Integrating Sustainability Into Future Planning

The old way of doing things just isn’t cutting it anymore. Many cities are structured around old unsustainable development strategies with hundreds of unnecessary roads and homes miles away from businesses. As the gas price continues to rise more and more people are going to feel the pressure to move closer to work to reduce their millage costs, creating miniature ghost town suburbia’s on the outskirts of the city where only a select few people will be able to afford to live. City planners have to start implementing changes now to try and ease this transition to make heading in a sustainable direction a possibility. The costs of maintaining the unsustainable existing development now make it very difficult to make dramatic changes in a leap toward sustainability. However investments now will pay for themselves in the future. City planners need to ensure all new building are sustainable, sustainable building are show to have a lower initial cost because more planning is done before they are constructed. They also have a higher overall return in the long run. City also need to focus on centralizing business and homes together so that people within a community can afford the cost of going to work and to avoid future suburbia ghost towns. The centralization of business and homes also greatly increases the social capital within the community by increasing the different type of networks available. The city also needs to consider bringing in businesses to the suburbia areas to try and prevent them from their inevitable fate. Developers need to step away from the old ways of doing things and start making changes now to facilitate the development of sustainable cities in the future.