of the environmental impact; whereas the former is basically concerned with specific, localised impact (pollution) that could affect people's health, the latter assumes that any impact, near or far, that affects the biosphere's capacity for regeneration will affect people's well-being in the medium or long term. This difference is a key one, because environmental strategy in developed countries in recent decades has consisted of transferring the most pollutant activities to third-world countries, solving the immediate problem of the environmental hygiene of their citizens, but probably worsening global unsustainability. In this regard, certain environmental-hygiene strategies may have environmental costs that are not taken into account because they are far removed in either time or space.
Protecting natural spaces would seem to be an appropriate strategy for either of these two objectives, but how effective it is largely depends on the criteria applied to delimit the areas in question and fix minimum conservation conditions for them. If the criteria and resources used are not appropriate, this policy may end up as mere green rhetoric, making it essentials for it to be part of a broader strategy for environmental sustainability or hygiene.
In this document we will focus on sustainability strategies, objectives and measures that in the main will coincide, include or supplement —although they also may temper or even challenge— diverse environmental-hygiene policies or specific criteria for protecting natural spaces.
Firstly, we need to identify the main symptoms of the current unsustainability, which may be outlined as follows:
In any case, one key question cannot be ignored: all these symptoms are immediately interrelated. Environmental deterioration mainly affects groups that are excluded (from the fruits of economic growth and political decision-making processes) at all scales (local, national and international).
Various strategies may be considered to address this problem, but we must always take into account that they must take on a political and dialectical dimension that incorporates the interests of all those affected (the population of a neighbourhood, city or country; humanity as a whole) and that, since the various facets of the problem are all so interrelated, we cannot adopt solutions that are only partial or isolated, or we risk merely transferring the problems from one sphere to another. Thus, despite being presented schematically, the following sustainability strategies should be understood as a set of action areas that only make sense to the extent that they are developed in a coordinated way:
Within its abstraction, this would appear to be a simple exercise but, as we shall see, the difficulty lies in transferring them to specific fields of action.
To apply the above sustainability strategies to urban planning we must first take into account their actual field of action here and now: organising a given territory (usually a municipal district) with regard to the specific urban and building uses. From this perspective, what planning can achieve is quite limited, but it can also have significant scope and effects.
In practice, urban planning defines a model and a structure for the city onto which different urban uses are laid and developed. In this model, such issues as building types and their relationship with open spaces (roads, spaces for coexistence, green areas, etc.), the distribution of different uses and their coexistence or separation (housing, public and private facilities, tertiary and industrial uses, etc.), and their varying degrees of concentration in the space, may either help or hinder certain lifestyles that are to some degree sustainable. Of course, in a democratic society such as ours the final decision must lie with individual citizens, but it is the task of public authorities, via both planning and other ambits within their remit, to encourage individual habits that are the most beneficial for the community, by offering the most appropriate incentives and disincentives in each case. Several interrelated factors thus come into play:
Urban planning is therefore responsible for shaping the city's physical support, but in doing so it necessarily influences both other spheres. And from awareness of this capacity for influence is where sustainability strategies described above can be integrated in planning. Let us now break down the various spheres of influence of planning and the main objectives to be pursued in application of the sustainability strategies in each case:
1. Criteria for action in the city surroundings
2. Criteria for action in urban areas
3. Criteria for action on transport
4. Criteria for action on resources
5. Criteria for action on waste
6. Criteria for action on social cohesion
7. Criteria for action on governance
Note that the first two spheres correspond to the territory or physical support of the city. Transport (owing to its dual nature as infrastructure and flow) occupies en intermediate position between support and metabolism, while the final two enter the social sphere by two different approaches: combating social exclusion as part of the content of the planning, and fostering public participation as a key element of the planning, understood as a procedure for managing public assets.
Of course, this breakdown still has a high level of abstraction. In truth, it is incomplete, since a third level is missing: one that would bring together a set of specific measures to achieve the goals set. The full list is given in Annex 1. As an example, the first block would look like this:
Criteria for action:
1. in the city surroundings
The full list consists of seven blocks or spheres, 19 strategies or general
criteria, and 93 specific criteria for action. It is not intended to be a
comprehensive list of all the possible measures to favour more sustainable
urban planning, but rather a structure for including different alternative
or complementary measures —we should remember that one of the premises of
planning is to adapt to local conditions— which may be judged and assessed
according to how effective they are in line with the overall sustainability
strategies. Likewise, their hierarchical character allows the problem to be
approached from different levels of detail, linking overall policies with
specific measures.
