Social Sustainability in Urban Areas

This groundbreaking new volume on social sustainability offers both critique and creative solutions. It challenges the conventional wisdoms of social sustainability and presents practical examples of projects that will help practitioners to think carefully and innovatively about the situations they are addressing. The book consists of original contributions from academics working in the fields of urban planning, housing, regeneration, transport and international sustainable development. Drawing on case study research gathered in the UK, Europe and Africa, it adopts an original, interdisciplinary approach to both theory and practice, illustrating the challenges and opportunities facing policy-makers and practitioners attempting to develop, manage and maintain sustainable communities.Social Sustainability in Urban Areas addresses the complexities of locating social sustainability within the broader implications of sustainable development. The authors argue that the dominant approach of 'how to do' small scale social sustainability fails to locate it within broader social processes. Ignoring the context not only sustains, but also actively reproduces wider inequalities. It presents a new, more coherent and more complete approach to issues of social sustainability in urban areas.The book approaches current urban policy discourses in three different ways, represented by the three sections of the book. Firstly, it focuses on small places within the urban fabric, using the concept of building locality-based social capital to identify how institutional changes may confuse the persistence of social relationships with social sustainability. Secondly, it addresses the whole urban fabric by examining whether changing urban living and working patterns associated with supporting more environmentally sustainable transport patterns can also achieve socially redistributive objectives. The third section of the book explores some of the ways that funding can be secured to achieve the aims of social sustainability and the social planning associated with it. Challenges associated with drawing on private sector finance to fund economic and social regeneration are highlighted.The book concludes by posing a set of critical questions that help to distinguish whether specific sustainable urban policies move towards socially sustainable development or merely reorganise the use of urban space.

Tony Manzi is a Principal Lecturer in Housing and the Course Leader for the MA in Housing Practice at the University of Westminster. Karen Lucas is Research Fellow with the Transport Studies Unit at the University of Oxford and former Director of Research for the Centre for Sustainable Development at the University of Westminster. Tony Lloyd Jones is Principal Lecturer in Urban Design and Development at the University of Westminster and Director of Research and Consultancy at the University's Max Lock Centre. Judith Allen is Principal Lecturer in Neighbourhood Management in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Westminster.