Powerful quantitative methods in the area of sustainable development have recently been developed which, when applied appropriately, can become very useful tools in the effort to establish the foundations of sustainability for the built environment. Among these analytical methods are the so-called sustainability indicator regimes and the various environmental footprint assessment tools (SPI, MIPS, etc.). This paper suggests that while these tools have played a valuable role in mobilizing wider public understanding of the nature of unsustainable processes operating in the world, by themselves these instruments have decided limitations if the goal is to achieve sustainable city-regions. As an alternative, this paper presents a supplementary tool in the early stages of its development –the Sustainable Area Budget (SAB) --as a particularly useful method in the sustainability design process.

---

The sustainability indicator approach is among the most popular and widely used methods by policymakers both in Europe as well as in North America, from the local to the national and even global levels, to guide strategies of sustainable development. Within this method, a list of fairly discrete measures identified as key yardsticks of sustainability is typically generated. For some measures distant goals for achieving a desired level of reduction often are set. Then periodic reviews are established where these sustainability indicators are calculated in order to assay how much progress (and where) has been made toward achieving these goals. Whether in Seattle, Washington, Chattanooga, Tennessee or Hamilton-Wentworth, Ontario, in North America and almost universally in Europe, this preferred method has been a staple in the design of strategies for “moving toward local sustainability.” Perhaps the most positive argument for governments employing sustainability indicators is that the process of selecting such indicators reflects collective values (Meadows, 1972) and clarifies stated goals and desired outcomes (Roseland, 1998: 203) and assures that what gets measured and evaluated gets implemented and supported (Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). Still there is a saying that “Better is the enemy of Good,” and in some sense better and good may be incommensurable. “Sustainability indicators” may be a case in point. In spite of the fact that they are often represented with precise numbers, such figures are only an indication of whether we are doing better or worse in a very relative sense. In fact the scales upon which such numbers are located do not have and cannot have sustainability as one pole. Such indicators are excellent in comparing cities (as Milano vs. Roma) to come up with an approximation of which one is worse in a variety of different weighted categories or on an aggregated, ranked scale. Such rankings can be very useful to prod municipalities to perform “better” in particular sectors, especially when performance is particularly poor. But this exercise can be repeated a limited number of times before further improvement comes up against various barriers and diminishing returns well short of any desired goals, make the exercise appear increasingly futile. No point on any of the separate scales or on the aggregated scale exists where sustainability can be said to exist. Rather the scales are better understood as indicators of unsustainability, and in this sense the name of the scale is a misnomer. They should really be called Unsustainability Indicators, for they are used only to assess existing unsustainable city-regions. The point is: sustainability is not a quantity to be measured. It is an ongoing metabolic process. Indicators do not even tell us tell us if in fact such sustainability processes are actually operating and in fact such processes do not exist in the cities being assessed. Improvements on an indicator scale, are then to be viewed as anecdotal and not to be considered as evidence of a viable sustainability process active at the scale of the city-region. What can be measured are second and third order effects, whose presence (or absence) are seen to be indicators of ill health in particular specialized sectors. They are not constructed to assess balances or, in the case of potential sustainable city-regions, complex interrelated balance-seeking systems. While they are still a very useful as a didactic and political tool, this will not be enough.

back to top

---

Appropriated Environmental Space and the methods that have been developed for assessing it (SPI, MIPS, etc.) are very useful tools in making local determinations to assist in minimizing the various loads on the environment. Their great merit is that they are extremely effective as analytical tools for assessing the environmental load for everything from a small-scale material or component, a factory or even an aggregated figure for a whole city-region. Moreover, metaphorically and visually, they are powerful, even compelling, ways to represent the extent of unsustainability manifested by ongoing social, economic, energy, and other processes within the built environment. They are however a good deal less useful in shaping a solution once the magnitude of the problem is recognized. For example, when Herbert Girardet (Joplin and Girardet, 1997) calculates the ecological footprint of London (using Rees-Wackernagel assumptions) to be 125 times the city’s land area, this calculation invariably makes a big impression upon readers, particularly since he shows that this figure approximates the entire arable land area of the British island. His figure tells us several things: that London’s metabolic processes are appropriating far too much territory; that London’s reliance on land is in competition and conflict with all the other towns and cities in Great Britain; and that London’s use of resources and land area must be dramatically cut back. But beyond that, it tells us little about what could or should be done or how a strategy to respond to this assessment might be shaped. The implication seems to be that in the long run London must cut back its use of resources and its load on the land by a factor of 125 times. This in fact, is not the case, since London must be entitled to claim more than its actual land area. But how much more? And how do we respond in terms of policy to this gross overuse of finite resources? Do we react to such a footprint calculation by buying into the Wuppertal strategy that urges an increase in resource efficiency by a factor of 4 or a factor of 10? Or do we adopt a more cavalier attitude, to wit: “Let’s not worry what the exact factor may be. We are doing very badly and we know what direction we need to be going. So let’s get started as soon as possible with any and all discrete actions that will reduce the footprint and figure out the precise goals later on.”

