Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

Urban sustainability is a common agenda in global policy and promoting sustainability as a strategic value for cities appears to be a key motivation for multilateral agencies. The general concept of sustainability makes sense as cities encounter various environmental pressures including climate change, resource uncertainties, concerns about the future of infrastructure and services, economic challenges, and various ongoing social struggles. Although the concept of urban sustainability is deemed critical, scholars and practitioners from different disciplines frame the concept of urban sustainability using a diversity of theories, principles, and criteria. In all its diversity, urban sustainability has currency in policy agendas as a theory as well as a practice around which, increasingly, various disciplines coalesce. This paper takes as its premise a perceived value shift in society towards urban sustainability and examines the communities taking charge of its evolution as well as the nature of this engagement. The paper explores the policy, scholarly and practical purchase of urban sustainability as a social value. It considers diverse urban sustainability agendas and the common ground emerging in relation to urban infrastructure. In addition to the policy–science nexus driving urban sustainability, it shows the particular role of applied practices and infrastructure experiments. The paper connects several literatures to show the disciplinary roots of high-level concepts and policy agendas, and in doing so, reveals the fundamental role of functional planning and design experiments in creating urban sustainability value shifts.