ABSTRACT
The past century has seen the rise of an urban and suburban landscape that is profoundly different from anything created before. From the office parks, malls, freeways, residential tracts, and abandoned inner cities of many affluent nations to enormous Third World megacities, human communities have taken on dramatically new forms and characteristics. Cities that once occupied a few square miles now cover thousands; populations that once walked most places are now utterly dependent on the automobile. Although recent patterns of urbanization have brought many benefits, they have also created enormous problems and are unsustainable in that they cannot be continued in the same ways in the long run. Today’s development practices – both economic and physical forms of development – consume enormous amounts of land and natural resources, damage ecosystems, produce a wide variety of pollutants and toxic chemicals, create ever-growing inequities between groups of people, fuel global warming, and undermine local community, economies, and quality of life. Since the changes are incremental, it is hard to appreciate how rapidly our world is being transformed and how fundamentally these processes affect our lives and the choices available to us.
