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In search of a new “vision” for planning . . . many commentators believe that there is a needfor a new vision, one which can “reach out to society as a whole, addressing its wants, needsand insecurities” . . . a “vision to rank with those of Ebenezer Howard a centuryago” . . . There is a consensus that such a vision can now emerge from what has come to becalled sustainability.

—Simin Davoudi (2001, 86)

During the latter part of the twentieth century, many interrelated factors challengedthe legitimacy and value of planning as an essential mechanism of government provid-ing rational societal guidance, management, and coordination between the economicand social spheres for the common good, especially for the built environment(Beauregard 1989; Dear 1986; Friedmann 1987). One fundamental reason was thedecline of the welfare state’s perceived ability to deliver public goods and the rise ofneoliberal values, market deregulation, and public choice theory in its place as the“commonsense of the times” (Allmendinger 2001; Gleeson 2001; Peck and Tickell2002, 381; Troy 2000; Sanyal 2005). A loss of faith in planning expertise and the per-ceived effectiveness of instrumental rationality to deal with emerging societal concerns,particularly those pertaining to race, gender, and the environment (Beauregard 1991;Berke 2002; Gunder 2003a; Marcuse 2000), compounded that perception. These con-cerns were complicated further by issues of urban decline and fiscal insolvency in manyFirst World cities that eventually gave rise to the domination of market-led values ofcompetition and globalization as the only game in town (Gunder 2005a; Jessop 2000;McGuirk 2004, 2005). Levy (1992), writing more than a decade ago, attributed the lossof planning’s central coordinating role to a loss of planning’s “guiding principle or cen-tral paradigm” of master planning for the public good “and nothing has come along toreplace it” (p. 81).

Yet, even as Levy was documenting this lament, new guiding principles were emerg-ing for planning practitioners and academics (Gunder 2004). In particular, for many,the displacement of planning’s traditional purpose and role subsequently has beenrecovered via the discipline’s response to the increasing emphasis being focused on theimportance of the quality of the environment in many planning-related discourses(Davoudi 2000, 2001; Gleeson, Darbas, and Lawson 2004; Healey and Shaw 1994;Jepson 2001; Murdoch 2004; Wheeler 2000). Despite its loss of initial expert purposein the name of the public good and its traditional role of attempting to provide social

Abstract

This article explores the concept—sustainability—as a transcendental idealof planning purpose and value. The articlecritically argues that sustainability largelyhas been captured and deployed under anarrative of sustainable development in amanner that stifles the potential for sub-stantive social and environmental change,all of which constitutes new purpose, legit-imacy, and authority for the discipline ofplanning and its practitioners whilepotentially sustaining or creating adversesocial and environmental injustices.These are injustices that planning tradi-tionally attempted to address but nowoften obscures under the primacy of theeconomic imperative within dominantinstitutional interpretations of the sus-tainable development narrative.

Keywords: sustainability; regulation; legiti-macy; ideology; injustice

Journal of Planning Education and Research 26:208-221DOI: 10.1177/0739456X06289359© 2006 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning

Michael Gunder is a senior lecturer in theSchool of Architecture and Planning at theUniversity of Auckland, New Zealand. Hisresearch interests draw on poststructural-ist insight to supply understanding of plan-ning practice. He is currently president ofthe New Zealand Planning Institute.

SustainabilityPlanning’s Saving Grace or Road to Perdition?

Michael Gunder

Sustainability � 209

justice1 across classes, planning and its related disciplinessought to develop and adopt new discourses and practicesof environmental management. This gave rise to planning’sadoption of a new transcendental ideal: sustainability.

This article explores the rise of sustainability as a diverseset of contestable discourses and practices that has come tooccupy a central place within planning as the organizingprinciple of one of the discipline’s most important new dis-cursive fields.2 The text will focus on how the very word sus-tainability itself has emerged as a catchall term for many ofhumanity’s diverse environmental concerns and responses, sothat it now acts as a point of identification and belief for manyin planning and in wider society. The article will consider theeffect this newly emerged transcendental ideal has had inestablishing new planning perspectives and disciplinary prac-tices. The article subsequently will consider a potentially per-nicious interpretation of sustainable development, an oftendominant or hegemonic take on sustainability, and how gov-ernments have used this interpretation to justify policies thatare not necessarily sustainable or even socially just.

This article begins by tracing sustainability’s rise to promi-nence in planning education and its emergence as a domi-nant planning theme. The article will argue critically that thedefinition of sustainability can be and often has beendeployed selectively by planners or politicians as a material-ization of dominant institutional ideologies supportive ofgrowth and capital accumulation that maintains the existingstatus quo of class inequalities, with limited regard to theenvironment. Rather than encouraging opportunities forsocial change that comprehensively might reduce consumerbehavior to that consistent with the Earth’s carrying capacity,the discourse of sustainable development often is deployedsimply to further the interests of the entrepreneurial sup-portive state and its institutions.

These are promarket interpretations of sustainable devel-opment that water down the concept of sustainability toliterally that of business as usual, with, at best, an objective topartially reduce urban-consumer energy consumption andwaste outputs while still maximizing the potential for all-embracing economic growth with little regard to overallresource depletion. This is of particular concern wherediverse socioeconomic and environmental issues are consti-tuted under one mantle of a triple (economic, environmental,equity) or quadruple (plus creativity) bottom line of account-ing constituting an all-embracing, sustainable-developmentrubric. This is an approach that promises a balanced consid-eration of the social and environmental good but gives dis-proportionate consideration to the importance of economicoutcomes (Dyllick and Hockerts 2002, 132).

This interpretation of sustainable development consti-tutes new purpose, legitimacy, and above all, authority for thediscipline of planning and its practitioners, but it also risks

sustaining existing social and environmental injustices, not tomention inducing new forms of social disparity and environ-mental degradation. These are injuries that stem from society’sstill dominant cultural imperative of the marketplace driven bycapitalist competition and globalization (Gunder 2005a).

This market-orientated deployment of sustainable develop-ment obscures and subsumes dominant economic objectivesunder the overtly stated imperative to sustain the environment,against which, in itself, few would wish to argue. Further, thisapproach largely overlooks injustices that planning traditionallyattempted to address overtly as important issues of the urbanproblematic. Under dominant market interpretations of thediscourse of sustainable development, planning risks marginal-izing its role of serving today’s public good in turn for servingthe further depletion of the environment as it continues to sus-tain wealth accumulation for future generations, regardless ofthe social or environmental cost that this actually may induce.