In any case, this list has not appeared out of nowhere. Although its
overall structure has been purpose-built, most of the elements have been
compiled from various guidelines and manuals published by different public
authorities and academic institutions (see Annex III).
Each of the items on the list has been drafted in such a way that it can be
converted directly into an assessment questionnaire that can be applied to
various types of documents.
For example, based on criterion 1.03, the following questions can be
raised:
As we can see, each document, standard or plan has specific goals that
correspond to different levels of detail, but in each of them we can
determine whether a given sustainability criterion has been included or
whether it has been rejected on reasonable grounds. Similarly, whenever one
of these criteria is included in any standard, plan or project, the
specific way in which it is done can be judged in relation to the rest of
the list:
The result of urban planning, at least in part, would be a city, but its
content is distributed across diverse documents that make up the corpus of
planning: compulsory standards (laws, regulations, technical instructions,
etc.), recommendations (guidelines, manuals, etc.) and the plans and
projects that develop them and adapt them to the specific conditioning
factors in each case. The most direct way of studying planning would
probably be through plans (and their effects on the physical reality), but
this approach clashes with the huge amount of documentation that would have
to be studied, including analysing a minimum representative sample
(including each administrative ambit, different ecological territories and
different types of cities in terms of their size, urban model, etc.).
Another possible approach, which is the one taken here, is to study the
framework within which the planning is developed, and therefore including
regulations, which make certain content compulsory or apply certain
procedures in the drafting of urban plans, as well as diverse technical
guidelines and manuals, which make more flexible recommendations but also
offer a number of more sophisticated technical instruments.
Regulatory framework
Such a trans-disciplinary activity as urban planning, even when referring
to only one municipal district and its urban uses, will necessarily be
influenced by a host of sector standards that regulate the various policies
and activities affecting the territory. These sector regulations shape the
content significantly, albeit not as much as the specific regulations on
urban and spatial planning. With regard to procedures, the complexity is
similar, since drafting and approving any urban plan is a complex process
involving different authorities and entities delegated by them, to assure
compliance with the requirements from all sectors affected by the
organisation regulated by the plan, as well as the transparency of the
process itself. Finally, we should remember that in Spain urban and spatial
planning has been transferred to the remit of the autonomous regions, which
have legislated on it to varying extents, creating specific conditions for
urban planning within their respective territories.
This means as a result that a considerable amount of legislation now
directly or indirectly influences urban planning in Spain. To define a
significant, homogeneous sample of it all, we have opted to study all the
regional laws and regulations introduced in the following ambits:
Annex II includes a full list of the laws and regulations studied. We
consider that this selection covers a considerable part of the relevant
legislation, although certain issues of undoubted significance (for both
planning and sustainability) have been omitted, such as specific
legislation on public works. All sections of the entire corpus selected
have been studied in detail to determine which parts refer to any of the
criteria for sustainability defined in the previous section of this
document. Based on this data, the inclusion of each of the criteria
(general and specific) in the different pieces of legislation has been
determined, underlining any notable absences. A summary of the results is
also included in Annex II.
Guidelines and manuals
Guidelines and manuals are basically technical in nature and may cover
details and specifications that the legislation, owing to its own nature,
neither can nor should touch upon. In this regard, the literature on the
application of sustainability criteria to urban planning is relatively
abundant. A number of guidelines that address with the issue in particular
detail have been selected as the starting point for this white paper. Annex
III contains a chart that sets out the topics, criteria, goals and
indicators proposed by each of these guidelines, to enable them to be
compared with the list of criteria used here.
Interesting though study of the documentation undoubtedly is, it only shows
the legal and technical theory that lies behind urban planning. To
complement this vision, a number of professionals with extensive practical
experience in urban planning have been consulted, selected with a view to
representing as much diversity as possible in terms of their academic
backgrounds, professional experience and geographical ambits, including
urban planners —not just architects— with experience working in various
autonomous regions. Each of them was asked to submit a confidential report,
explaining where they consider urban planning in Spain currently stands in
practice, particularly in terms of the objective of sustainability. These
reports have been taken into account for the drafting of this White Paper,
but their views, which have been included wherever possible when they share
viewpoints on certain issues, need not necessarily coincide with the
overall conclusions of this paper or the analysis of the current situation,
which remain the sole responsibility of the directors.
the natural capital
(natural and artificial).
and preserve its productivity).
Practical use of the list of criteria
Documentation examined
Expert consulting