Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities?: Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development

TLDR

Urban planners navigate a tension among environmental protection, economic development, and social equity—forming a “planner’s triangle” whose center, sustainable development, is only attainable indirectly through resolving these conflicts. The study proposes that planners must redefine sustainability and integrate social theory with environmental thinking, coupled with conflict‑resolution techniques, to address economic and environmental injustice.

Abstract

Abstract Nothing inherent in the discipline steers planners either toward environmental protection or toward economic development—or toward a third goal of planning: social equity. Instead, planners work within the tension generated among these three fundamental aims, which, collectively, I call the “planner's triangle,” with sustainable development located at its center. This center cannot be reached directly, but only approximately and indirectly, through a sustained period of confronting and resolving the triangle's conflicts. To do so, planners have to redefine sustainability, since its current formulation romanticizes our sustainable past and is too vaguely holistic. Planners would benefit both from integrating social theory with environmental thinking and from combining their substantive skills with techniques for community conflict resolution, to confront economic and environmental injustice.