Unfortunately, the footprint approaches tend to encourage these mindsets, urging citizens and policymakers alike toward embarking on a succession of incremental improvements. We would argue that it is this very incremental, local problem-solving mindset that has us winning many small skirmishes and even mid-sized battles but losing the larger war. The stratagem of increasing resource efficiency and decreasing the environmental load or footprint in the many different places and scales at which it occurs is the sort of program best carried out by latter-day “neo-Calvinists” (i.e., technicians, management and efficiency experts); and it is thereby unlikely to benefit from the needs and creativity of the larger stakeholder population which it ultimately seeks to serve. It is thus also likely to be the sort of process that in sacrificing equity issues for efficiency goals, will transform this portentous democratic policy issue into a narrowly construed technical concern and thus allow it to fall below the threshold of an open and participatory process that sustainability demands.

Footprint approaches fall err to other problems as well. Like sustainability indicators, the ecological footprints as aggregated areas are additions of causes, which in effect appropriate land areas for their long-term maintenance. Because of this they cannot take into account synergistic effects between causes. They thereby discourage seeking and constructing complex networks of causes as a primary strategy for reducing footprint area. A city-region is a complex network of relationships. From an analytical perspective, these relationships can be disaggregated and quantified, but relational information is lost in such an analysis. It is much easier to disaggregate a complex system than it is to put it back together again. (The Humpty Dumpty effect.) It’s time to move from strategies that are aimed at incrementally lowering the various loads on the environment, making things marginally less unsustainable, to a strategy that seeks out and adopts strategies that are based on a full sustainability agenda which commit to adopting complete sustainability processes from the outset.

back to top

---

Most importantly, both the indicator and the footprint approaches suffer from their inability to establish an effective operating definition of sustainable development. Because they both show us in powerful ways approximately where we are, and because where we are is far from where we need to be, they can play a powerful didactic role in spurring us into action. In addition, because they can be visually represented, the magnitude of the unsustainability problems can be readily seen. But other than a general message to reduce, reduce, reduce, these methods do not present us with a coherent program for grappling with unsustainability nor do they conceptualize within their individual frameworks the condition of sustainability.

While Wuppertal’s strategy is to maintain a positive outlook by presenting many uplifting success stories, their overall political strategy of promoting resource efficiency and conservation is insufficient to realize the goal of long-term sustainability. It is very difficult to steer a vehicle while at the same time trying to apply full braking force. It seems futile to try to institute a program aimed directly at reversing society’s enormous momentum. Better to seek a process that can build on that momentum and steer it to a new path. While there is a consensus as to many of the principles and attributes of the sustainable city-region, it is time to come to grips with designing methods and models for getting from here to there. Now is the time for the discussion to turn from how much we may need to lower our environmental loads to how to collectively restructure our places, our processes and our lifestyles so that we can continue to operate at a given, preferred level indefinitely (i.e., a sustainable condition understood as “equity extended into the future.”) The current authors through their work on the Aalborg Charter (1994) onward have maintained that:

