Sustainable urban and/or rural planning and management - Brownfield Redevelopment

Abstract

Modern land development has been more associated with sprawl than sustainability. The continuous expansion of cities into the rural area seems to address the problem with the growing population as well as the desire for better living, yet, this is far from being sustainable. Land supply will one day exhaust, and the continuous encroachment and destruction of natural habitats for human settlement also tilt the balance of the natural environment, partly contributing to the climatic changes that we face today. In the field of the contemporary landscape architecture practice, many advocate a sustainable urban development and sustainable rural expansion by re-looking into the ‘brownfield’ sites in the heart of the cities for redevelopment. Those derelict and contaminated post-industrial sites have become the target redevelopment areas in major developed cities. However, ‘brownfield’ is not only the issue for the developed world. With the rapid economic developments and urban city growths in various developing countries, the abandoned and undeveloped brownfield sites and urban sprawl issues in the developing world also need immediate attention. This paper is trying to take the brownfield redevelopment strategies in the developed world as inspirations, and to examine why brownfield redevelopment is a sustainable land planning strategy for the developing world to take on, and how the developing world can adopt the methodology of brownfield redevelopment in dealing with its urban sprawl and other land development issues, so that they can plan ahead and avoid the land planning problem that the developed world is facing now. The redevelopment of urban brownfields not only can solve the problem of land shortages, it can also provide temporal open areas for recreation (while the land is going through phytoremediation) as well as curbing the rapid expansion of settlements into the rural landscape. It is a topic worth investigating.