The article next examines contemporary planning pro-cesses that purport to draw on this justification in southeastEngland; Toronto, Canada; and Melbourne and Sydney,Australia. The article concludes that although attention toecological sustainability is crucial for continued human sur-vival, issues of social justice, human creativity, and especially,economic well-being cannot be subsumed as merely a quanti-fied subset of sustainability, for the market imperative ofgrowth and competitive globalization still illogically domi-nates all other considerations (Rees 2002, 2003). The confla-tion of market and environment creates a risk that the desirefor growth will trump the needs of the environment tosustain. Under sustainable development, the arguments ofecological sustainability often are subsumed as mere justifica-tions or legitimizations for policies that are largely market ori-ented. Here, sustainability’s underlying message that we mustchange our consumptive behaviors to be consistent with thecarrying capacities of the planet largely are overlooked, if notoutright negated.

� The Rise of Sustainability inPlanning Education

Gunder and Fookes (1997a, 1997b), reporting less than adecade ago on the content of Australasian planning-schoolprograms, did not use the word sustainability at all, let aloneas a catchall term for environmental concern. Their workfound that on average in 1995, accredited planning-schoolcurricula focused less than 5 percent of their total programson environmentally related planning issues. Over a quarter ofall programs had no formal environment-orientated courses;at most, one program had 12 percent of overall course con-tent focused on environmental issues. In contrast, all pro-grams had components concerned with social and economic

issues, averaging 12 percent of program content, with oneprogram devoting 31 percent of its content to these concerns.

While ecological and environmental issues undoubtedlywere addressed in most, if not all, planning programs at thetime of Gunder and Fookes’s study, these issues lacked a focalpoint of attention necessary to shape them as a specific fieldof prominent concern within planning education. The con-cept of sustainability, although articulated in the literature(Jacobs 1991; Healey and Shaw 1994; Orr 1992; Rees 1995),was yet to emerge as a dominant marker that focused plan-ning educationist environmental concerns under one cate-gorical label.

Friedmann (1996, 96) was the first to note the emergingimportance of sustainability in North American planningeducation when he reported on the adoption of sustainabledevelopment as one of five areas of planning competenciesfor the University of British Columbia. Yet, Friedmann’s arti-cle did not advocate the adoption of sustainability in his ownidealized conceptualization of planning core curriculum.Whereas the teaching of environmental justice as a planningissue was gaining support in educationalist circles of thisperiod (see: Washington and Strong 1997), sustainability wasyet to emerge as a universal concern for planning education.Dalton (2001) noted that both new urbanism and sustain-ability gave American planning programs, especially thosewith a focus on civic design, a boost in the 1990s, yet still con-sidered sustainability to be, at best, one strand of many fortwenty-first-century planning education.

The number of North American planning schools offeringa dedicated specialism in environmental planning increasedmore than threefold between 1984 and 2000 and nowis offered by 86 percent of all accredited ACSP schools(Swearingen White and Mayo 2004, 81). Swearingen Whiteand Mayo conducted a survey of these environmental plan-ning programs and found that sustainability was considered byrespondents to be the most important foundational knowl-edge set to impart to students. It is interesting to note thatenvironmental justice or its nonenvironmental variants werenot reported in the survey findings as knowledge topics forconsideration.

In the United Kingdom, sustainable development emergedas a key planning discourse during the 1990s, especially inrelation to the tension created by the demand for housingprovision in the countryside (Murdoch and Abram 2002).The Royal Town Planning Institute’s (RTPI 2001) report NewVision for Planning placed sustainability as a central watchwordof the RTPI’s new conceptualization of spatial planning (Batey2003). Yet, recent reforms of British planning education(RTPI 2003), with their shift to more technological and gen-eralized education and focus on lifetime learning, leave lim-ited room for the development of key competencies,including those of sustainability. Of particular concern to thisauthor is the limited scope during the one-year enrollment

period in the new accredited professional master programsfor development of critical research skills rooted in a detailedunderstanding of policy analysis and social-science theory. AsDavoudi (2000, 133) cautioned a priori, this short time periodof instruction may be sufficient for technically orientated pro-fessional training, but it is insufficient to develop skills of eth-ical judgment and critique necessary to engage critical debatefully about issues beyond those of blind acceptance of domi-nant values and cultural imperatives, such as those of ecologi-cal modernization and globalization, shaping the discoursessupporting the arguments for sustainable development.

Sandercock (1997) was one of the first Australasian-basedplanning educators to assert the need for ecological literacyas a key constituent of planning education, yet her articledid not use the word sustainability. Richard Cardew (1999,135) argued for the importance of integrating environmentalmanagement into urban planning education, in which, atbest in Australia, “environmentalism may be regarded moreas sustainability, where energy use and transport issues aregiven more prominence than water quality, water movement,waste management and habitat protection.” Cardew argued,drawing on both Australian and New Zealand models, thatplanning students need greater exposure to scientificapproaches in environmental management, perhaps bestdelivered as a consequence of collaboration between plan-ning and environmental departments. It is interesting to notethat Cardew considered sustainability a socially oriented con-cept rather than ecological, at least in the planning educationdiscussed within his article.

Cardew’s desire, then, was being fulfilled, at least inNew Zealand. Dixon (2001, 6) observed that the dominance ofneoliberal values and New Zealand’s planning-regulation focuson sustainable resource management was putting pressure onplanning-education programs to “shift from design and socialconcerns to a more singular focus on scientific,” legal, andenvironmental knowledge, raising the question, was “sustain-able development the new goal of planning?” Consequently,Freeman (2005, 106) reported that at “the University of Otago[New Zealand], both in the planning programme and in theGeography degree programmes sustainable development isarguably, the most used theoretical paradigm.”

Sustainability is now a regularly used word in the planning-education-related literature, but this literature has supplied,at best, limited definitions of the term, often using environmen-tal education, competency, or literacy interchangeably with sustain-ability, as do Thomas and Nicita (2002) in their overview ofthe state of Australian university education for sustainabil-ity. Bruce Glavovic (2003, 25), then head of one of NewZealand’s largest planning-school programs, viewed sustain-ability as the core concern for planning education in which“a good planning education should therefore provide thequintessential foundation for understanding sustainabilityissues, and transmogrifying this understanding into workable

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Sustainability � 211

sustainability solutions.” Yet, sustainability, even as a core forplanning education, appeared to remain an undefined ideal,with the contemporary educational literature’s consistentlyhaving difficulty defining what exactly was meant bythe concept and especially how it should be operationalized.For example:

Sustainability is still being conceived here as a condition orestablished trend towards the operational realisationof which the whole process—education for sustainability—is susceptible of being directed . . . But the issue is, how toframe that ideal—which does not spring in us fullyformed—and how to turn it into a political reality, a set ofguidelines and constraints for collective and individualdecision making. (Foster 2001, 156)

The following sections explore the idea of sustainabilityfrom the perspective of Lacanian and Zizekian social critique.This is a view of the world that considers social reality itselfto be an aggregate of shared ideological constructs (Hillier2003). Subjects, as participants in society, materialize thesymptoms, or artifacts, of their ideological belief sets via theiractions and behaviors. In this worldview, sustainability acts asa highly valued identity-shaping concept for its adherents,especially planners, even though when asked, all have greatdifficulty in concisely and comprehensively attempting todefine and operationalize the concept. Yet, it is this very fuzzi-ness that gives sustainability its ideological power.