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

In order to begin the process of bridging the divide between the unsustainable here and the sustainable there, progress on conceptualizing and operationalizing the idea of a Sustainable Area Budget is needed. The Sustainable Area Budget (SAB) can be thought of as the other side of the indicator/footprint coin—that is, as another more comprehensive, way of looking at and addressing the problem of unsustainability. Its preliminary formulation goes something like this: If each city-region were to have a budget, a land budget, from which to satisfy its needs now and into the future, then it would have a clearer understanding of its resources and its limitations. With a fixed area budget the citizen-stakeholders of a city-region would in principle be free to negotiate their way of life within the limitations presented by their locale and their own culture and creativity as long as they would not export any negative imbalances beyond their SAB. Bear in mind that this is not a new condition. It is the basis on which all traditional towns and cities operated historically with the exception of those cases and situations where through greed, jealousy and ignorance they would sometimes infringe on the environmental space of others. In a globalized economic system, such local processes no longer obtain. Unfortunately this system of global capitalism is by its nature, fundamentally unsustainable. This is so because as a system it has no place for equity or environmental issues. Moreover, although many governments and institutions are attempting willy-nilly to apply social and ecological brakes to the globalist juggernaut, it continues to gather strength and increasing capacity for deflecting these minor nuisances. The good news is that in the long run global capitalism by its own design must fail, since it is ultimately dependent upon people and the environment and therefore cannot exploit them indefinitely. The bad news is that unless we create alternative sustainable structures soon, its collapse will pull people and the environment down with it.

The Sustainable Area Budget is simple in principle. Discounting the likely effects of global warming, the land area of the earth and of each region on it is fixed. Material resources are land based . The land budget of a city-region in its simplest terms is the same fraction of its country’s total land area as its population is a fraction of the country’s total population. This means that each resident of a country carries a claim to the balancing potential of his/her fraction of the country’s land area divided by its population. For Austria, with a population of 8,131,000 people and a land area of 83.858 sq. km, each resident would have this sort of claim to .0102 sq. km (1.02 hectares) of land. This land would not be individually held, but would be part of the claim of his/her city-region. So far it is simple enough. On the other hand, such an approach raises many questions, the most general of which is: is it worth the trouble to embark on such an exercise? But is there really any alternative? Before entering this discussion, it is useful to consider some of the benefits from following this approach.

If we were able to agree on such a land-based budget, whether it was on a national, a continental or a global basis, we would have for the first time a clear and relatively precise basis upon which to conduct a local sustainability process. With the assistance of an array of new tools on the shelf or on the horizon, the citizen stakeholders of a given city-region could negotiate amongst themselves how they would afford to live within the limits of their land budget and their own creativity. In this new governance process involving an expanded democratic process, they would consider their own traditions, land, climate, history, hydrology, agricultural traditions, land resources, culture, patterns of conviviality, urban and rural patterns, recreation, resources, etc. in the process of projecting alternative scenarios for their collective future. Naturally they will also need expert assistance in constructing and projecting these alternative models. The current authors have projected what we call the Sustainability Engine©, a computer program using CAD/GIS technology with object oriented systems dynamics programming that would house land based models of the city-region. Using this programming platform, stakeholders would, with the assistance of technicians, conduct their scenario building exercises and hypothetical experiments. The stakeholders could try out their ideas and introduce what-if questions to emerging models of the developing city-regions. In the process, they could negotiate solutions to local sustainability that could entertain every potential option and involve every represented interest, but under the overarching condition that sustainability itself would be nonnegotiable.

To elaborate, this experimentation would occur in the context of the Sustainable City Game, an Interactive Construct where competing needs and competing proposals could exist side by side within alternative scenarios, modeled and displayed on the computer. In addition to displaying the three-dimensional images and walk-throughs of the various developmental proposals, the Sustainability Engine© would also house a systems dynamics model that would track the state of balance of the city-region-system and of its many subsystems. With this processing capability, the engine would provide feedback as to how a given proposal (say a new factory or a farming operation) might possibly add to the economy, but simultaneously unbalance the energy-material flow dynamics of the overall system. There would then be a succession of attempts to rebalance the system using local, regenerative resources.

back to top

---

The Sustainable Area Budget concept is relatively simple: each human being is entitled to be sustained by a fair share of the earth’s land, water and air. Still, the specific application of the principle behind this concept is by no means obvious. Ultimately, the application of this principle will need to be the subject of international negotiations and treaty. But that step is some years away. Even specific applications of this principle will need to be the subject of a number of lines of research and debate. This discourse as it is pursued is likely to provide the basis for development of a better understanding of the nature of sustainability and its consequences. A number of questions raised by the SAB concept come to mind:

--For a given city-region on a country by country basis:

*Is the SAB to be determined on the basis of total land area or only arable land area?

*Is the SAB to be determined by land category (entitlement of similar percentages of agricultural land, pastures, forests, wilderness)?

*Is wilderness to be excluded from the calculations and be permanently protected?

*Does land quality come into the equation?

*Is SAB to be restricted to the contiguous area of the given city-region?

*May SAB land be traded between city-regions?

