Green urbanism

Green urbanism has been defined as the practice of creating communities beneficial to humans and the environment. According to Timothy Beatley, it is an attempt to shape more sustainable places, communities and lifestyles, and consume less of the world's resources. Urban areas are able to lay the groundwork of how environmentally integrated and sustainable city planning can both provide and improve environmental benefits on the local, national, and international levels. Green urbanism is interdisciplinary, combining the collaboration of landscape architects, engineers, urban planners, ecologists, transport planners, physicists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and other specialists in addition to architects and urban designers. Urbanization and environmental consequences has always moved hand in hand. Odum in 1989 has called cities as ‘parasites’ on natural and domesticated environment, since it makes no food, cleans no air and cleans only a little amount of water for reuse and Mayur (1990) has argued that such disharmony may result in environmentally catastrophic events (cited in Leitmann, 1999). Leitmann mentioned such critical urban environmental problems as the ‘brown agenda’ which deals with both environmental health and industrialization. He further pointed out that throughout the 19th century; developing countries were more concerned of the public health impacts of poor sanitation and pollution. Moreover, he figured out the links between cities and ecosystems into three phases. Early Urbanization phase, starting from 3000 BCE to 1800 CE, was of more productive agricultural techniques yielding a surplus that was able to support non-agricultural concentrations of people. In second phase, Urban Industrialization (1800 CE - 1950 CE), energy consumption, particularly fossil fuels, was increased rapidly with mechanization of production. Since the 1950s the city/environment relationship has entered into third phase, Global interdependence, with rapid population growth and globalization of economy.