Green Cities: a Guide for Sustainable Community Development (2005)

An exciting transformation is underway in neighborhoods around the world. Governments and the people they serve are embracing sustainable community development and taking action in their cities and towns and across national boundaries to protect the environment, address poverty and other social issues, and improve the quality of life now and for the future. Communities are discovering that when residents, local governments and business work together, destructive patterns of development can be transformed into beneficial outcomes that provide prosperity which is ecologically and socially sustainable.

Today, 49% of the world’s population, or some 3.6 billion people, live in cities. By 2030, the figure is expected to rise to 61% (PDDESA-UN 2003). Large urban settlements face an increasing number of problems: severe environmental degradation, pollution, declines in water quality and availability, energy and food shortages, solid waste accumulation, housing affordability and availability, disease and poverty.

Harmony Foundations publication Green Cities: A Guide to Sustainable Community Development promotes and showcases community development initiatives which are environmentally sound and socially just and encourages public officials, municipal planners and community leaders to exercise visionary leadership and bring people together to take action which meets local needs while addressing regional, national and international objectives.

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