� Sustainability as a Label of Identification

The word sustainability is used in a manner that Markusen(2003, 702) deems a “fuzzy concept”:

A fuzzy concept is one that posits an entity, phenomenon,or process that possesses two or more alternative meaningsand thus cannot be identified or applied reliably by dif-ferent readers or scholars. In literature framed by fuzzyconcepts, researchers may believe they are addressing thesame phenomena but may actually be targeting quitedifferent ones.

Sustainability is a concept that everyone purports tounderstand intuitively but somehow finds very difficult tooperationalize into concrete terms. Regardless, no planningor policy document can omit the concept these days, becausesustainability or “sustainable development is declared as theultimate planning goal although it is not usually specifiedwhat it means exactly and how it is to be achieved”(Briassoulis 1999, 889). Consequently, “the success of the sus-tainable ideal . . . is due especially to its unifying promise, theway it seems to transcend ideological values of the past.”(Ratner 2004, 51)

Gunder (2003b, 2004, 2005b) and Hillier (2003), draw-ing on Lacanian theory, have identified sustainability as animportant idea that provides a sense of personal identificationfor many currently involved in the planning discipline. This

view suggests that the individual is constituted as a conscioussubject in society via his or her identifications with a collectionof shared words or labels, called master signifiers (Verhaeghe2001). These vary from descriptive words of actual appearance,ethnicity, and gender to abstract words representing a subject’sspiritual values and intellectual ideals (Bracher 1999, 45). Thisaggregation of words of identification constitutes a person’sconscious ego, that is, the core ideals, dogmas, and sense ofself constituting who subjects mostly think they are and whatthey can articulate to others. For example: I am a marriedAmerican male, planner, Democrat, Episcopalian, heavy-metal lover who believes profoundly in sustainability, democ-racy, and the Yankees.

Each of our identifying labels, particularly those that aremore abstract, constitute diverse and often contested sets ofspecific discourses comprising knowledge, practices, norms,and belief that give body to who we are and how we shouldact. Importantly, these supporting discourses also define howwe think others expect us to act, although this particularknowledge often is shrouded in ambiguity and misinterpreta-tion. Each of our labeling words of identification and belief,such as planner, sustainability, or even Yankees supporter, pro-vides an anchoring point or holder for these competing fieldsof diverse narratives, and by encapsulating them under onesingle label, gives them common identity even in their diver-sity and ambiguity (Zizek 1989, 88). Each term acts as a con-tainer without specific meaning in its own right. It is an emptyword. Yet, this lack of specific meaning, this emptiness, allowsit to contain a conflicting range of narratives under one labelof master identification we can share with others.

We treasure each of our identity-bearing labels, for theyprovide our sense of self. We have faith and belief in the intrin-sic values of these terms and ideals, for they summarize ourpersonal, spiritual and intellectual truths. Consequently, wevigorously defend these concepts, and many, if not all, of ourassertions have a primary purpose to affirm the value andsupremacy of the ideas, values, and knowledge sets that webelieve constitute them. This ongoing defense is central to our“sense of oneness and wholeness”; it defines who we are to oth-ers as sociopolitical actors within society (Bracher 1999, 45).

Because we want to protect and defend our identity-definingvalues and truths, they constitute our joint groups and com-munities of shared interest. They compose the structuraliza-tion of our sociopolitical life (Stavrakakis 1999, 30). Forwithin our groups of shared identification, whereas theshared identifying labels themselves remain unchanged, theirexplanatory contents may be widely variable and subject to allsorts of diverse and contrary hegemonic enunciations. In thiscontext, discourses are made to vie, often without success, tobe the one dominant truth that gives the only possible mean-ing to our empty and ambiguous but contested terms of iden-tification, be they planner, sustainability, or even New YorkYankees supporter (Laclau 1989, xiv).

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� Planning as a Group IdentityConstituted by Shared Mysteries

In this light, the planning profession is constituted by amembership of similar-minded but not always agreeing prac-titioners. All human disciplines or professions distinguishthemselves through the shared use of technical terms or ideaswhose definitions are often ambiguous, difficult to learn(hence, providing barriers to admittance), and always chang-ing and/or evolving for the practitioners involved. As Gunder(2003b, 286) reported, what ensures a discipline’s homo-geneity are its specific professional concepts whose meaningsare actually a mystery3 to all its practitioners—no one knowswhat they really concisely mean, but everyone assumes that allothers do. For planning, these especially include the conceptsof the public good, social justice, and now, during the pastdecade or so, sustainability. Planners regularly use theseambiguous terms, often as justification for their professionalactions—that is, we must do this if we want a sustainable cityor we must do so in the interests of social justice! Yet, whatunites planners (and other professions) as a discipline is fun-damentally their common or shared lack of knowledge.

No one knows, let alone can succinctly or comprehensivelyand universally define, what a sustainable city, social justice, orthe common good, for that matter, actually is! At best, we canonly guess toward some vague notion that lacks a clear focus.But it is this lack of clarity that allows this concept to be a “real”or “good thing” for all those who embrace it, regardless of theparticularity of their individual understandings, dreams, anddesires about this sublime object—which makes it profoundlyideological in its very nature (Zizek 2002, 58). Moreover, thislack of clarity and understanding makes ideas such as sustain-ability transcendental objects. They are concepts beyondhuman knowledge and experience, so that when placed on apedestal as a desired societal goal, they become transcendentalideals (Zizek 1993, 16). A transcendental object or ideal

appears mysterious, nonsensical, incomplete, not only to usbut even to the Other. For it is just this that appears to openit up to us, allow us to add to it, make it our own. It is just inits lack and unknowability that it calls on us to realize it, takeits place, say what it should be saying. (Butler 2005, 56)

Lacanian theory suggests that the basic functioning ofsocial reality requires “a certain non-knowledge of its partici-pants” (Zizek 1989, 21). Social reality is constructed symboli-cally via a set of ideological illusions, or fantasies, that we takeon without question so as to ensure our existence appearscomplete while blatantly failing to notice what is missing(Hillier 2002, 264). A rather insightful example exposing thisis the following quote regarding sustainability:

Does the way that sustainability slides from one meaninginto another, as its core challenges, problems and solutionsare framed and reframed, leave you uncertain about what it

all means or what should be done? Or alternatively do youfind that your firm and clear convictions run into the sandtime after time as other “takes” on sustainability seem tohold sway (though it is hard to pin down how or why)?(Richardson 2002, 353)

Practitioners and academics teaching the subject do notknow exactly what sustainability means; they largely justretain a belief that it is a good thing that we have to developmore knowledge about—hence, the perceived value of acad-emic research (Lacan 2004).

