Sustainability Science

This proposal for a new kind of suburbia is inspired by the tree, featuring self-sufficient "symbiotic" homes that generate their own power and are integrated with the land.

Across the country, home buyers are embracing subdivisions that make farms a central amenity.

[...] it does take a study to rank the city as the second-densest metropolitan area in the country - right behind our perpetually jealous East Coast stepsister New York City. According to "Measuring Sprawl 2014," a national study released Wednesday, when a city is more densely stacked with people and buildings, its residents have increased health and safety, better chances of upward economic mobility and lower transportation costs. While dense urban environments do have more car accidents, fewer of them result in fatalities according to the report, which was compiled by Smart Growth America, a Washington, D.C., coalition of groups advocating for city planning solutions,. Indexed by looking closely at four factors - development density, land use mix, street accessibility and activity centering - the city by the bay had a score of 194.28, just a smidge behind list-topper New York, which scored 203.36. Beyond avoiding deadly car accidents, the benefits reaped by people who live in cities with higher density include lower rates of obesity and diabetes, as well as lower blood pressure on average, the report said. For every 10 percent increase in a city's index score there is a nearly 5 percent increase in the likelihood that a child born into the bottom 20 percent of income distribution will ascend to the top 20 percent.

A century ago, "an alternative vision of the future of American transportation flickered to life, and then faded."

Urbanisation is the key factor underpinning and catalysing changes in food systems, environmental quality, climate change and agriculture livelihoods in the overall urban ecosystem setting and its sustainability. The paper explores Dar es Salaam, a rapidly expanding city in Sub-Saharan Africa, and shows that urban agriculture provides urban ecosystem services and contributes to environmental sustainability. The interconnections of environmental justice, urban ecosystem services and climate change and variability found eminent feature that influence land governance, productivity and aesthetic value of the city. The study reaffirms the pivotal role urban agriculture which plays to enhance community health services and access to resources, with important implications on urban environmental sustainability and redistributive spatial land use planning policies and practices. The process of urbanisation, forms of urban agriculture and government strategies for enhanced urban food systems in the city economy have been highlighted. Equally, the process triggers the transformation of settlements from rural in character to modernity with an augmented land use conflicts. The results suggests that with increasing population, a clear spatial land use planning and management strategy is required to overcome the challenges and enhanced food systems and urban environmental sustainability in rapidly urbanizing cities like Dar es Salaam in Sub-Saharan Africa.