The provisions of the Rio Earth Summit treaty of 1992 obligated the towns and cities of the signatory countries to prepare and carry out an action plan under its “Local Agenda 21” provisions. Because these provisions were somewhat general and abstract, the European Commission instituted a program culminating in a conference in Aalborg, Denmark in May 1994 called “The European Conference of Cities and Towns Towards Sustainability.” Its animating purpose was to develop a charter that would detail a European approach to the realization of Local Agenda 21. The resulting Aalborg Charter, which has now been ratified by hundreds of cities throughout Europe, has become the principal European vehicle for implementing Local Agenda 21.

Rather than becoming a document that focused on a listing of “best practices” or promoting an “indicator” approach, the Charter emerged after much negotiation and debate as a process document that set forth in strong and clear terms the nature of Sustainable Development as a process. The present authors were principal architects of the Charter and have continued developing both the theoretical framework presented by the Charter as well as extending the process to real world projects. Through successive theoretical iterations and practical design interventions, the authors have devised an operational definition for sustainability processes which is both a condensation and a completion of the operating principles as put forth by the Aalborg Charter:

“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, thus opening a fullness of opportunity and possibility (moglichkeitsraum).”(1)

A unique quality of this definition is the way it places the human and social dimensions of sustainability at the center of the sustainability process without diminishing the critical supportive role played by bona fide science and responsive technological innovation. This paper will explicate that definition, as applied in a project in Vienna and describe how together they describe the minimum level of activity at which sustainable development can be appropriately pursued.

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At its current stage of development, Sustainable Development appears to manifest through many different faces and issues, and many different movements independently address each of those issues. These include: the face of environmental remediation, the face of sustainability indicators, the face of industrial ecology, the face of green architecture, the face of technological systems, the face of social justice, the face of developing regions, the face of increasing crime and social unrest, the face of energy conservation, the face of climate change and greenhouse gasses, the face of species extinction, the face of ozone depletion, the face of developing nation bankruptcy, the face of potable water shortages, the face of population explosion, the face of HIV/AIDS and other epidemics, the face of globalist devastation, the face of fishery depletion, the face of rainforest destruction, the face of solid waste accumulation, the faces of intergenerational, intergender and interspecies equity, and on and on. Each of these facets (and others) has generated organizations and movements aimed at confronting them as separate problems. While the battle is being fought on many fronts, much evidence suggests that in the absence of a coordinated and holistic strategy the amelioration of problems in one sector or location is highly likely to give rise to often larger and more intractable problems in other sectors or locations. While we may be winning a few of these battles, we are certainly loosing the war. A number of significant questions arise: Can the issue of sustainability be addressed as many issues if it is not first and primarily addressed as one issue? Can sustainable development manifest itself through many faces if it does not first manifest with one face?

The oft-promoted trinity of Sustainable Development in many theoretical treatments is: “Ecology, Economy and Equity.” While in some respects a useful rhetorical move for understanding, communication, and facilitating particular areas of research and action, the ploy of starting with one issue (Sustainable Development) and then subdividing it into three issues also creates a significant problem. The risk is that having traveled down this path, we are then likely to follow the slippery slope and further subdivide these issues. If various theoretical constructs like the Aalborg Charter are valid, then Sustainable Development must be a concerted, integrated effort. Following this view, although such a process can be seen as having various realms of activity, the process of sustainable development cannot work successfully unless all these perceived parts work in harmony. Therefore isolated remediation of one of these many unsustainability problems will at best have little or no effect on the many other aspects of the larger situation and at worst cause larger unintended imbalances elsewhere in the overall system.

The orthodox approach then sees sustainable development activities proceeding at many scales from the global to the local, and in many different realms by attacking many individual and discrete problems of the condition of unsustainability. While each of these scales and each of these problems may be fully worthy of such attention, their separation may put them at cross purposes with one another and may create unforeseen problems in other sectors, at other scales or in other places. The incremental/analytic approaches limned above forget that Sustainable Development is a characteristic of the whole and not of the parts. Therefore although there are many useful tools and processes in the realms of Ecology, Economy and Equity that can be used in support of a sustainability process, there is no inherently sustainable material or process that can be said to exist below the level of a full blown Sustainable Development process.

