Achieving urban sustainability is amongst the most pressing issues facing planners and governments and ensuring that new urban development reaches the highest sustainability standards is a major component within urban sustainability. While achieving urban sustainability is partially technical, the major challenges are to be found in the realm of urban governance and this book is the first to provide a cohesive analysis of urban governance and what is required to achieve sustainable development in urban areas.
The core focus of the book is the decarbonization of urban development, exemplified by the UK government's commitment that new residential development achieve zero-carbon by 2016 and all development be zero-carbon by 2019. There is a pressing need to understand how this ambitious agenda can be delivered and how it fits within the broader goal of sustainable development and commitments to social and economic advancement. To this end the book considers climate change mitigation and adaptation, together with other dimensions of environmental sustainability, and then connects this to the social and economic dimensions of urban development, looking across the scales of the individual building, the development site, the urban area, the urban region and the infrastructure network.
In particular the book looks at how sustainable urban development can be delivered on the ground through a comprehensive analysis of governance concerning new urban development. The book considers how a variety of policy tools could influence markets and governance processes to promote urban sustainability. It provides an innovative conceptual emphasis on how learning within planning processes and market structures is essential to achieve sustainable urban development. While making a contribution to urban governance theory with this learning perspective, the book is above all concerned with demonstrating how sustainable urban development can be delivered in practice. In doing so it draws on a mixture of reviews of existing research, policy and literature together with original research focussing on London, as well as examples drawn from Europe, Australia and the USA.