Changes in Portland, Ore. bureaus by mayor-elect Sam Adams reflect a commitment to sustainability as a guiding principle in planning decisions, not an add-on. Earlier this week, his office announced that the city's Office of Sustainable Development (created in 2000) would merge with the Bureau of Planning to form the Bureau of Sustainable Planning & Development.

Sustainability: Beyond the Platitudes
The Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute hosts the largest land use
law and planning conference in the nation. Join them for a wide range of presentations on land use, land use law, and sustainability.

More and more community leaders and citizens are re-thinking how local systems operate and realizing the environmental, financial and community health benefits of creating a more sustainable future for their citizens. Graduate students from Columbia University designed this handbook, released by the U.S. EPA, to help your city go green.

At a time when climate change is a major priority for the international community, this Symposium aims at pushing forward the research agenda on climate change from a city's perspective. Specifically, the main questions will be structured around the impacts of city and urban growth on climate change; measuring and anticipating the consequences of climate change on urban quality of life, city assets, and local and national economies; and assessing alternatives to increase the resilience of cities and related costs and incentives required for successful implementation.

Academic thinking about sustainability has progressed quite a bit since the days of the Brundtland Commission and the Earth Summit. Our practice of sustainability, however, has lagged. With global warming and peak oil at our doorstep, we have no time to waste to turn theory into practice.

Colleges and universities can be powerful social actors, with their large populations, research facilities, and significant budgets. How are they acting with respect to climate and energy issues?

I've always been wary of city sustainability rankings (Warren Karlenzig's top-notch How Green Is Your City? excepted). A recent Brookings Institution report of the carbon emissions of the 100 largest U.S. cities is a case in point.

This ground-breaking symposium has been organized to address the role of urban design in the face of one of the most profound and important challenges facing global society: the need to re-imagine and rethink how cities are designed and organized in a future without the plentiful and abundant oil upon which prosperous urban economies have been built.

For ISOCARP's 44th Congress, taking place in the city of Dalian, China, the theme is "Urban growth without sprawl," a goals of city planning that is in striking contrast with the reality of rapid urban development all over the world.

The dilemma for governments is that forecasting has such a poor track record that forgoing today's pressing needs to prepare for an uncertain future carries considerable political risk. Making the wrong choices will lead to unfortunate consequences either way.