For some planners, sustainability (or perhaps some otherconcept such as social justice) may be a profoundly identity-shaping belief, arguably little different than the faith some ofus have for our spiritual truths. Consequently, this strongbelief underlies and consistently guides these planners’ everyprofessional judgment and action. For other disciplinarymembers, these ideas may be less profound. Some plannerseven may disagree personally with the core values or implica-tions embedded within these dominant professional beliefs,such as having a neoconservative perspective on social justice,or driving an SUV but professionally arguing for more publictransport in the name of sustainability. Yet, they know thatgood planners are supposed to have regard for these domi-nant concepts or ideals, and so they act accordingly.

We are socialized via our educations to act in this manner.Successful students learn to copy their teachers by modelingthemselves on them, giving them what they want by returningthe teachers’ truths and values as though they were the stu-dents’ own. Accomplished students do so whether they agreewith the teachers or not, and it is in this very way that weacquire our norms in planning or in other areas of educationand wider socialization (Baum 1997; Gunder 2004). This isimportant because an important part of our identity is derivedfrom being perceived by others as being a good planner. Weuse our knowledge of how good planners should act, asdefined by the norms of the profession, to actually act. Phraseddifferently, we act in a manner in which we think others expectgood planners to act—we conform to the expectations of theprofession—and good planners now are expected to supportsustainability (Gunder and Hillier 2004).4

Although personally lacking faith in the dominant planningideal, many planners may well give the external appearance ofthis core belief and espouse the appropriate message and plan-ning action—for this is what good planners are expected to do.Further, in outward appearance—that is, what is measurable asthe empirical materialization of our social reality—there is littledifference in the actions of the true believers or of the skeptics.Both act in a similar manner in response to the fuzzy demandsof planning’s ambiguous but dominant concepts such as sus-tainability. Further, it is not just this materialization in actionsof what the social actor actually may believe, but just as likely,what he or she thinks is expected of him or her to materialize

as belief that constitutes the ideological construct of our socialreality (Zizek 1997, 21).

Wider social reality, not just the planning profession,requires these ideological concepts of belief and identifica-tion to be fuzzy and ambiguous for our sociopoliticalprocesses to function. This is particularly so when differingconcepts clash together. Looseness and ambiguity allow us toaccommodate incompatible beliefs and political positions.Without the linguistic slippage, imprecision, and even mis-recognition this ambiguity provides, society would cease toexist (Zizek 1997). Further, the conflation of conflicting con-cepts is often how new ideas emerge or gain primacy overothers. The Bruntdland Commission’s (1987) interpretationof sustainability as sustainable development dependent oneconomic growth is one such outcome of this political andideological shaping process.

� The Value of Sustainability to Planning

While it is perhaps sometimes not straightforward todefend planning and the value of planning to nonplanners,other concepts are particularly easy to defend, for few if anymembers of society would wish to disagree with them. Theyare literally motherhood5 and sustainability—protecting theenvironment for current and future generations—is at pre-sent situated readily on this pedestal of unquestionable good-ness for most of society, just as social justice for the collectivegood previously was situated positively before the demise ofthe welfare state. Planning and wider society’s conceptualiza-tion as to what is important in constituting the good changesthrough time. Consider planning’s then-positive role inurban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s, which now is consid-ered, by many, to constitute one of planning’s darker periods(Allmendinger and Gunder 2005, 99).

As Neuman (2005, 17) observes, sustainability is a fuzzybut inherently valued thing, for it now has emerged as aPlatonic idea, a category of the good. Sustainability currentlyhas great ideological power, particularly when used in con-junction with other concepts, for by its mere association, italso embosses these other ideas as good things with whicheveryone can identify. If sustainability is unquestionablygood, then sustainable cities must be good, as must sustain-able management, sustainable regeneration, or sustainabledevelopment. Who can argue against sustainability and allthat is associated with it? Sustainability has become an impor-tant political resource, or tactic, capable of co-option “tolegitimate particular policy approaches” (Haughton andCounsell 2004, 141). This provides great value to the currentdiscipline of planning, particularly if sustainability is now theprofession’s core purpose and goal. For sustainability, onceagain, places planning’s very justification largely beyondpublic challenge.

Concepts that can be labeled and known universally, evenif not clearly understood, such as sustainability, convert “thearbitrary and conventional into the regular and natural” stateof the world: “that by which an implicit order or prescriptionis made to seem as though it is only the description of a pre-viously existing state of affairs” (Butler 2005, 19). These ideo-logical markers construct social reality itself, and onceidentified, they appear as ideals that always have existed, eventhough they are new concepts and states of constructing ouraspirations and values within the world. Planning educationdid address issues of ecological and environmental concernbefore the emergence of the term sustainability (Beatley andManning 1997), but it was the transcendence of this wordinto the role of being a name of subject identification andpurposeful belief (or at least, the appearance of belief) thatallows this field of diverse issues to coalesce into one unifiedand constituting ideal of planning mission, even if the storyof sustainability remains fuzzy, ambiguous, and incomplete.

Yet, this is not without cost. In sustainability’s looseness is thepotential for this ideal to produce unintentioned perniciouseffects. This is especially so when the concept is conflated withconflicting but identity-shaping ideas and values. The followingsections will suggest that this particularly may be so in regard tosocial justice and even, also, for the environment itself.

� The Pernicious Nature of Sustainabilityas an Imperative

To think that their present circumstances and their presentsocietal arrangements might be sustained—that is an unsus-tainable thought for the majority of the world’s people.(Marcuse 1998, 103)

The sustainability imperative has been interpreted, at leastfor the Australian city, to imply “a profound reconfigurationof urban morphology that would reduce the ecological foot-print (resource demands and waste outputs) of cities andtheir hinterland[s]” through urban intensification (Gleeson,Darbas, and Lawson 2004, 351). This is a reconfigurationof settlement that may have little regard to the cost inducedon those who currently or will live in these environments.Further, it has been predicated on a simplistic assumption thatthe mere physical design of a community can affect humanbehaviors sufficiently to lead to the creation of a sustainablecommunity, when in actuality, any potential achievement ofsustainable settlements will depend on a plenitude of coevo-lutionary processes (Neuman 2005). As Bauriedl and Wissen(2002, 109) observe, sustainability tends to be perceived as “abroadly accepted norm” that is considered “to be in every-body’s interest”; consequently, planning regulation often“neglects that what is sustainable for the one can threaten theliving conditions of the other.” These authors also observethat state regulation justified in the name of sustainability

Sustainability � 213

effectively controls aspects of the environment, and implicitlybut often obscurely, the very “social contradictions of capital-ist societalization” (109). As Markusen (2003, 704) comments,

Political organizers often look for umbrella concepts thatcan pull strange bedfellows together—“sustainability”might be an example. Or, someone wishing to obscure ahegemonic or power relationship might choose to use arhetoric of inclusion.