In many respects the challenge of Sustainable Development appears to be rooted in technical questions and technological remedies. The dimensions of the sustainability “problem” are stated in numbers and over the past few years scientists and engineers have made concerted efforts to quantify the problem, often resorting to measuring the immeasurable or else identifying quantitative surrogates for immeasurable societal dimensions of sustainability. Within the current climate of official environmental concerns and activist environmental mobilization, a clear hierarchy can be discerned in regard to in the way in which the aspects of sustainability receive attention and funding. In an increasingly globalizing world the economic dimensions of sustainability receive the greatest attention and support. Even within the current unsustainable economic framework, sustainable development programs are often asked to demonstrate short term economic payoffs and quick paybacks on investment. In part because economics has experienced the greatest success in converting social problems into empirical measures, indices, formulas, and equations, in part because of the putative relevance of the discipline for promoting policies advancing the good (i.e., mass consumerist) society, economic analysis has exerted a hegemonic role in sustainability research and policy debate.

Next in the pecking order are the ecological questions. Because many aspects of the ecological problems and their effects lend themselves to quantifiability and calculation, they attract a moderate amount of support, albeit at grossly inadequate levels. But precisely because the boundaries of ecology as a field exceed any single discipline’s reach or expertise, its scientific prowess as a unified field is lacking in recognition and legitimacy.

At the bottom of the totem pole are equity issues. Because quality of life is such an elusive and debatable issue it elicits only token gestures and relatively little support, even though few would deny that quality of life is the core of any substantial understanding of sustainability. Analytical thinkers would suggest that equity issues are better addressed through the balancing of the more measurable economically and ecologically related problems, which is grounded in the trickle-down notion that with a better economy and a better ecology, equity will tend to take care of itself. Moreover, given the hesitancy of economic interests to grapple directly and openly with the unexplicated questions of values underlying supposedly value-neutral “market” considerations, economists prefer to traffic in safer, materially grounded terms like gross domestic product or “quality of life” indicators.

But Sustainable Development is essentially a cultural question. In Herman Daly’s poetic definition:

“Sustainable Development is equity extended into the future,”

Equity then is the foundational principle of sustainability. But this question must of necessity be served by quantitative means. Thus we may ask: how are the resources of science, technology, industry, economy and ecology be mobilized in the furtherance of a social program without the cart overtaking the horse? How can technical means become the servant of a social process?

These questions have been pursued for a number of years through collaboration between the Center for Sustainable Cities in the US and Oikodrom in Austria. Their research and design agenda has taken the form of an operationalization and implementation of the previously stated definition, which itself is a development of the principles set forth in the Aalborg Charter.

The social dimension of sustainable development has two conventional faces, neither one of which has been particularly useful in sustainability processes. In the scientific realm, the social sciences have had a strong empirical/analytic history that has generated a powerful reluctance to engage in activist programs, much less design endeavors. Participation as social activism, on the other hand, has often been extremely efficacious in preventing bad things from happening, or at least in slowing down their impact; but it is difficult to channel activist energies toward consideration of complex problems where experimentation and synthesis of alternative scenarios are the mode of operation.

Although the Aalborg Charter makes it clear that Sustainable Development is at its base a social process, the pursuit of Sustainable Development remains largely in the analytic, scientific realm. Moreover as a subject for scientific inquiry, Sustainable Development tends to be pursued for the most part within specialized disciplinary frameworks, thus virtually insuring that the results of these scientific studies, while they may foster marginal improvements in various sectors, overall will fall outside of the domain of sustainability.

It is easy to see why scientists are wary of participatory approaches. For one thing, disciplinary frameworks within science are seen as more or less autonomous and complete in themselves. Compounding fragmentation and hyperspecialization in academic disciplines is the parallel allocation of most funding for resources (NSF, NIH, NEH, etc.) along traditional disciplinary lines where even putatively integrated research is understood as multidisciplinary (i.e., where many discrete disciplines utilize their individual perspectives on their own definitions of the problem) rather than interdisciplinary (i.e., where many disciplines open out onto a common framework of understanding of the problem guided by a shared and integrated set of assumptions). Moreover, given the way Science is defined institutionally and marketed to the wider public, it is not seen as being scientific to introduce interest group opinions, political pressures or economics into a scientific determination. Adding something to science is seen as being less than scientific. But if Sustainable Development is to be seen as a social and cultural question, then it must recognized and addressed in an integrated way by a civic process aided by good science and not a scientific process debased by political pressures.

