Rethinking sustainable urban development: towards an integrated planning and development process

A city is the most dramatic manifestation of human activities on the environment. This human-dominated organism degrades natural habitats, simplifies species composition, disrupts hydrological systems and modifies energy flow and nutrient cycling. Sustainable urban development (SUD) is seen as a panacea to minimise these externalities caused by widespread human activities on the environment. The concept of SUD has been around over a considerably long time as the need to adopt environmentally sustainable behaviours made the international community commit to it. However, to date such development has not been achieved in large scales anywhere around the globe. This review paper aims to look at the SUD concept from the lens of planning and development integration to generate new insights and directions. The paper reports the outcome of the review of the literature on planning and development approaches—i.e. urban planning, ecological planning, urban development, SUD—and proposes a new process to support the efforts for achieving SUD—i.e. integrated urban planning and development process. The findings of this review paper highlight that adopting such holistic planning and development process generate a potential to further support the progress towards achieving sustainability agendas of our cities.