Sustainable Community

I am in the process preparing of a paper entitled creating a sustainable community through proper town planning and property development under the concept of Local Agenda 21. While researching on the relevant topics, I found that many residential areas with premium pricing share some common features. These include safe environment, freehold land, good infrastructure and facilities, quality maintenance and management, strategic location, connectivity and accessibility as well as greenery. These are extinguished physical aspects that provide good return of investment to the buyers and also creating a quality and fine living environment for the residents.

The question is do we classify them a sustainable community. To me, yes partly but not all. While a fine community can have good and efficient service delivery, it does not necessary qualify the community as a sustainable community. I am saying this as the community might be an over consumption and wastage society. They might have kept the neighbourhood clean and tidy by transferring all rubbish to other area for disposal. They can afford to pay the water bill without considering to save the water consumption or to harvest rain water for gardening. They will enjoy eating foreign fruit stuff rather than sourcing it locally with lower carbon footprint.

In summary, although many planners and developers will like to brand their design and properties as green as they can say it, or at time misquoted as sustainability, the ultimate achievement for sustainable development will fall back to the behaviour of its cohabitants. Until change of consumption pattern, passionate about environment and thankful to the depleted resources is taking place, the objective of creating a sustainable community is yet to achieve.