Sustainable Holistic Planning Systems (SHPS) and the Challenge of Varying Land Use Epistemologies, Spatialities and Praxis

Keywords: land system science, sustainability planning, Triple Bottom Line, infrastructure, small towns, community engagement
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Communities worldwide face challenges adopting any one of the many environmental sustainability planning frameworks that have emerged since the 1990s. Confronted with an array of choices and possibilities, they struggle to assess the institutional and organizational capacity that implementation requires. Given the key characteristics of such planning frameworks, an interdisciplinary research team of geographers, political scientists, civil engineers, mathematicians, and business analysts is referring to them collectively as SHPS (Sustainable Holistic Planning Systems). Having worked with, and studied dozens of, such SHPS in community and academic settings alike, this team proposes a diagnostic taxonomy that will help communities understand better what implementation will entail.

In devising and testing the taxonomy, the research team has noted varying and sometimes conflicting epistemological approaches toward land systems that both SHPS designers and community adopters deploy. Land varies from being a scattered distributed of state-controlled properties only, to being large complex interoperable and leverageable infrastructure networks, to being continuous spaces divided into land-use and zoning classes. Each land use conceptualization assumes a specific spatiality--a geometry--that requires different public engagement strategies in communities as they adjust to climate change and try to build resilience in advance of natural disasters. This paper discusses these land system dynamics via three representative SHPS: USGBC’s LEED for Communities, New York State Climate Smart Communities, and EPA’s Smart Growth Assessment tool. The findings will be of interest to land system scientists, planning professionals who design and implement SHPS, and planning educators who are training next generation planning professionals.