As with the basic term sustainability itself, the professed concern with sustainable urbanism has become something of a cliché in the 1990s. While such popularisation is a vital element in the process of getting the issue onto political agendas, the simplifications and abstractions involved often diffuse essential meanings. Expedient or cynical hijacking of popular slogans like sustainability have sometimes served to conceal status quo arguments and to reduce or prevent substantive change. It is now widely accepted that existing urban areas and forms of urbanism are generally unsustainable in the sense that they are highly energy intensive, polluting and waste generating, are often inefficiently structured and organised, and (apart from newly industrialising countries) are characterised by increasing social inequalities to the point where long-term viability and the ability of future generations to meet their needs and aspirations (e.g. in terms of an equivalent quality of urban life) cannot be guaranteed. I would argue that an acceptable level of equitability is essential to sustainability, because the latter can be achieved only through general legitimacy, acceptance, empowerment and participation.

The issues have now been accorded international recognition at the highest level. For example. Chapter 7 of Agenda 21, adopted at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, deals specifically with ‘promoting sustainable human settlement development’ (Middleton el al, 1993). In mid-1996, Habitat II, the second UN City Summit, was held in Istanbul, Turkey. The draft ‘Global Plan of Action’ to be agreed at Habitat II contains two key national commitments for governments to endorse, namely ‘adequate shelter for all’ and ‘sustainable human settlements in an urbanising world’ (Church 1995). In support of these activities and commitments, the UN Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS/Habitat) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) have launched a Sustainable Cities Programme. This is a technical cooperation and capacity building programme for ‘the development of a sustainable urban environment, founded on broad-based and meaningful public participation’ (UNCHS 1995).

In the academic and professional literatures, at least two books with the title Sustainable Cities (Haughton and Hunter 1994; Stren et al 1992) and a range of shorter works on this topic have appeared recently.