Integrated management framework for sustainable cities: insights into multiple concepts and principles

Abstract

There is a growing call for cities and the built environment to be managed or remanaged based on the idea of sustainability. The rationale is to make cities more resilient and productive as centres of production and consumption, and address the rising environmental and socio-cultural challenges associated with twenty-first century urban centres. There are, however, emerging or extant concepts that attempt to supplant or espouse sustainability principles or related principles; thereby, creating a seemingly unclear framework to drive effective and efficient management of cities. Through interrogation of extant literature, this study identifies four main neighbouring concepts -industrial ecology, natural capitalism, cradle-to-cradle and circular economy and how they compare and contrast with sustainability in the context of the built environment. Despite the seemingly conceptual difference between sustainability and the neighbouring concepts, they prescribe virtually the same set of principles and operationalisation indicators. However, given the multiplicity of the concepts, their set of principles and indicators, and uniqueness of different cities, an initial broad integrated framework needs to be developed based on all the concepts. Subsequently, individual cities taking cognisance of their peculiar circumstances will then have to craft their own frameworks for effective and efficient management in the face of growing economic uncertainties, poverty, rapid urbanisation and other environmental and socio-cultural challenges.

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