Similarly, as Marcuse (1998) notes in regard to the deploy-ment of sustainability as a mechanism of ideological inclusionin relationship to housing policy and urban development:

Sustainability is both an honourable goal for carefullydefined purposes and a camouflaged trap for the well-intentioned unwary. As a concept and a slogan, it has anhonourable pedigree in the environmental movementwhich has, by and large, succeeded in its fight to have thestandards of sustainability generally accepted by allsides . . . The acceptance of sustainability, at least in prin-ciple, in the environment arena by virtually all actors hasled to the desire to use such a universally acceptable goalas a slogan also in campaigns that have nothing to do withthe environment but where the lure of universal accep-tance is a powerful attraction . . . “sustainability” [herebecomes] a trap. (p. 104)

Sustainability often is deployed simply as an ideological toolto anchor or quilt the discourse to us unquestionably as anunassailable object of desire and importance (Zizek 1989, 88).It implies that everyone has a common stake in sustainabletransport, sustainable housing, sustainable development, or sus-tainable cities; “that if we all simply recognized our commoninterests everything would be fine, we would end poverty,exploitation, segregation, inadequate housing, congestion, ugli-ness, abandonment and homelessness” (Marcuse 1998, 105).

Yet, Marcuse continues with his argument that this is aruse, because the very “idea of universal acceptance of mean-ingful goals is a chimera.” The urban problematic is con-structed of conflicting positions and desires, where one’s gainis another’s loss (Gunder 2005a). The land developer’s gain(profit) is the home purchaser’s loss; a new sustainable railcorridor means noise, vibration, and loss of amenities for res-idents adjacent to the new alignment, little different than theadverse effects of a new unsustainable freeway. Similarly,high-density residential development without quality designand construction may mean low residential amenity at thelevel of local place, even though it goes hand in hand with thedesirable ability to sustain public transit at the regional level(Dixon and Dupuis 2003). This list could be long!

� The “Sustainable Development”Imposition of Social Injustice andEven Environmental Ambivalence

Urban policy is both socially produced and helps to makethe urban problem seem natural, taken for granted.

Dominant understandings of urban policy both reflect andinfluence the ways in which people experience urban living;urban policies help to define the urban “problem” or eventhe urban “crisis.” They are not just responses to those prob-lems but help to constitute them. (Cochrane 2000, 540)

Planning driven and/or justified by dominant institu-tional interpretations of sustainability often no longer is con-cerned about its traditional ideal of social justice in which itbalances market and social interests in the public good; now,it is concerned primarily with pursuing “sustainable cities thatbalance environmental concerns, the needs of future popu-lations, and economic growth” (Beauregard 2005, 204). Formany, the urban crisis appears to be that our cities simply arenot sustainable. What has happened to planning’s traditionalconcerns about fairness, equity, and social justice? Under thishegemonic crisis of unsustainability, issues such as homeless-ness, racism, or inequality often appear no longer to be burn-ing urban issues. Yet, they have not gone away.6 Exploitationstill occurs, it is just no longer considered an urban problemof major institutional concern, especially in relation to theimportance of reducing our ecological footprint! Is thisobscuring of injustice by some who claim to act in the nameof sustainability not ideology at its most insidious?

In contrast to the honesty of the radical ecological positionthat places sustainability as a moral response to pernicious factors of capitalism and scientific rationality (Davoudi 2001, 88)—what Beck (1998) refers to as risk society—thedominant planning take on sustainability appears to derivefrom the politically palatable view of the BruntdlandCommission (WCED 1987). Central to this position is that“economic development is essential to meet social goals of sus-tainable development” (Haughton 1999, 234) or even those of“environmental improvements” (Davoudi 2000, 128), whatthese authors and others, such as Maarten Hajer or DavidHarvey, refer to as ecological modernization. This is a dis-course largely framed by “Northern elites” and directly con-strained, if not indeed constructed by, institutional andmarket imperatives of competition, growth, and globalization,the very causative factors of capital-generating inequality,exploitation, and degradation of both the first and developingworld’s peoples and environments (Barry and Paterson 2004;Byrne and Glover 2002; Doyle 1998; Rees 2003, 31)!

As developed in prior sections, sustainability, in itself, acts asan empty name or label of an ideal that many can believe andidentify with. Yet, in doing so, sustainability accommodates awide range of contestable discourses, each vying to articulate itsdefinitive meaning. Sustainable development is one such dis-course. This discourse is particularly attractive for our existinginstitutions of state and governance because it continues toengage and even privilege the capital imperative of unboundedgrowth or at least give economic growth equal value to that ofthe social and the environmental. We can have our capitalistcake and at least maintain the global myth, or fantasy, that we

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can continue to consume it for future generations (Rees 2002).Consequently, for planners and others who still give primacy tothe ideals of progress, growth, and continuous wealth accumu-lation, and perhaps more importantly, for their institutions thatprovide legitimization for their planning agency, sustainabledevelopment’s acceptance of this highly utilitarian marketimperative makes it the only acceptable, hence hegemonic,articulation of sustainability. Consequently, sustainable develop-ment has become the international orthodoxy for government-led planning (De Roo and Miller 2000). Unfortunately, thisresults in policy responses that are, at best, “only marginalreforms when the problem demands fundamental change”(Rees 2003, 30).

Indeed, while the Bruntdland Commission’s work is “trans-lated usually into the simultaneous satisfaction of three objec-tives: economic efficiency; environmental protection; andsocial justice,” often referred to as “the triple bottom line”(Briassoulis 1999, 890), the main focus often appears to be thetension between that of the market and the environment, withsocial equity being, at best, a distant third (Marcuse 1998).Even within this duality, Davoudi (2001, 91) reports that withinBritain, at least, notwithstanding “the rhetoric of sustainabledevelopment, the planning system has remained deeply pre-occupied with short-term economic priorities against the inter-ests of long term environmental concerns.”

