A Review of Sustainable Urban Development Frameworks in Developing Countries

Abstract

Cities are considered the engines of economic prosperity and responsible for a substantial amount of the world’s CO2 environmental pollution. Urban sustainable development frameworks have become common to manage these challenges. However, new frameworks are required as existing global frameworks are not sufficient to meet current challenges nor do they consider future requirements in developing countries. These frameworks currently focus on planning and engineering aspects and lack the flexibility to incorporate local issues factoring in views of stakeholders. Examples of this are issues such as political instability, degradation of public services and utilities and damage to the infrastructure and economic deterioration caused by conflict. This paper reviews and analyses existing sustainable urban development frameworks, it identifies that they have focused on urban sustainable development assessment tools by electing several urban sustainable development factors with rating systems. Through this review, this paper finds several strategies have not been addressed in previous research related to locality specific issues. These include (a) consideration of the views of the public, (b) future urban planning requirements, (c) future domestic property requirements of occupants, and (d) achieving a reduction in domestic energy consumption. Thus, this paper proposes that future frameworks should be designed based on considering stakeholder feedback, experts’ consultation, and validation stage. This is a challenging proposition, however it does, provide significant advantages in highlighting and addressing the community’s priorities for solving problems in the local context, experts’ views, in order to combatting the gaps found between decision-maker’s opinions and public priorities.