ABSTRACT
Environmentalism, along with some other supportive socio-political tendencies, has furthered the cause of reform in the planning and management of urban areas. The Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992, called on local governments to mobilize their communities for the localization of Agenda 21. This UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) went further. Its thematic guidance favoured community-led participation in the approach to environmental improvement, introducing an emphasis on bottom-up participation, rather than reliance on top-down ways of doing things in much town planning practice. This new ‘environmental planning and management’ (EPM) has also been advocated in the Sustainable Cities Programme (SCP), organized as demonstration projects in designated cities by the UN Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). In application, the localization of Agenda 21 and the SCP would clearly have local variation in accordance with the perception of sustainability and the economic, social and political dialectic in community-based environmentalism. This chapter contains an analysis and evaluation of the planning methods, the progress and the dilemmas in the modem localization of environmentalism. Although the chapter has some general evaluations and reflections, as is appropriate at this early phase of EPM, it also has much descriptive detail.
