disP - year 2016

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    Sustainable Cities: Addressing the Challenges of Tomorrow
    (Routledge : Taylor and Francis Group, 2016) Giezen, Mendel
    The Sustainable Cities Thematic Group has only recently been established. The motivation for doing so was the fact that the AESOP conference tracks have, in the past, paid limited attention to sustainability, even though it is a key topic in many fields. For instance, at the Prague conference in 2015, there were no tracks directly related to sustainability or even resilience. Closest came the title of track 5: Legal Environment for Effective (Good) Governance and Efficient (Sustainable) Use of Land. Sustainability is here the afterthought to efficiency, while it should be the other way around. This is problematic because it is a crucial topic for planners. It is especially crucial for urban planners because cities are – at the same time – the cause of, the victim of, and the solution to issues such as climate change. As the world becomes ever more urbanized, the city has become the place where the problems of climate change have their greatest economic and social impact. For instance, damage from flooding is exponentially exacerbated by the density of population and economic activity. Every year there are more reports of flooding in both the global north (for example, the UK) and the global south (for example, Bangladesh), while at the same time large conurbations such as Los Angeles and Santiago have ever-worsening drought issues. Cities consume a lot of resources and are responsible for a large amount of CO2 emissions. Yet this also means that cities are crucial places to focus on when looking for sustainable development, and urban planning plays a big role in addressing these issues. Therefore, sustainable cities should also be a key focus of planning research and for this reason I started the AESOP Sustainable Cities Thematic Group. Hopefully, over the next few years, we can grow further and become a prominent group within the planning community.