Deurbanized cities as strongly sustainable human settlements

Abstract

Current approaches to sustainable urbanism follow a weak sustainability approach, which assumes technological and market-based solutions to sustainability problems in human settlements. This makes them inadequate from a sustainability perspective to both respect the sustainability perspective and to maintain critical natural capital in the long-term. Additionally, concern for the well-being of the cities' inhabitants becomes a secondary issue. We argue that de-urban design and deurbanization offer a viable path for redesigning urban human settlements according to strong sustainability principles. This paper examines the potential of the deurbanization framework to regenerate cities and transform human settlements into permanent habitats that build harmonious relations between human beings and non-human natural elements. We first identify key principles of strong sustainability and deurbanization, and address their relevance for the design of human settlements. We synthesize concepts and practices into the deurbanization framework to establish what practices would constitute deurbanized human settlements, and we briefly illustrate how some of these practices would take place in a design-case study. Finally, we establish deurbanization as a strongly sustainable approach to redesigning cities because it views the human and non-human natural world as equally valuable and necessary for life to flourish.