“A Ladder of Citizen Participation”

The sustainability principles espoused by the Brundtland Commission helped to give weight and authority to urban environmentalist organizations worldwide, none more so than an innovative planning and design movement called the New Urbanism. The New Urbanism has proven to be a long-lived and ever-evolving movement. It has attracted a large number of practitioners, and the movement has various wings and branches that continually question and inform the movement&s;s mainstream. The Congress for the new urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society&s;s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge. A primary task of all urban architecture and landscape design is the physical definition of streets and public spaces as places of shared use. Metropolitan regions are finite places with geographic boundaries derived from topography, watersheds, coastlines, farmlands, regional parks, and river basins.