Sustainable Development Policies Can Solve Problems in Urbanization Conditionally

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Introduction

Although a lot of experts argue that policies of sustainable development are the ideal ways to solve these problems of urbanization, some countries and regions which are experiencing urbanization have failed in their attempts to implement unstainable policies which were adopted by developed countries decades ago to find accesses to problems of urbanization. This essay stood on the point that the problems of urbanization can be met by a policy of sustainable development only conditionally depending on the cultural factors and whether the policy is well-structured.

Cultural factors

A policy of sustainable development can meet problems in urbanization when the culture of planning fits the local societal culture. It has been proven by some facts that if city planners do not take cultural factors into account, negative impacts would occur to urbanization.

There are two typical examples about neglecting cultural factors in carrying out sustainable development policies. One is that citizens in Los Angeles rejected the proposal of building an underground transit system in 1925 (Thisdell, 1993) and till now metro is not the first choice for most of families in L.A. comparing with cars (Newman, 1999), despite the fact that underground transit systems are recognized as a sustainable measure because of its low carbine emissions and the transportation is much important for a city’s development due to its function of ensuring the daily running of a city (Pardo, 2012). Another one is that in western China damage of the “stone Buddha” resulted in continuous resistance from local people of any more sustainable development policies including exploiting the sightseeing resources (Deng & Bai, 2014).

In L.A. case, people refused to use underground transit system mainly because of two reasons which were ignored by city planners in L.A.. The first one is that the underground transit system cannot deal with the traffic problem in L.A. because of the multi-center urban pattern caused by city’s history of orange farming (Thisdell, 1993). This kind of city patterns results in huge amount of non-work trips such as picking up their children after parents’ daily works and going shopping in near centers. However, the existed underground transit systems in other countries were mostly designed for one-center city pattern. Therefore, driving is much more convenient than metro. The second reason is that the design of stations ensures crimes happening more easily than people drive on the ground. The stations were designed as rectangles; when a robbery happened robbers can run away from the stations quite easily (Thisdell, 1993). People feel unsafe so that they are not willing to take metro. Government and city planners of L.A. failed to figure out these two cultural factors before they decided to build underground transit system.

In western China case, local people insist on resisting development policies is major caused by the concept that they are worry about their religious belief will be damaged again. In western China which includes 55 Chinese minority groups who have different and unique cultures and religious believes, local government damaged the “Stone Buddha” which is not only a historical relic from the Neolithic (about 7500 B.C～2200 B.C.) but also a crucial site for local religious activities in order to develop regional tourism resources (Deng & Bai, 2014). Subsequently, this disrespectful action caused a strong resistance from local people to reject many development projects (Deng & Bai, 2014). Consequently, the urbanization in this region was slow down or even stopped by lack of considering the relationship between planning culture and local societal culture (Deng & Bai, 2014).

Both the L.A. case and western China case proved city planners cannot ignore the cultural factors. Here are some suggestions for city planners to avoid the situation in the two examples listed above. The most crucial one is that before the sustainable development policies will be implemented city planners should analysis the local culture thoroughly. The next suggestion is that government and city planners must respect local cultures.

What happened in the Netherlands, a neighbouring country to Flanders in Belgium, shows how cultural factors influenced a country’s or region’s urbanizing. Flanders and the Netherlands have a common language and similar geographical, economic and political contexts because they all belonged to Dutch once upon a time (Vries, 2015). Although Flanders adopted a lot of similar policies to those of the Netherlands’ such as , it is very obviously that spatial development of Flanders is worse than it of the Netherlands when urbanization developed and more people live there because houses in Flanders are arranged more disorder (Vries, 2015). The main reason for the difference is that people in Flanders do not trust to planning but people in the Netherlands trust (Vries, 2015). These different attitudes on planning are due to different experiences of Flanders and the Netherlands. Compared with the Netherlands, Flanders had less stable internal and external borders caused by long-term foreign domination (Span, Australia and France) (Vries, 2015). This period of foreign domination adapted “the generally hostile attitude towards to government” and “an attitude of hyper-individualism”. For the Netherlands, the situation is contrary (Vries, 2015). These polar sociocultural factors result in total different situations in urbanization of Flanders and the Netherlands.

The cases of Flanders and the Netherlands offered an alarm to any country or region who want to take advantage of sustainable development policies to cope with the problems of urbanizations that only copy succeed experiences from other countries or regions may not work in some contexts because of specific cultural differences. In additional, Flanders and the Netherlands cases also suggest that governments and city planners should value the feedback and the thoughts of local people (Ko, Schubert, & Hester, 2011) as well as try their best to build up good reputations.

Systems thinking

The second factor which can impact whether the problems in urbanization can be met by a sustainable development policy is whether the policy was structured well and stood on a holistic view, which means that when governments and city planners formulate the sustainable development policies they should make an objective judgment about the current situation and any possible consequences after implementing the policies and revaluate the policies by systems thinking.

An appropriate policy should be the