ABSTRACT
The green city ideal in modern planning has a long pedigree but development of a truly ecological foundation dates from the 1970s. In Australia, the development of modern planning focused on community advocacy, private initiatives and state experimentation, targeting mainly public health, economic development and city beautification at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nineteenth-century approaches to land management were geared to land survey and disposal rather than environmental impacts. The rise of the modern town planning movement was driven by the perceived need to develop a higher-order, bird's-eye view, for coordination of urban improvement and management processes, concentrating on land use and the built environment. In the post-Depression 1930s, the major Australian planning preoccupation was housing and urban renewal. Growing interest in the bio-physical environment was underpinned by new ecological science. Ecologically sustainable development (ESD) was terminology 'unique to Australia' attributed 'to the power of major environmental groups' in the early 1990s.
