Typically, Sustainability can be a matter of registering the decrease in emissions from municipal buildings, increasing the number of public transit buses, growing more food close to home, not using plastic bags for shopping and volunteering to plant more trees in one's yard. All the effects of these activities may add up to an amelioration of the urban environment, and certainly a better collective feeling of participating in a societal project.
However there is a deeper layer of meaning and project which has to be undertaken if we are to be satisfied citizens in our new less carbon intensive lives. Sustainability has an aesthetic measure which forms both an iconic and quotidian sense of place and livelihood. Recognising and building on these latent measures will, if not help define sustainability, at least help define a sensibly better way of living with the world.
A cobbled street in Palermo, Buenos Aires, where everything one may need lays within a block or two of home.
When we begin to really think about and feel what is local and special and contextual we can begin to see how the distances we walk help or hinder our daily life, the shelters we stand under in the dripping rain or burning sun, or how the plants which line the street add or decrease a sense of authenticity. How the planning of the new commercial area close to home is outwardly accessible by foot and circulated within by foot and if it is visually open with opportunities to sit; all these matter.
It is why any one Large Sized Store is easily forgotten while particular neighbourhoods, or even whole cities, are memorable.
Anywhere
The measure of Urban form which you can recognise with your eyes, your feet, your nose is as equal to any other measure of 'sustainability' yet devised. Sustainability has little to do with purchasing and a lot more to do with appreciation of the good in our towns, cities and megalopolis' we have now inherited.
This has nothing to do with nostalgia and everything with simply designing urban space with the users in mind.
Paris, a very large city with many intimate places
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