Social Sustainability and "Legacy Landscapes"

Abstract

This piece pays tribute to a great scholar and urbanist, Sir Peter Hall, who was concerned with the social and economic vitality of neighborhoods. In his 1988 book, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, Hall writes about the Garden City, exploring both the original vision as imagined by Ebenezer Howard and the global diaspora of Howard’s ideas. Hall also discusses the theoretical contribution of Garden Cities today, especially with regard to issues of social equity and social sustainability. This piece critically re-examines the Garden City concept, including its utopian social origins, its implementation on a global scale, and its impact on current planning theory and practice. I illustrate how Hall and others have affected the canonical garden cities literature, and have created a “legacy landscape” concept that is still relevant today in new sustainable development.

About the Author

Dr. Nicola Szibbo is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Global Leadership and Sustainable Development (GLSD) program at Hawaiʻi Pacific University (HPU), Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (DURP) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a practicing city and re- gional planner at the City and County of Honolulu. Dr. Szibbo obtained both her Master of City Planning (MCP) and PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of California—Berkeley, and her undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of British Columbia (UBC).