*Can SAB’s be allowed to fluctuate with changes in population or is the SAB to be fixed at a given point in time and a given population?

*When people move from town to town, does that influence the SAB?

*Should SAB’s be standardized to the current point in time or some future point in time where a “climax population,” a planned mature or maximum population for the subject city-region, is reached?

*How do trade agreements and alliances form between city-regions and how does this effect local balances and the determination of local self-sufficiency?

--For different countries:

*Is SAB to be calculated on a country basis (ex. Austria), or a continental basis (ex. Europe), or a global basis? (In such differing cases the SAB is likely to differ dramatically.)

*If it is to be on a country basis, is each country still entitled to its equitable globally based share of the earth’s air and oceans?

*Are sustainable partnerships to be permitted/encouraged between city-regions in the dense, wealthy countries of the north and the less populated, poorer, less consuming countries of the south?

* Such partnerships could greatly increase the SAB’s of countries like the Netherlands and the U.K., but what about countries like Bangladesh? .

back to top

---

While there are many long-term issues to be resolved, the SAB concept is ready for research, and such use could accelerate the emergence of sustainable city-regions. The SAB will be useful in helping to answer the question: In negotiating and designing the activities and fluxes of our city-region, what are the resources we have to work with without infringing on the environmental space of other city-regions? As has been indicated, the definitive answer to that question will be a while in coming, nevertheless the authors propose some simple working guidelines for responding to this question. Because Europe is more densely populated than other continents, and because it would be premature to claim environmental space outside of one’s own country, a conservative approach would initially establish local SAB’s from a country based perspective. Even this does not completely answer all the questions generated by this developing approach. However, as a useful starting point, it does serve as the impetus to some valuable experiments.

For Austria, we would propose as a point of departure several complementary SAB’s: For growing on the land:

*The arable land area( 1.397.000 hectares) divided by the population (8.131.111) = growing SAB= .17 hectares per capita

*For grazing: the grazing land area (1.943.000hectares ) divided by the total population ( 8.191.111) =grazing SAB= .24 hectares per capita

*For forest resources: the forested area ( 3.240.000) divided by the total population (8.131.000) = Forest SAB = .40 hectares per capita

*For CO2 fixation: the total area (8.396.000 ) divided by the total population (8.131.111) =CO2 SAB= 1.02 hectares per capita (this number of course is to be modified by or substituted by the photosynthetic capacity of Austrian flora and is to be augmented by Austria’s equitable share of the photosynthetic capacity of the Earth’s oceans )

Compare these figures for those of other countries, continents and global values as shown in charts #1 and #2. To determine the available city-region SAB’s in the various sectors multiply these per capita SAB’s by the population in the subject city-region.





back to top

---

Within an ongoing sustainable city game, footprint and indicator approaches take on new value. The emergence of alternative city models would be guided and facilitated by the Sustainability Engine© which could use a footprint model as an embodied subroutine. Thus as these models would be brought toward balance the footprint subroutine would indicate this by showing that the appropriated environmental space would be reduced to approach the size of the Sustainable Area Budget. Similarly during the city design and negotiating process, Sustainability Indicators (also as a subroutine of the Engine) could be applied to the emerging city models as a test, to give the stakeholder game players feedback as to the ways in which various aspects of the city models needed more work to move them toward balance.

back to top

---

Dumreicher, Heidi; Levine, Richard S.; Yanarella, Ernest J.; and Taghi Radmard “Generating Models of Urban Sustainability: Vienna’s Westbahnhof Sustainable Hilltown.” In Williams, Katie; Burton, Elizabeth; and Jenks, Mike. Achieving Sustainable Urban Form. London: E & FN Spon (Routledge) 2000. 288-298, 379.

Jopling, John, and Herbert Girardet. 1997. Creating a Sustainable London.”London: Sustainable London Trust.

Levine, Richard S. “The Sustainability Engine© and the City,” in Stadtplaene #6, 1/96, Oikodrom, Vienna

Levine, Richard S. and Yanarella, Ernest J. “Don’t Pick the Low-Lying Fruit: Sustainability from Pathway to Process,” 19th National Passive Conference, ASES, San Jose, California, June1994

Meadows, Dennis. 1972. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.

Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T.A. 1992. Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector. New York: Perseus Press.

Roseland, Mark. 1998. Toward Sustainable Communities: Resources for Citizens and Their Governments. Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers.

back to top

---