SUS2017: Sustainable Community Development and Urbanism

RESPONSE 1: reaction paper
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SUS2017: Sustainable Community Development and Urbanism
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Focusing on the differences and similarities between town life and country life captures how the lifestyles result in diverse use and management of resources. The proposal of a garden-city is based on the idea of integrating advantages of living in cities and rural areas. The garden-city remains a hypothetical proposition and there is no guarantee that this option would improve sustainability and land use. There is also ambiguity on the association of various factors identified for there to be a well structured city. The proposal of city and development goes beyond the geographical proposal taking into account the socio-economic concepts. Contemporary cities integrate economic concerns, but the proposals of establishing towns and cities that exist together have not been well tested to determine their viability.
The authors look into what defines a city, where there is a diversity in the landscape as there is no single dominant force influencing planning. Lewis Mumford contends that the diversity also extends to the social and economic spheres of life in cities and this breaks monotony and predictability. This observation is right as the author rightly points out that the cities have small geographical locations, but diverse populations compared to the rural areas. The link between time and space is more apparent in cities, where planners have to maximize on the space available, while leaving what is appropriate to make it easier for people to maneuver. Since cities have buildings of different styles and those constructed from different periods they all improve the aesthetic appeal because of diversity.
Conservation is one of the strategies to improve land use su...