Green Communities and Neighborhood Planning

Laurence Crot

Global concerns over climate change and the associated search for greener urban lifestyles have created new challenges for urban planning theory and practice, most notably in the field of neighborhood planning. The neighborhood is the territorial scale at which people develop specific behaviors and attitudes in domains of crucial environmental relevance such as housing, transportation, and consumption. Thus, if urban planning is to contribute to urban environmental sustainability, it is expected to do so by acting on the physical environment at the neighborhood level. This endeavor lies at the heart of contemporary green communities, with several recent groundbreaking planning models seeking to show the way forward. To avoid the limitations of physical determinism, however, these models of neighborhood planning must acknowledge that achieving behavioral sustainability cannot exclusively rest on top-down alterations of the built environment but requires involving local residents in the “greening” of their communities. Recognition of the neighborhood ...

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