Part I.: The Need for a Sustainable Urban Form

        Living within natural limits, while maintaining standards of living, achieving social equity, and generally enhancing the overall well-being and quality of urban life are the core challenges addressed by current theories on sustainable urban design. At the core of a growing body of work on creating sustainable urban environments is the belief that a particular urban form can shape the behaviour and activity patterns of urbanites in ways that minimize environmental impact while increasing health, access, efficiency and equality.
        Much of the literature found under the rubric of sustainable cities is a reaction to the perceived widespread consequences of   modernist planning and design that many criticize for the segregated, sprawling, auto-dependant, and polluting urban forms that characterize American, and to a lesser extent, Canadian, cities today.  Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” (1929); a vision of the “city as machine” with “towers in the park”, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broad Acre City”(1935); a vision to re-inhabit the rural ‘frontier’ landscape with a city of independent homesteads (each one on at least one acre of land), find their expression most completely in the typical late twentieth century North American city and suburb.  With the automobile playing the central and defining role, the spatial design of North American urban environments is one that is bloated and isolated, and where city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone on foot. The transformation of urban space by the automobile has also profoundly reconfigured social life in North America (see for instance, Calthorpe, 1993; Freund and Martin, 1993; Schoenauer, 1994) as the auto-dominated urban form has distorted the fabric of social life, particularly through the loss of public space and street life (Jacobs, 1961; Relph, 1976; Davis, 1990; Frug, 1996). Today, many North American cities are characterized by pollution, sprawl, public poverty, and private affluence.  The current ecological and social crises occurring in many urban environments highlights the interconnected and interweaving of all sub-systems which the functionalist (modernist) approach tried to isolate and put into boxes (Gibbs, 2001).
         The negative outcomes of modernist and auto-oriented planning and design unleashed a formidable critical reaction that begun more than 40 years ago in part as a result of the publication of Jane Jacob’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities (1961). One of the most influential thinkers on urban issues in the last fifty years, Jane Jacob’s challenged the expressway, ‘slum’ clearance, segregated, and greenfield suburban development approach to building cities that dominated city-building for most of the last century. Jacobs’s ideas on urban vibrancy and sociability became, in many ways, the foundation for the sizeable body of concepts and theories on sustainable urban design that has been produced over the last several decades.

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