Britain’s current focus on spatial planning is premisedheavily, at least rhetorically, “on a wide (socioeconomic)interpretation of sustainable development” in which localauthorities have a duty to prepare community strategies thatseek “the economic, social and environmental well-being oftheir areas and contribute to the achievement of sustainabledevelopment in the UK” (Doak and Parker 2005, 24). In theachievement of this latter goal, it has been suggested byUnited Kingdom government policy documents, as well asothers, that growth and development should be encouragedaway from the environmentally sensitive and densely popu-lated southeast of England (Turok 2004, 1075). Yet, theBritish government consciously has intervened to back thecontinued prodevelopment case for this region (Haughtonand Counsell 2004, 142). As the strategic-policy advisor forthe United Kingdom Environment Agency writes about theSoutheast, rather than making “choices between economicgrowth and the environment,” the crucial issue is how far“smart growth” can be deployed to “achieve high outputs andproductivity with a minimum of consequential physical devel-opment” (Howes 2004, 45–46). As Murdoch (2004, 53,emphasis in original) observes, the “political rationality” thatdominated existing United Kingdom planning policy, at leastfor the provision of housing to address labor-market short-falls, especially in the Southeast,

effectively involved the rather selective appropriation ofelements within the sustainability discourse by CPRE[Council for the Protection of Rural England] and central

government. Sustainability was now interpreted not in itsusual sense as a balancing of economic, social and environ-mental criteria within the development process but ratheras the re-development [and intensification] of already-developed land.

The label sustainable communities is deployed in a hybridmanner to describe the region’s strategic goal of settlementcreation on what are largely brownfield sites so as to over-come shortfalls in housing provision for key workers neededfor the region’s continuing economic growth (Raco 2005a).Concerns of social equity are, at best, equated with publicconsultation and job creation to advocate the value of private-sector development and growth for global competitivenesswithout “artificial” regulatory constraints, while “in a shallowgreen way,” espousing the value of high levels of housing den-sity to address “the environmental limits of growth” (Raco2005b, 333). Under the deployed neoliberal institutionalagenda, the emphasis is on quantitative physical infrastruc-ture improvements for economic growth, whereas issues ofsocial equity are addressed with “simultaneous references toqualitative notions of sustainability, such as the creation of asense of ‘place’ and the benefits of community diversity andvibrancy” (Raco 2005b, 333–34). The economic is addressedto materialistically and empirically achieve high outputs andproductivity. The environmental is addressed in a shallowmanner through intensification and reuse of existing sites,regardless of the cumulative effect of population increaseon the surrounding environment. The social, at best, isaddressed with intangible platitudes.

In many sustainable-development discourses, the margin-alized concerns for this third criterion of social equity areinherently political and outside the technorational scientificapproach central to and dominant within considerations ofmarket efficiency and environmental protection (Briassoulis1999), not to mention demanded by recent trends in interna-tional planning education as documented in a prior section ofthis article. Although it consistently is argued that social equityis intrinsic to sustainable development, one or more dimen-sions, be they intergenerational, intragenerational, geograph-ical, procedural, human equity, or even that of interspeciesequity, generally are overlooked in many instances of sustain-ability’s practice-led planning implementation (Haughton1999). This is perhaps because they are contrary to the domi-nant neoliberal market values deployed, and even if they arenot, they may be too hard to quantify from a rational per-spective. For example, how should we determine the net pre-sent value of the needs of future generations in our localdevelopment plans, or the impacts of global warming on resi-dents of oceanic atolls on the other side of the planet?

Fundamentally, the market does not favor the disadvan-taged. As Rees (2002, 255) observes, the “market modeleschews moral and ethical considerations, ignores distribu-tional equity, abolishes ‘the common good,’ and undermines

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216 Gunder

intangible values such as loyalty to person and place, commu-nity, self-reliance, and local cultural mores,” all positions thatplanning traditionally has sought to espouse! Moreover, asRees documents, the market ensures that wealth accumulationfrom economic growth accrues to the already affluent.

“Programmes and policies can be sustainable and sociallyjust, but unfortunately, they can be sustainable and unjust,”for sustainability “and social justice do not necessarily go handin hand” (Marcuse 1998, 103). As outlined in the previous sec-tion, a dominant approach to sustainability adopted by plan-ners is one of city redesign toward more sustainable urbanforms. This approach often has, at best, implicit rather thanexplicit regard toward equity issues (Haughton 1999, 238).

The search for sustainable urban development underwhich cities develop and operate imposing minimumstress on the environment has led, in its first phase, to theacceptance of well-intentioned but empirically unsup-ported policies of containment. These policies have beenbuttressed by notions of “the urban” that are at variationwith the aspirations and behaviors of the great majority ofthe population. (Troy 2000, 552)

In some cases, these arguments of urban intensification inthe name of sustainable development are literally ideologicalfoils for actions specifically directed at promoting the eco-nomic competitiveness of entrepreneurial cities or regionsunder globalization, as was the case of southeast England, orsimilarly, as Keil and Boudreau (2005, 12) observe in Toronto,Canada, where “a new politics under some banner of ecologi-cal modernization [sustainable development] took hold”resulting in “an urban renewal that dramatically changed thefabric of class and space in the parts of the inner cities thathad yet been spared previous waves of gentrification.” In thisregard, “the environmental problems of regional sprawl serveas a public rationale for the primary municipal goal of increas-ing Toronto’s economic and land-use development throughprivate-sector investment and the attraction of skilled, profes-sional labour to the [inner] city” (Bunce 2004, 180). All of thisis perceived as necessary, ultimately, in a desire to offsetToronto’s perceived decline in international competitiveness asa global city. Bunce goes on to illustrate how the rhetoric of sus-tainability is deployed to imply that, regardless of perceived localadverse effects, “if residents do not endorse intensification, thenthey can be considered insensitive to regional environmentalconcerns” (p. 183). Yet, at the same time, the planning visionpromotes a “green,” but more importantly, a “globally recog-nised” Toronto devoid of any redistributive content in whichthe very “initiatives for public transit, environmental restora-tion, and affordable housing are subordinated to this impera-tive of competitiveness” within the global marketplace (Kipferand Keil 2002, 246).

Urban containment and intensification justified to mini-mize the environmental footprint results in the promotionof techniques of social regulation and imposed settlement

patterns that are often contrary to the majority’s perceptionof what constitutes a higher quality of life (Neuman 2005).Whereas globally footloose, talented knowledge workers maywell desire a high-density urbanized lifestyle of “vibrancy andliveability in the central city” (Bunce 2004, 181), they alsohave the necessary incomes to afford (and demand) thisbourgeois and potentially culturally exciting standard of liv-ing. However, most other city residents lack the affluence nec-essary to access this good life or even the ability to relocateregionally, yet alone globally, if they feel disadvantaged by thisintensification. Gilbert (2004, 248) documents how Toronto’surban intensification has “generated new socio-spatial dispar-ities leaving many marginalised residents without any benefit”to offset the cost of their loss of original community.

