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You can find the transcripts through this link.

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Are you interested in how much sustainability substance is in urban visions? 

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Our summary today works with the article titled How much sustainability substance is in urban visions? An analysis of visioning projects in urban planning from 2015 by Beatrice John, Lauren Withycombe Keller, Armin Wiek, and Daniel J. Lang, published the Cities journal. 

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see whether visionary urban planning can help with economic decline, social injustices and environmental degradation. This article presents recommendations for urban future visioning processes based on 9 global examples to integrate better sustainability substance.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Cities need to actively steer urban development paths and use options that urbanisation trends offer to find innovation solutions and embrace their role as forces for sustainability transformation.
2. Current visions miss significant sustainability substances due to lack of connections to other regions, narrow focus on the built environment, and top-down approaches.
3. Decisions about a shared sustainability vision with comprehensiveness and stakeholder inclusion are vital for communities as they can pave the way for solutions and have practical implications for long-term planning.

You can find the article through this link.

Abstract: Cities are hubs of social interaction, trade, and innovation. Yet, they face sustainability challenges of economic decline, social injustices, and environmental degradation. Urban planning is a critical instrument to cope with these challenges. Visioning, the process of constructing desirable future states, can provide direction for sustainability-oriented planning and decision-making and is increasingly used in this capacity. However, there is ample evidence that urban visions are often not designed along a robust set of sustainability principles. We analyze nine explicitly sustainability-related urban visions from Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Canada, USA, and Australia with respect to their sustainability substance, i.e. in how far they, broadly and in detail, adhere to sustainability principles. Using rough set analysis, we identify a number of procedural components that enable or obstruct the inclusion of sustainability substance in urban visions. Results indicate that the sampled urban visions do not substantially and comprehensively include sustainability substance, instead narrowly focus on optimizing the built environment, for example. Furthermore, the sustainability substance of visioning processes benefits from stakeholder engagement that includes capacity building, whereas some other types of participation obstruct the inclusion of sustainability substance. The study concludes with recommendations for visioning processes to yield urban visions with sustainability substance inclusive of a diverse and integrated set of sustainability principles.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• No.007R – World scientists’ warning of climate emergency;
• No.018I – Interview with María Jose Yanez about sustainable urban development;
• No.057I – Interview with Amélie Uhrig about individual sustainable steps you can take;

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