Manifestoes have been a vehicle used by avant-garde groups and movements in politics, architecture and other artistic communities to chart out and publicize their grounding vision. The Sustainable Cities Manifesto was the founding statement of a developing project begun in 1987 to institute a multidisciplinary Center for Sustainable Cities on the University of Kentucky campus. It was impelled by our sense that a document tracing its critical inheritance from the past and enumerating a set of key principles and supporting arguments informing the vision of sustainable cities of the future was needed.

Urban thinkers from Aristotle to Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs have identified population and spatial density as the hallmark of the true polis or city. Like sustainable cities, the dense or compact cities – particularly large, heavily populated metropolises – have their own origins, influences and precursors. While previous studies have indicated that sustainable cities have been and are likely to be dense cities, urban density in and of itself is not a definitive indicator of sustainability in historic cities, current cities and cities of the future. Instead, the operative principle guiding the design and governance of sustainable cities is the striving for ecological and social sustainability. Certainly, the sustainable city treats urban density as an enabling element, but its distinctive design feature lies in its commitment to the principle of homeostatic balance within the city and between urban habitat and nature.