The same intensification and nodal development pro-moted in the name of vibrancy and sustainability, especiallywhen facilitating the viability of public-transit infrastructure,tends to ghettoize the working poor into high-density environ-ments of poor build quality, amenity, and service. Further,these often nonknowledge, nonbourgeois workers are dis-tanced from the liveable and culturally interesting central citybecause of high land prices and resultant high inner-city rents(Dixon and Dupuis 2003; Troy 1996). Burton (2000, 1987)found in an empirical study of 25 English cities that urbancompactness led to social injustices experienced by the sociallydisadvantaged in regard to “less domestic living space; lack ofaffordable housing; increased crime levels; and [surprisingly]lower levels of walking and cycling.” Moreover, British policyresponses to tackle issues of urban disadvantage largely have“failed to recognise the important environmental concerns ofdeprived communities” (Lucas and Fuller 2005, 462). Otherarguments against urban intensification also have a significantenvironmental dimension, including reduced per capita openand green space, increased segregation and congestion, andless effective local decision making (Frey 1999, 25).

Affluent, talented knowledge workers constituting Florida’s(2002) creative city may well benefit and be attracted to citieswith policies similar to those of Toronto that promote loftconversions, café society, and active, vibrant city centers.Nevertheless, this well may occur with a price being paid bythe less globally mobile, less talented, less affluent membersof the community that actually constitute the majority ofthe city’s population. Further, the quest for economic com-petitiveness under the imperative of globalization may havesubstantial environmental costs that are mitigated only mod-erately, at best, by policies of urban intensification.

� In the Name of Competitiveness: SustainabilityDeployed as an Authoritarian Illusion

Sustainability purports to be a scientific discourse groundedon facts, even if it is an undefinable concept. Yet, as Cardew

(1999) reported in the earlier section on planning education,sustainability is actually a social construct largely concernedwith human endeavors such as energy consumption and trans-port issues, not at all directly concerned with environmentalquality or an object of direct study by environmental or otherformal physical sciences. Sustainability and the discourses thatunsuccessfully attempt to articulate it are ideological social con-structs. Sustainability and its contestable knowledge sets seldomare based directly on irrefutable scientific principles, such as thelaws of thermodynamics. Yet, planners deploy their interpreta-tion of sustainability, or perhaps that of their political masters,as though it were an incontestable scientific edict—the one andonly truth.

Of course, there is a scientific basis to the environmentalproblem underlying the broad sustainability context. Issuesof biodiversity, global warming, ecological footprint, andrelated metaissues are emphatically valid areas of scientificinquiry and concern. However, of apprehension to thisauthor is the extrapolation of these metaissues as the logicand justification underlying site-specific local planning regu-lation. Newman and Kenworthy’s (1989) broad-brush analysisof energy use and urban density often is cited as the justifica-tion for policies of urban containment and intensification.However, the broad assumptions used in their calculationsdo not stand up to challenge across a range of site-specificempirical studies (Breheny 1995; Hall 2001; O’Connor 2003;Neuman 2005). Consequently, as Troy (1996, 2000) repeat-edly has pointed out, there is little or no empirical researchunderlying many of the policy and regulatory prescriptionsfor compact cities made in the name of sustainability.

Apart from making a good marketing jingle for the public(see Gunder 2003b, 2005a), what is the scientific reason andjustification, that is, the empirical scientific research support-ing Melbourne’s policy objective in the Melbourne 2030 Planthat 20 percent of all motorized Melbourne trips should beon public transit by 2020 (Department of Sustainability andEnvironment 2005)? Why not make it 15 or 25 percent? Mees(2003, 292) observes that this “ambitious-sounding patronagetarget [was] introduced without justification or analysis,”whereas the same plan proposed freeway developments cost-ing “$3 billion, or some 15 times the cost of the proposed railextensions.” How can the two perspectives be reconciled?Mees suggests that Melbourne’s plan for urban intensifica-tion was largely just a continuation of the region’s existingmarket lead growth plan, albeit one that addressed the “risksand opportunities posed by globalisation” (Gleeson, Darbas,and Lawson 2004, 356).

Similarly, Sydney’s current metropolitan strategy is predi-cated on promoting a competitive or entrepreneurial city andprovides little evidence of provision to address issues of socialequity. Although the strategy purports to follow a sustainabledevelopment triple-bottom-line approach, issues of affordablehousing or transportation infrastructure are addressed only to

“ensure that ‘key workers’ are not excluded from those neigh-bourhoods inhabited by their better remunerated counter-parts, the ‘knowledge workers’ ” (McGuirk 2005, 64).

The “rhetoric of sustainable development, public transportand diversity . . . is merely a smokescreen to cover the fact thatthe substantive proposals involve no significant change”(Mees 2003, 293). Mees concludes that in the Melbourne 2030Plan, the “real issues of multiculturalism and sustainability arereduced to forms of ‘political correctness’ that can be satisfiedby the inclusion of appropriate slogans and pretty pictures”(298). Meanwhile, roading engineers and the market can con-tinue to dominate Melbourne’s or Sydney’s development inthe interest of competitive globalization “untroubled by post-modern angst about the nature of the task” (Mees 2003, 298).

As Lefebvre (2003, 166) suggested, planning policy oftenis constructed by drawing on a strategy that mixes ideologicalvalues and beliefs with rationality as though it is all techno-logical science. This makes the rationality of planning, atbest, an arbitrary ideological construct supportive of the plan-ners’ beliefs and values. Planners do what they think goodplanners are supposed to do. It is hardly objective or based onvalid and reasonable grounds for the injustices it often pro-duces (Gunder 2005a, 187).

As some argue, “sustainable development requires not justaltering behaviour patterns in relation to the environment,but about changing the broader systems that shape humanbehaviour” (Haughton 1999, 235). In this regard, some plan-ners take the position that the ends justify the means and thatthey should have the right bestowed on them in the name ofsustainability to impose their vision and the necessary behav-ioral changes to achieve such an outcome. In the case ofMelbourne:

A need for sharing the vision for a sustainable future andbringing the community along with the profession in pur-suit of this vision is long overdue and can be achievedthrough an appropriate framework for education andbehaviour change utilising existing structures and author-ities to deliver such a message. (Donnison 2005, 18)

Is this approach, in which the planners induce behaviorchange on the public via their self-decreed authority to knowbest, justifiable? Do planners have the necessary knowledgeand judgment to do this? On the other hand, are institutionssometimes deploying planners ultimately as dupes in thisregard? Are planners’ beliefs and their motivations for abetter, more sustainable world being channeled by otherinterests of capital accumulation and business as usual?