If we return to the above definition, we see how the preceding observations and arguments bear on its meaning and import. In this view, Sustainable Development is a: --Local: a specific place, a city-region or what we have termed a “Sustainable Urban Implantation,” where Sustainable Development can find a place; --Informed: the role given to science to provide the process and its stakeholders with the scientifically and systematically determined information as to how their proposals and scenarios will play out; --Participatory: the social dimension of sustainability where all manner of possible representative of movements, interest groups, and business, labor, and citizens organizations are invited to become stakeholders in the Sustainable City Game; --Balance-Seeking Process: the interactive arena where any proposition may be put on the table, with the implications of its reverberations through the city-system being tested through scientific modeling, and its negative imbalances being brought towards equilibrium through these negotiation and modeling processes;

--Operating within its Sustainable Area Budget (SAB): so that an equitable ecological determination of the appropriate space and resources at different scales can be made (see below);

--Exporting no Negative Imbalances Beyond its Territory or into the Future: where each town or city-region seeks to transform its negative externalities into positive inputs or resources for other processes within its boundaries. (To elaborate on the last two components of this definition—particularly, the concept of the Sustainable Area Budget: every town or city-region has an inherent budget based on its per-capita claim to the Earth’s bounty and the Earth’s capacity to absorb offences. This is its Sustainable Area Budget--or SAB. In principle, a city-region is free to negotiate anything it wants to within the limits of its calculated Sustainable Area Budget, its local culture and its collective creativity, as long as it does not export problems beyond its region or leave those problems for future generations.)

--Thus Opening a Fullness of Opportunity and Possibility (moglichkeitsraum): such a process is seen as an empowering and liberating activity that maximizes the principle of locally bounded, informed choice within globally recognized limits. All this is accomplished through a guided negotiation and design process. As against this definition, a significant conceptual problem with the Ecology, Economy, Equity trinity is that it has no context. It has no place and no scale. Neither can it effectively become ecology plus economy plus equity. Sustainability is not an additive enterprise—i.e., it does not involve an addition or accumulation of programs or parts, wherever they may happen to occur. Sustainability is ecology, economy and equity as one entity in one place.

In this respect, it is not so difficult to create a checklist of the characteristics that a sustainable city-region would embody. Many such checklists have been put forth. It is much more difficult however to formulate a strategy and a process by which a sustainable city-region would be generated. One of the strengths of the Aalborg Charter is that in spite of great pressure to do so, it did not adopt the checklist approach. Instead it presented a process by which a sustainable city would be generated. In our development of the approach outlined in the Charter, we have come up with a strategy for initiating the process as well as developing the tools by which that process can be carried out. Early versions of that process were carried out in the Westbahnhof Sustainable City-as-a-Hill project.(3) The starting point of the process is much like that of a game--the “Sustainable City Game.” The game approach is useful because it is both engaging and non-threatening. There have been a number of versions of this game developed to date.(4)(5) On the other hand, it is also more than a game. It is an attractor. It attracts various potential stakeholders with widely divergent interests (as in any real city) to come together in a non-hostile environment where, in the process of playing the game, they come to realize that any real progress or development must come from a synergy of diverse, even competing interests, perspectives, and resources. Through the game they come to learn how their common interest in developing and maintaining sustainable balances in the development of the city, supercede their individual interests in maximizing their personal advantages. They also learn that the pursuit of personal goals or interest group goals is likely to throw the city-system out of balance and that in order for any proposal to be acceptable, balances need to be reestablished at the largest scale--the scale of the city-system. This is the underlying principle of the “game.” Any proposal may be put on the table, but in order to be viable through several rounds of the game, it must find a way of becoming part of a larger system, which itself approaches balance or is capable of rebalancing itself. In principle, everything is negotiable except sustainability, i.e. the balance-seeking principle. In the Sustainability Game, it is the role of science to determine the state of balance of the proposed city-systems. In response to a problem or a need, questions like these arise during the playing of the game: What if we try such and such? Does it solve the perceived problem and what are its larger effects on the city-system? Also: If the local solution causes problems elsewhere in the city-system, what can we do to compensate for those imbalances? And: as the effects of these proposals and our attempts to compensate for the imbalances they cause reverberate through the city-system, is the overall level of problem and the attendant resiliency of the system increasing or decreasing? Is the overall effect of the proposal, which in the first instance seemed to be an excellent idea, finally worth the larger imbalances it may be causing?” And again: if it is worth doing, what new measures do we have to take to bring the city-system back toward balance?

