Co-directors Richard S. Levine and Ernest J. Yanarella founded the Center for Sustainable Cities at the University of Kentucky with the goal of exploring the theory and practice of sustainability. Their exploration of sustainability with continual collaboration with Heidi Dumreicher at Oikodrom: The Vienna Institute for Urban Sustainability has yielded an operational definition of sustainability, as reflected in the Aalborg Charter.

“Sustainability is a local, informed, participatory, balance-seeking process, operating within its Sustainable Area Budget, exporting no harmful imbalances beyond its territory or into the future, thus opening the spaces of future opportunity and possibility.”

Using the operational definition as an impetus, the Center for Sustainable Cities has been a partner in several projects and intensive urban studies in Austria, China, Italy, and has headed several studies in the United States. The Center for Sustainable Cities has presented a multitude of papers on the subject of sustainability at conferences around the world and has been published in several books and magazines.

More recently, the Center for Sustainable Cities Design Studio was formed as an architecture and urban design firm based in Lexington, Kentucky. The CSC Design Studio’s goal is to focus on the implementation of our operational definition of sustainability through the practice of architecture. Architecture, of course, is only one part of the sustainability process, other fields of research would include, but are not limited to, the ecology, the economy, and the sociology of a city-region, with the goal being collaboration between all the professions involved to provide a holistic picture of a place. Informed citizen participation is also necessary for the implementation of sustainability, and with the professionals’ help, stakeholders begin to understand how their city-system is an intricate web of interconnected cause and effect relationships that can be manipulated in a multitude of ways to achieve a balanced, and sustainable development. Architecture is an important part of this participatory design process because it is the place where sustainability happens, but by its nature, can’t be sustainable unto itself. There are many papers written on this subject in the Research portion of this website. Currently, the CSC Design Studio is involved in residential sustainability-oriented design, and community development. The CSC Design Studio’s head architect is Richard S. Levine, and he is assisted by two research associates/ architectural apprentices Casey Ryan Mather and Michael T. Hughes – two graduates from the University of Kentucky School of Architecture.