Publisher's Synopsis
Towards Planning for Sustainable Development breaks new ground by establishing principles and a process for planning which addresses environmental threats posed by development. The book suggests that development can be framed by four major environmental dimensions: territorial, quantitative, qualitative and temporal. The dimensions determine constraints, called Ultimate Environmental Thresholds (UETs), which should indicate where, at what scale and which kind of development should take place, over what time period or at what rate, so that a rational use of natural resources can be secured. The UETs should play a critical role in defining ecologically sound 'solution space' within which development proposals should be generated or contained. The book, after discussing the UET concept in the context of sustainable development, presents several real-life applications of the UET method and offers a step-by-step guide for its use in everyday professional practice. In the follow-up parts the book indicates new avenues revealing a latent potential for a wider development of the method and provides educational experience from its teaching. It can be argued, therefore, that it covers both theoretical and practical aspects of the pursuit of ecologically sound professional planning.