To provide the means to answer these sorts of questions is the role reserved for scientists and other professionals. The stakeholders ask the “what if we were to do this” questions and the scientists, architects and technicians, provide the feedback. They do this through what we are calling the Sustainability Engine©(5) This sustainability tool is a suite of computer software that combines computer aided design, facilities management and geographic information systems programming with object oriented or systems dynamics models of a developing three dimensional city design or a family of city designs.

The game begins with simple “sustainable urban implantation” designs assembled in a modular fashion, and builds in complexity as the games proceed. Just as the stakeholder-players learn of the consequences of their ideas, needs and preferences by playing the game, so to the game (the computer program) “learns” about how sustainable city-regions work through the many rounds of the playing of the game. The program learns which strategies work under different circumstances and the reasons for their higher or lower levels of performance. This experience then becomes available to subsequent players of the game as suggested successful patterns of development. Part of the interest of the game is that a number of different city design scenarios may be pursued simultaneously by different players and a given player may be involved with a variety of other players in the development of several design scenarios. Different designs will have differing regimes of balance and imbalance and this would suggest that in subsequent rounds of play the characteristics of different designs might be folded together to create new urban models, in attempts to minimize weaknesses and maximize strengths. Eventually one or more city designs will emerge that have a strong and resilient relationship to the balances that need to be maintained and that also are a reflection of the needs, desires and creativity of the whole stakeholder constituency. As the game is played through subsequent rounds, the complexity and robustness of the game itself increases. Slowly, confidence in the skills of the scientists and facilitators of the game process increases, as the quality, livability and sustainability of the emerging city designs become apparent. As an understanding that the mutual benefit that will accrue to all stakeholders (however divergent their inherent interests may be) also develops, the game will become increasingly serious. At this point it is to be expected that the game will become real and the first of the modern European sustainable city-regions will emerge.

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What is described above is a Sustainable Development process that relies heavily upon science and technology, but which is also fundamentally a societal process. Although the science has not yet been fully developed, this is not a major problem. Since sustainability is a fundamentally social and cultural issue, far more than a technical one, its receptiveness in the social and political realms is what is most in need of development. That is not likely to happen without widespread confidence that truly sustainable city patterns and processes of development exist. And that is not likely to happen until there exist examples of city-regions that can be demonstrated to operate within clearly understood sustainable limits–or at least that there are credible processes and models of such sustainable city-regions. That is the goal of this research.

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(1) “Cities and Regions in the Global Sustainability Debate: Co-Evolution Toward Sustainable Development, R. S. Levine, E. J. Yanarella, H. Dumreicher, Regions-Cornerstones for Sustainable Development Conference, SUSTAIN, Graz, Austria, October 1998

(2) “Beyond Sustainability Indicators: The Sustainable Area Budget,” Making Sustainable Regions Real Conference, Graz, Austria, November 2000

(3) “Generating Models of Urban Sustainability: Vienna’s Westbahnhof Sustainable Hilltown,” H.Dumreicher, R.S. Levine, E.J.Yanarella, T.Radmard, in Achieving Sustainable Urban Form, Jenks, Burton and Williams, ed. Spon, London 2000

(4)”The Emerald City: a Sustainable City Game,” R.S. Levine, D. Marshall, E.J. Yanarella, G.I.V.E. (Globally Integrated Village Environments) Conference, Vienna, Austria, February 1997

(5) “The Space of Flows, the Rules of Play, and Sustainable Urban Design,” E.J.Yanarella, R. S. Levine, H. Dumreicher, The Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, v.1, No. 1, 2000

(6) “The Sustainability Engine© and the City,” Stadtplaene #7, Oikodrom, Vienna, Austria, February 1996

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