ABSTRACT
Most sustainability literature chooses to be blissfully ignorant of the history of the concept. Many commentators talk as if sustainability was invented sometime in the late 1980s – and has only been an issue since the Brundtland Commission's report Our Common Future was published in 1987 (WCED, 1987). Of course, the concept is much older. Earlier versions can be found in medieval thought, seventeenth-century forest practices, colonial land management and most of the alternative thinking of the 1960s (e.g. Cobb and Daly, 1989; Pepper, 1984; Reid, 1995). The planning pioneers, Geddes, Howard and Osborne, can also be credited with having provided early visions for sustainable cities (Leonard, 1992; Hall and Ward, 1998; Hall, this volume)
