Are Sustainable Cities Possible?

A “sustainable city” is the kind of city which causes little or no damage to the environment and therefore it is able to continue for a long time.
In order to create a “sustainable city ” a sustainable development is required. This goes beyond the boundaries of science and business development and trade to include human development, values, and differences in cultures.
The Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
As we all know, cities are major consumers and distributors of goods and services. However, many cities tend to be large consumers of goods and services, while draining resources out of external regions that they depend on. As a result of increasing consumption of resources, and growing dependencies on trade, the ecological impact of cities extends beyond their geographic locations. In this case, future generations will have no chance to take advatages of what we have today.
We can make “sustainable cities” a reality by achieving the improvement in the quality of human life in harmony with improving and maintaining the health of ecological systems. At the same time a healthy economy's industrial base should support the quality of both human and ecological systems.
If we want our society and our environment to thrive in the future, the best thing we can do is positively address how we make decisions about the increasing population growth, urban planning and social infrastructure.
In order to create better planned, smarter, more ecologically resilient and livable cities we need to develop a sustainability framework with a series of indicators and targets to measure progress; to increase funding for public and active transport and clean distributed energy; to ensure rapid progress towards carbon neutral and water sensitive cities and precincts; to find ways to create a step change increase in energy and...