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Urban sustainability: an inevitable goal of landscape research

2009; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s10980-009-9444-7

1572-9761

Jianguo Wu,

Urban Planning and Landscape Design

‘‘Sustainability’’ has become the word of the day and the theme of our time. The word—which in essence means meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own (WCED 1987)—tends to conjure bucolic images of landscapes with green hills and empty spaces, but that may be a mistake. Our world certainly is replete with environmental problems: biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, landscape fragmentation, climate change, just to name a few. Urbanization—the spatial expansion of the built environment that is densely packed by people and their socioeconomic activities—has often been held responsible for all these problems. In the recent serge of interest in sustainability, some think that urbanization is key to regional and global sustainability, whereas others regard urban sustainability as an oxymoron. Is urbanization a problem or part of the solution for sustainability? Why is it relevant to landscape ecology? The dualistic nature of urbanization