explores two urban planning approaches: Self-Sufficient Urbanism and Sustainable Urbanism. The first section presents Jaime Correa's pessimistic vision of environmental collapse leading to small, medieval-style communities (max 1,600 feet radius) with integrated agriculture and populations under 20,000. The second section defines Sustainable Urbanism as walkable, transit-oriented development with high-performance buildings, emphasizing compactness and biophilia. It introduces an ecological systems model viewing sustainability as interconnected processes rather than fixed products.

1. New Urbanism
CT.LAKSHMANAN B.Arch.,M.C.P.
SRM SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
Concept of Self sufficient Urbanism &
Sustainable Urbanism

2. Self sufficient urbanism
 How dire is the world’s environmental situation? - Jaime
Correa
 America’s largest metropolitan areas will disintegrate.
Skyscrapers will be partially abandoned. Their ruins will
sprout vertical gardens and wind turbines, and will gather
rainwater for the winnowed-out populations of cities.
 People will end up living either in rural settlements or in
reconstituted urban villages surrounded by agricultural
hinterlands. “All other districts and monofunctional areas
in between will fail without recourse,” Correa predicts.

3.  Correa, a new urbanist architect who directs the
program in suburb and town design at the University
of Miami, has signed onto a kind of eco-pessimism
that’s not hard to find in these days of global
warming, worldwide fisheries depletion, and other
problems of planetary magnitude.
 The result is a 100-page paperback that insists our
way of life is about to fall apart, and yet, some
farsighted small groups will have the “exhilarating”
opportunity to create satisfying human-scale
communities — “self-sufficient urbanism.”

4.  Colombia-born architect and planner lays out the
reasons why the world cannot continue to support
6.5 billion humans, many of them consuming
resources at a tremendous rate.
 Correa argues that unless we learn to live within the
planet’s means, a collapse will soon be upon us.
 He contends that the modern world is facing
“conditions of ecological exhaustion … similar to
those encountered by the Maya or Inca civilizations.”

5.  The solution, he says, is to live small. Thus, the self-
sufficient communities of the near future will, like
medieval villages, be places where the center is no
more than 1,600 feet from the hinterlands.
 In rugged terrain or in arid or freezing climates,
settlements will be even more compact.
 Their buildings, streets, and public spaces will draw
from the new urbanist work of the past quarter-century
and from historical settlements.

6. Plans for new settlements
Correa has devised conceptual plans for these post-crash communities.
 Each settlement, he says, will need a centrally located open space
not over 160 feet wide, paved with permeable materials.
 For residents’ well-being, there must be a central street — no more
than five blocks long in urban villages, no more than three blocks in
their rural counterparts.
 “Individual shops for trading, bartering, and exchanging of surplus
production and manufacture should be located along the central
promenade,” Correa says.
 Cafes, restaurants, and community kitchens or dining halls may
encroach upon this public right-of-way, which will be anchored at
its ends by buildings or nodes for informal gathering and public
functions.

7.  Agriculture will permeate these communities. Small
orchards will grow alongside thoroughfares and in
public spaces. Correa goes into minute detail about
food production, down to prescribing “no less than
three beehives per block.” Rural settlements will
limit themselves to 5,000 people, and urban villages
to 20,000.
 Correa lists places throughout the world where
concepts of the self-sufficient community are now
being put into practice. It’s a weird list. Why
“Philadelphia, USA” is included is a mystery.
Another place on the list, Civano in Arizona, doesn’t
seems to exist on its own resources.

8.  One of them, a 60-member community called Earthaven,
describes itself as “an aspiring ecovillage in a mountain forest
setting near Asheville, North Carolina.”
 Another, the “Twin Oaks Intentional Community” in rural central
Virginia, seems to reflect Correa’s outlook on economics;
supports itself by producing hammocks and soy foods and by
operating book-indexing businesses.
 Another community, Chicken Hill, is described on its website as a
mill village near downtown Asheville that is “implementing the
best principles of Historic Preservation, New Urbanism, and
Green Building.” It turns out that Jaime Correa and Associates
produced Chicken Hill’s architectural guidelines.

9.  Clearly, there’s a portion of the public that’s willing to give such ideas a try.
 How communities that are largely self-sufficient (producing their own food,
among other things) can come into being within metropolitan areas,
though, is hard to grasp.
 Correa says the “most enduring and resilient pieces” of the metropolis can
be made to function and survive in the post-crash era; these may include
“complete neighborhood units and central pieces of land.”
 The book concisely makes important points about the environment and
urban design and because it contains many handsome, instructive
illustrations on topics ranging from how to handle water and waste to how
to lay out streets and arrange buildings and public spaces, Self-sufficient
Urbanism will inspire helpful small-scale actions. Beyond that?

10. Sustainable urbanism
 Sustainable urbanism has recently been
defined as “walkable and transit-served
urbanism integrated with high
performance buildings and high-
performance infrastructure” (Farr 2007).
 Compactness (density) and biophilia (human
access to nature) are considered as the
core values of sustainable urbanism.

11.  These associated values of sustainable urbanism focuses
on the form-based bias of the current architectural
theories and practices for understanding sustainability.
 The current popular definition of sustainable urbanism is
also imagined as a grand unification of architecture, city
planning, and environmental design for a better way of life.
 This is problematic as it situates the domain of sustainable
urbanism in the context of contradictory and conflicting
design bias of architecture, urban planning, landscape
architecture, and civil engineering.

12.  Questioning the meaning of sustainable urbanism takes help
from a relatively new model of sustainability—the ecological
model (Williams 2007).
 Ecology is the scientific study of the distribution and abundance
of life and the interactions between organisms and their natural
environment (Bregon et al 2006). The ecological system
recognizes that everything is related to everything.
 Within this framework, the focus shifts from understanding
sustainability as a definite product to valuing sustainability as a
system of dynamic connective processes—biological
interchanges, efficient use and storage of energy, and effective
management of natural resources.

13.  Inspired by classical works such as Fundamentals of Ecology
(Odums1953) and Design with Nature (McHarg 1992), the
ecological model derives the notion of sustainability as a process of
relationships among the natural systems (such as soil, climate,
hydrology) and between the natural systems, relationship to the
human systems (social ethics and values), and the economic
systems (allocation, distribution, and management of resources).
 Within the systems oriented approach, the ecological model has
three important implications:
(1) spatial interdependence and connectivity becomes critical to sustainable design,
(2) the ecological systems approach brings a process oriented notion of
sustainability, and
(3) it also allows connections of the environmental systems to the social and
economic systems towards generating an interconnected network of
interrelations