Sustainable urban planning

Sustainable cities, urban sustainability, or eco-city (also "ecocity") is a city designed with consideration for social, economic, environmental impact, and resilient habitat for existing populations, without compromising the ability of future generations to experience the same. These cities are inhabited by people whom are dedicated towards minimization of required inputs of energy, water, food, waste, output of heat, air pollution - CO₂, methane, and water pollution. Richard Register first coined the term "ecocity" in his 1987 book, Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future. Other leading figures who envisioned the sustainable city are architect Paul F Downton, who later founded the company Ecopolis Pty Ltd, as well as authors Timothy Beatley and Steffen Lehmann, who have written extensively on the subject. The field of industrial ecology is sometimes used in planning these cities.

There remains no completely agreed upon definition for what a sustainable city should be or completely agreed upon paradigm for what components should be included. Generally, developmental experts agree that a sustainable city should meet the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The ambiguity within this idea leads to a great deal of variation in terms of how cities carry out their attempts to become sustainable.

Ideally, a sustainable city creates an enduring way of life across the four domains of ecology, economics, politics and culture. However, minimally a sustainable city should firstly be able to feed itself with a sustainable reliance on the surrounding countryside. Secondly, it should be able to power itself with renewable sources of energy. The core of this is to create the smallest conceivable ecological footprint, while producing the lowest quantity of pollution achievable. All while efficiently using the land; composting used materials, and recycling or converting waste-to-energy. All of these contributions will lead to the city's overall impacts on climate change to be minimal and with as little impact.

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