Just as the discourse of sustainable development largely hasgained hegemonic domination of the wider sustainability dis-course for government lead agency in the interests of com-petitive globalization and economic growth, the economicimperative embedded within sustainable development alsohas hegemonic primacy. The other dimensions constitutingthe sustainable development discourse—creativity, social

Sustainability � 217

justice, and even the environment—often appear to bedeployed in a manner that facilitates this dominant marketimperative. Implicit is the assumption that we first must havegrowth and wealth creation so that we can address these otherissues. All of this is predicated within a fantasy or illusion thatthe global cornucopia is without end (Gunder 2005a, 182).

The planning discipline has adopted sustainability heartily.Yet, because of the strength of the market imperative that con-stitutes our dominant worldview, at least for our corporationsand institutions of state and governance, the only politicallypalatable interpretation of sustainability is sustainable develop-ment in which the market imperative dominates. Planning’ssaving grace well may be sustainability, as it may be for the restof society, yet sadly, so far, the dominant articulation of thisideal has been captured to maintain business as usual.

� Conclusion: Saving the Baby, butThrowing Out the Pernicious Bathwater

Bill Rees (2003, 31) sorrowfully suggests that our domi-nant worldview’s failure to accept that the global carryingcapacity is finite, and consequently, that indefinite growth isan impossibility “raises the unsettling possibility that much ofeven our present cultural worldview may consist largely ofshared illusions!” This author would strongly agree with thisinsight. We seek the appearance of security and certainty inour institutions’ actions reflective of our dreams and desires.This fundamentally includes our hopes for a better future.Unfortunately, our dominant worldview still is predicatedlargely on a hope for a better future based in materialisticterms of growth and economic progress (Gunder and Hillier2006). Consequently, the underlying premise of “sustainabil-ity poses a far more serious challenge to many of society’smost basic beliefs and analytic concepts than most main-stream planners and policy makers have so far been preparedto contemplate” (Rees 2003, 31).

This article has begun to illustrate how these mechanismsof illusion may occur and how the domination of the sustain-ability response so often has been captured by the dominantcultural imperative of economic growth. The question is, ofcourse, how do we rearticulate sustainability’s core concern,not as a mechanism for justification for more promarketbehaviors but as a means to displace the economic imperativefrom its throne of supremacy over that of social equity andthe environment?

Sustainability as an ideal societal goal in itself, as capturedand embodied by ecological modernization’s sustainable devel-opment, well may protect only the status quo of competitiveglobalization and facilitate the maintenance of the interests ofgroups or individuals who already largely have achieved whatthey desire and want. It does not address substantively themaintenance of the biosphere, the issues of natural-resource

depletion or the loss of biodiversity, nor does it address theneeds of the disadvantaged. For this author, in dealing withissues of social justice such as the problem of poor-housing pro-vision or high-density ghettoization, meeting the immediateexisting needs may be more important than providing theneeds of present or future generations of talented knowledgeworkers. While the well-off may desire a pristine or vibrant envi-ronment for themselves and their children, the first and devel-oping world’s destitute want and deserve for their basic humanneeds to be met now, even if this is not in itself an immediatelysustainable action.

Sustainability has emerged as a dominant concept of plan-ning education and good practice. Ecological sustainability,for this author, is indeed a profoundly important principle,but it should not be used as a blunt ideological instrument per-petrating social injustice and the neoliberal values of global-ization, particularly as deployed under the rubric sustainabledevelopment. Triple- or quadruple-bottom-line-based sustain-able development is not the same as single-bottom-line eco-logical sustainability. To conflate them together is to risk boththe environmental and the social in the name of sustainablewealth creation for the dominant minority profiting from com-petitive globalization. This induces the cost of excluding themany and reifying all as a commodity. Mainstream planning’sapparent acceptance of this materialist view of sustainabilityprecludes what, for this author, should be sustainability’s cor-rect articulation. This is a definition and role of sustainabilitythat would make it planning’s and the planet’s true savinggrace. This is an acceptance of an “economy of enoughness” inwhich we accept that we need to mitigate our First World con-sumptive habits (Rees 2002, 266). That is: we need to reduceour ecological footprint to that which is sustainable for allglobal inhabitants—human and other.

Planning educators particularly also have an additionalresponsibility to ensure that social justice is not swept aside inthe dualistic tension between market efficiency and environ-mental protection, even if economic growth always continuesto seem to prevail. To achieve this, this author, like Davoudi(2000) and Sandercock (1997), suggests that planning educa-tion must develop in its students core skills of critical inquiryand of ethical judgment. In particular, while supporting sci-entific rigor in developing knowledges for ecological sustain-ability, such as how to foster low-impact community design,students also should develop the ability in ideological decon-struction to recognize how discourses comprising what goodplanners are supposed to support and encourage, such as sus-tainability, can be twisted and manipulated to other ends.Unfortunately, this also requires students and their academicmentors to reflect critically on how their discourses, althoughenhancing the authority of the discipline, also can impose per-nicious effects of injustice on those that are planned withinsociety as well as adversely effect the environment. Sadly, thisauthor suggests that this critical reflection is often lacking

218 Gunder

Sustainability � 219

in the planning literature, and especially, planning practice,particularly when it pertains to the dominant ideal, the newvision of planning empowerment: sustainability.

Author’s Note: My thanks to the editor and the anonymous referees fortheir insightful and in-depth comments and suggestions that have madethis article a much more comprehensive document.

�� Notes

1. Whereas the term social justice, like sustainability, is a vagueconcept constituted by diverse and contestable discourses ofmeaning, for this article, it is interpreted to be consistent withsocial equity and fairness concerned with “improving the life-chances of low-income groups” (after Burton 2000, 1,972).

2. Other new fields also include “new urbanism,” “multicul-turalism,” “smart growth,” and “communicative planning,”although this list is not comprehensive (Gunder, 2004, 303).

3. The archaic name for a guild of craftspersons or a trade wasmystery.

4. Just as we conduct ourselves as good Americans, Canadians,Australians, and so on should act by trying to comply with thewider values of our societies. This includes, for many of us, thecultural imperative to fulfill the desire to be successful, happy,and wealthy and to express these accomplishments in a “normal”materialistic manner (McGowan 2004).

5. In the Lacanian parlance of desire, mother is the supremegood, but one that we can never attain (Safouan, 2004).

6. These issues are addressed specifically by numerous dis-courses of sustainability. The difficulty, of course, is that these crit-ical discourses are seldom discourses of interest to our majorinstitutions that shape the dominant debate. Indeed, they evenmay sit in conflict with these institutions, that is, ecoviolence or justsustainability (see Agyeman and Evens 2003, 2004; de Soysa 2002).

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