UC Berkeley

This research starts with the evolution of urbanization from the pre-industrial revolution to the contemporary era. It elaborates on the contemporary sustainability challenges followed by a review of the recent concepts with an objective to get closer to partially identifying the balance that sustainable development may achieve. It concludes with the following contemporary sustainable development challenges: Changing of planners’ skills over time; the change in framing the discipline; influence by non-planners on the discipline; the ongoing change of the built environment; introduced sustainable development solutions are not on-size-fit-all and the relatively weak connection between science and practice.