The development and testing of an integrated model for sustainable development and urban planning

This research proposes a procedure called the Urban Sustainable Development Model UrbanSD), to translate sustainable development theory into urban planning practice since this gap still exists in the literature. Sustainable development offers the most holistic approach to urban development and can be used as an umbrella theory to incorporate the tenets of New Urbanism, Smart Growth and Transit Oriented Development to create sustainable indicators for urban planning The UrbanSD procedure was used to create sustainable indicators at the national level and the local level in this research. The national application used idiographic explanatory design with decision Management techniques. The largest urban places in the US were the units of analysis. The following research questions were used to inform the study: What kinds of typologies can be extracted from this sustainable indicator set among urban places? How can urban places be ranked according to these typologies? Is there a difference between cities which have local planning mandates and those which do not across the sustainability typologies? The local application was a decision Management analysis stemming from identification of goals for development in Houston, Texas. Utilizing a panel of experts for a judgmental approach to analysis, a Delphi study was used to develop a primary set of indicators before the UrbanSD procedure was applied. Idiographic explanatory analysis was then used to compare superneighborhoods within the city. The following research questions were addressed: How do neighborhoods in Houston compare according to sustainable indicators? What factors contribute the most to a heuristic understanding of sprawl in the urban area based on the indicator set, and how can neighborhoods be ranked according to these factors? Are Superneighborhood councils a significant proxy to predict the performance of neighborhoods in any of the factors? This novel research unveiled heuristic development patterns which were previously not recognized since it systematically incorporated the synergy of diverse themes and ideas using the UrbanSD procedure. The research shows a relationship between sprawl and ozone levels in the national study. The local level findings show that the western region of Houston is where citizens defined as average typology reside.