Proceso de la Comunicación Organizacional

This section will provide answers to the research question proposed at the beginning of this chapter:

How is urban quality and urban sustainability conceptualized in the current scientific literature?

During the course of this chapter it was determined that a high quality sustainable urban environment must attempt to conform to the following criteria and principles:

1. A sustainable urban environment must achieve bio-physical sustainability. (section 3.2)

2. A high quality urban environment must provide a high level of need satisfaction on the hierarchy of Maslow for the majority of its inhabitants. (section 3.3)

3. Urban quality in regards to sustainability is an urban environment that is flexible, resilient, and is therefore in a position to effectively implement and maintain increased sustainability measures. (section 3.3)

4. A high quality sustainable urban environment must maintain (and improve) upon the urban ecological space, its natural capital. (section 3.4)

By applying a framework for modelling of the sustainable urban environment(Alberti, 1996), it was argued that these four criteria may be achieved by correctly designing and implementing suitable urban patterns. Urban patterns consist of both social and economic structures as well as the physical form of the urban environment (section 3.5).

48 Finally, there are a vast number of themes relevant to the topics of urban quality and sustainability. A comprehensive, but by no means complete range of these topics has been presented in section 3.5, Figure 18.

The first three criteria presented above are not refuted by literature. Irrefutability of the fourth criteria depends on the stance taken on the interchangeability of natural capital and manufactured capital, the discussion between strong sustainability and weak sustainability. The work in this research adopts a de facto strong sustainability stance as argued by (Ekins et al., 2003) thus preferring natural capital over manufactured capital, unless interchangeability concerning specific aspects of natural and manufactured capital is proven beyond doubt.

High quality sustainable urban patterns

The principles, dimensions and goals of a high quality sustainable urban environment have now been established. However, this report has not yet gone into much detail on what the form and patterns of the urban environment should be in order to achieve these, other than in brief explanatory examples. One reason for this is that there is by no means consent on what the ideal urban pattern should look like. Furthermore, the ideal urban form is often dependent on local conditions and development history (chapter 2), thus making a general description less useful. Nevertheless we will attempt to draft some guidelines for a high quality sustainable urban form.

(Haughton, 1997) identifies four approaches to sustainable urban environments. On one end of the scale he describes a city that has become self-reliant by internalizing economic and environmental activities and implemented circular metabolism. Moving down the scale he describes re-design of entire regions, meaning the city and its hinterlands, to establish regional self-sufficiency. On the far side of the scale he describes two scenarios’ in which highly efficient but specialized cities are externally dependent on resources as well as trading of natural ‘carrying capacity’.

Another problem, apart from different approaches, in defining the desired urban patterns is that these patterns are highly context dependent. High quality sustainable urban patterns that work for European countries may be unrealistic or even unpractical for cities in the Unites States. Even cities in the same country may have vastly different development histories, making universal urban patterns inappropriate. It is therefore important for each city to investigate how the general guidelines for a high quality sustainable urban environment may be best implemented locally.

49 We are however not entirely without guidance for the design and creation of appropriate urban patterns. As with the urban metabolism model, we again turn to the field of urban ecology to find ten principles for the design and creation of ecological cities(Roseland, 1997).

1. Revise land-use priorities to create compact, diverse, green, safe, pleasant and vital mixed-use communities near transit nodes and other transportation facilities;

2. Revise transportation priorities to favor foot, bicycle, cart, and transit over automobiles, and to emphasize 'access by proximity’;

3. Restore damaged urban environments, especially creeks, shore lines, ridgelines and wetlands;

4. Create decent, affordable, safe, convenient, and racially and economically mixed housing;

5. Nurture social justice and create improved opportunities for women, people of color and the disabled;

6. Support local agriculture, urban greening projects and community gardening;

7. Promote recycling, innovative appropriate technology, and resource conservation while reducing pollution and hazardous wastes;

8. Work with businesses to support ecologically sound economic activity while discouraging pollution, waste, and the use and production of hazardous materials; 9. Promote voluntary simplicity and discourage excessive consumption of material

goods;

10. Increase awareness of the local environment and bioregion through activist and educational projects that increase public awareness of ecological sustainability issues.

Although the principles stated here are still rather theoretical, they do provide a clearer image on how individual cities might develop urban patterns towards increased sustainability, without compromising quality. It goes beyond the scope of this research to describe in depth the specific form and structure of the high quality sustainable urban environment. As mentioned, detailing of the urban environment is unique to each city and should therefore be solved locally.

However, as working principles, the ten principles of the ecological city, and the four principles of the high quality sustainable urban environment provide us with a foundation on which to continue our research into measuring both quality and sustainability of the urban environment.

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4. Monitoring the urban environment by means of