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‘Sustainable’ seems to be the word that has risen to the top of the heap of choices available when looking for a catch-all term that describes the eco ideal. It’s a good word, and almost everyone who hears or reads it nowadays knows what’s meant.

I use that ugly phrase – ‘what’s meant’ – advisedly, not the much simpler and more straightforward ‘what it means’, because a great many people are not especially clear about what ‘sustainable’ actually means. Quite simply, it means capable of being sustained, in other words, long- lasting. We seem to have hit on this particular word to use because it expresses, more than most of the others (‘eco’, ‘green’, ‘environmentally-friendly’), the largest possible collection of ‘eco ideas’ under one verbal roof. Energy efficiency, renewable energy technologies, re-uses of waste and waste products, a sensible approach to transport – it’s all there. If you say ‘a sustainable transport policy’, pretty much everyone knows what you mean.

It also gets to the root of the whole environmental… let’s call it debate. What else can we call the massive, amorphous, constantly shifting, constantly under pressure from new ideas, new inventions and new thinking, corpus of knowledge, opinion, commentary, legislation, policy and a thousand other practical and theoretical responses to the overarching problem of humanity’s apparent inability to live on the earth without f*****g it up big time? That root is our desire to make it – earth, ourselves – last.

Where is all this going? And what does it have to do with design? This month, dear reader, I have mostly been thinking about the social and behavioural aspect of sustainability, a subject I have touched on before in the context of product design, but now as it applies to the creation of sustainable communities. Call it town planning or urban design; whatever you call it, it is affecting us all right now, and you can be sure will do so more and more as time goes on.

‘Sustainable development’, for instance, in the urban design context, is somehow a misnomer, a false concept. Property development can’t be sustainable, it can’t last for ever. Growth has to stop. ‘Sustainable design’ is another one – good enough for now, we all know what it means, but… er… does it mean design that lasts (or wants to last) for ever, or the practice of designing things, spaces, buildings that… well, they won’t last for ever, obviously, but their components and materials can either be re-used, or returned to the general organic mass of matter. Imprecise, but then so is the thinking. Useful up to a point, while the thinking matures enough to be able to turn round and define itself in its own terms.

All this is connected to the subject of one of the seminars in a programme that I’m working on, to be held at a certain consumer exhibition not a million miles from the NEC and not totally unconnected with a certain long-running TV programme about people building their dream homes. The topic in question is Eco Towns. Or rather, it is about three different approaches to urban ‘sustainable development’, of which Eco Towns is one. It so happens that I have recently been introduced not only to the idea – and indeed the reality – of ‘Transition Towns’, but also the more rarefied urban concept of ‘Cittáslow’, or ‘Slow Towns’. Both are the result of thinkers and writers getting to grips with the uncomfortable realities that a) urban planning, design and development in this country need a serious shake-up when it comes to sustainability (for want of a better word), and b) that that shake-up is not going to come from government. In fact, the phrase ‘sustainable development’ is much in evidence when Eco Towns are being discussed, explained, attacked or defended, as opposed to the material on Transition Towns and Cittáslow, which don’t pay much heed to development, and in the case of Cittáslow, not even a great deal to sustainability in the current accepted sense of the term.

It’s about quality of life, in which sustainability plays, of course, a huge part – and getting huger, if I may coin a cack-handed phrase. The Transition movement, started by Rob Hopkins in the Irish town of Kinsale, focuses on ‘peak oil’ and climate change as the two key challenges to meet. The phrase ‘peak oil’, in case you didn’t know, expresses the idea that although we aren’t about to run out of oil just yet, we are already in the ‘zone’ where oil takes as much energy to extract as it gives in the burning. Might as well already have run out, in other words. The whole tone and atmosphere of the movement promotes communal give and take, mutual understanding, what it chooses to call ‘positive visioning’, inclusion and openness. ‘The Purpose of Transition’, says its ‘who we are and what we do’ mission statement, is ‘to support community-led responses to peak oil and climate change, building resilience and happiness… It makes explicit the principle that there is, in the challenge of energy descent, no room for “them and us” thinking.’ Transition is about communities – usually towns, but it doesn’t have to be. ‘Anywhere there are people’, in its words.

Cittáslow, on the other hand, actually grew out of the disgust that an Italian journalist called Carlo Petrini felt at the arrival of MacDonald’s in the town of Orvieto, where he was covering the 1999 Food Festival. The Slow Food movement came first – as an obvious antidote to fast food – but developed from there into a vision of urbanism or communality that celebrates respect for ‘tradition and quality, and seeks to use the best aspects of the modern world to enhance, preserve and enjoy the old ways of doing things, but not to the exclusion of progress and not for the sake of avoiding change. ‘Living in and managing a Cittáslow, or Slow City, requires an attitude of mind that is open to opportunities presented by modern approaches to communication, transportation, production and selling. The aim of a Cittáslow is to encourage people to live and enjoy life at a human pace, and to provide an infrastructure that helps people savour and enjoy life and what it has to offer.’ (From the ‘philosophy’ page of the movement’s website.)

So although neither of these urban design ‘alternatives’ to Eco Towns say anything at all about the housing shortage, which is never far from the top of the list of reasons for any government urban design or planning initiative, both of them cradle the idea of well-being and community interaction at their heart. In their own separate ways they express the idea – and get to work on it – that true sustainability (for want of a better word) depends on changing the way we live, the way we view ourselves and our dwelling places, our ways of getting and spending. They emphasise local as opposed to global values; they promote co-operation rather than competition; without being Luddite about technology and innovation, they prefer to extend, refine and develop what we already have instead of building from scratch. Because the big problem, in my view, about the Eco Town idea (and controversial as it is, there are many, many people and organisations who have major problems with it) is that it does not deal, in any form I could find, with the issue of human behaviour. Eco Towns is a concept without soul, where Transition and Cittáslow are concepts that start with it. While it may be said that they will have to get real, a bit more hard-headed and a bit less airy-fairy, it can also be argued that they are highly practical proposals, and it’s surely better to start with too much soul than none at all. What’s important is that they both, in the nicest possible way, demand that we change our act when it comes to living in modern communities. Without this deep and abiding commitment to making our behaviour sustainable, Eco Towns might just as well not get out of bed.

This article was first published in FX Magazine.