Science for Sustainable Societies Sustainable landscape planning in selected urban regions

Nowadays, we often hear the term “sustainable development goals (SDGs).” As eloquently exemplified by this fact, the idea of sustainability represents one of the most important goals in today’s world. It appears, however, that the term “sustainability” is used mostly in the context of spreading certain technology in society. Solar power generation and electric vehicles are good examples of such technology. This book takes a somewhat different approach to discussing sustainability, focusing mainly on nature and culture, although it also touches on technological aspects. In order to show this, we used the term “landscape” in the title of this book. We hope that our new landscape approach of considering the relationship between human and nature, as an addition to the mainstream approach of considering sustainability from technological aspects, will help bring greater sustainability, going beyond just reducing environment burdens. Nature and culture are diverse and unique to each city or region, and we believe that such diversity and uniqueness could lead to greater sustainability.
 
This book presents a series of theories from various academic fields along with relevant case studies from around the world to untangle and diagnose sustainability from the perspective of landscape and transform it into that of a better kind. In the first section dedicated to untangling, we explain the unique perspective of this book, initiating discussion by reviewing basic concepts such as cities and regions. In the second section on diagnosing, we observe the symptoms of various environmental and social problems faced by cities and regions, such as heat island effects, to identify affected areas and causes by taking a microscopic view to look deep into details at times and a macroscopic view to capture the whole picture at other times. The last section of the book is about transforming cities and regions based on the diagnosis made in the previous section. Obviously, an attempt to achieve sustainability with piecemeal symptomatic treatment has its limitations. However, drastic drugs—those that would change everything all at once—may cause unexpected adverse effects. Thus, we conclude this book by introducing some goals that could be achieved through the trial and error of various attempts, such as urban farming, that are modest but will eventually influence the entire system.
 
Lastly, let us suggest further readings related to the issues covered in this book. This book is one of the Science for Sustainable Societies series compiled under the leadership of the University of Tokyo’s Integrated Research System for Sustainability Science (IR3S). While the discussion in this book is made chiefly from the perspective of city and regional planning, other books in the series focus on various other perspectives of humanity and social science, including biofuel policy as well as traditional and scientific knowledge. The issue of sustainability is characterized by a complex web of various challenges. For those readers who are inspired by this book and want to learn more about sustainability, we recommend other books in the series.
 

(Written by TSUCHIYA Kazuaki, Assistant Professor of Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Science and YOKOHARI Makoto, Professor, School of Engineering / 2018)