What is a sustainable city and how do you create one? Do you know the answer? If so, do please tell me as I’ve been looking for the answer for a long, long time…

But seriously, a great place to start getting ideas to these questions is from Herbert Girardet’s short book (less than 80 pages) entitled Creating Sustainable Cities. What does Herbert Girardet think?

What are Sustainable Cities?

Herbert Girardet develops a definition from the Brundtland Report (Our Common Future) definition of Sustainable Development. He describes a sustainable city as follows:

“A ’sustaianble city’ is organised so as to enable all its citizens to meet their own needs and to enhance their well-being without damaging the natural world or endangering the living conditions of other people, now or in the future”

He focusses on minimizing the ecological footprint of the city and uses London as an example. An updated version of his analysis is in the City Limits report. Quite amazingly, London requires productive land that is twice the size of the UK. Crikey!

How do you Create Sustainable Cities?

I won’t spoil the surprise for you by going through everything, but here are some ideas from Herbert Girardet:

1. Involve young people
2. Use good examples
3. Make cities centres of civilization, not mobilization
4. Place long term stewardship over short term satisfaction
5. Create a balance between the material and the spirtual

Maybe you might find some nice ideas in Creating Sustainable Cities that will help you?  Alternatively, you can read his free report on Adelaide where he touches on a lot of the principles and puts them to use in Adelaide.

What do you think of his ideas?