In ten years, more than half the world's population will be living in cities. The United Nations (UN) has stated that this will threaten cities with social conflict, environmental degradation and the collapse of basic services. The economic, social, and environmental planning practices of societies embodying 'urban sustainability' have been proposed as antidotes to these negative urban trends. 'Urban sustainability' is a doctrine with diverse origins. The author believes that the alternative models of cultural development in Curitiba, Brazil, Kerala, India, and Nayarit, Mexico embody the integration and interlinkage of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Curitiba has become a more livable city by building an efficient intra-urban bus system, expanding urban green space, and meeting the basic needs of the urban poor. Kerala has attained social harmony by emphasizing equitable resource distribution rather than consumption, by restraining reproduction, and by attacking divisions of race, caste, religion, and gender. Nayarit has sought to balance development with the environment by framing a nature-friendly development plan that protects natural systems from urban development and that involves the public in the development process. A detailed examination of these alternative cultural development models reveals a myriad of possible means by which economic, social, and environmental sustainability might be advanced in practice. The author concludes that while these examples from the developing world cannot be directly translated to cities in the developed world, they do indicate in a general sense the imaginative policies that any society must foster if it is to achieve 'urban sustainability'.

A new city has emerged in the 1990s, designed to achieve urban ‘sustainability’. The notion of sustainable urban form has its roots in the Garden City movement at the turn of the century. The ‘garden’ cities of the 1900s and the ‘ecological’ cities of the 1970s were proposed as alternatives to the pathology of modern urban form. Just as cities provide a place for humans to live, so they destroy ecosystems and become unfit habitats for the human spirit. The city must be made more vital, humane, efficient, beautiful, self-sufficient, and natural through a return to a more compact form, its impact on the environment must be decreased. These themes have re-emerged in the sustainable cities of the 1990s, advanced on behalf of future generations and planetary ecology. The sustainable city is a compact city. Calthorpe's ‘Transit-Oriented Developments’ (1989) are hailed as sustainable because their walkable streets free residents from reliance on automobiles and their high density preserves surrounding wildlife habitat. The European Commission (EC) rests a sustainable future for Europe (1990) on the twin pillars of urban compactness and urban regeneration. Nash (1991) believes that sustainable global urbanization would consist of 1.5 billion humans living in 500 compact cities. He calls his vision ‘Island Civilisation’. The sustainable city is also a city of regenerative processes. Girardet (1990; 1992) thinks it has a ‘circular metabolism’, as distinguished from the ‘linear metabolism’ of contemporary cities. McDonough (adviser to President Clinton on ‘sustainable development’) theorizes inThe Hannover Principles (1992) that in order to make civilization sustainable, urban form will have to be based on the principles of nature, which makes no waste, maximizes biodiversity and is sustained by the sun. The urban form designed by McDonald (1993), conceptualized with ideas from chaos theory, contemplates a sustainable city within a sustainable watershed and a form ‘holistic’, ‘diverse’, ‘fractal’ and ‘evolutionary’. Lyle (1994) believes that the sustainable cities of the next century will be based on the ‘green infrastructure’ of ‘regenerative systems’. The commonality linking these landmarks of sustainable urbanization is the ideal of bringing the city into a vital symbiosis with nature. The sustainable city is a ‘green’ or ‘living’ city. The search for the sustainable city in the 20th century has not been Utopian buttopian, a quest to create a form of city suited to optimal development of the Earth island.

The tropical rainforests of Indonesia are threatened with deforestation caused by rapid economic development. Because this development hastens global warming and reduces biodiversity, it violates the doctrine of sustainable development. The Brundtland report, Our Common Future (Brundtland, 1987), defined sustainable development as 'development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'. Sustainable development was adopted as the overarching world development policy of the 21st century at the Earth Summit in 1992, which introduced international accords to integrate economic development and environmental protection, manage and conserve the world's forests, stabilize production of the gases that cause global warming, and conserve the variety of living species. Indonesia views sustainable development with suspicion and is committed to economic development on the Western model. Sustainable development advocates, however, seek to save the Indonesian rainforests because they amount to 10% of those remaining in the world. They fear that the destruction of Indonesia's rainforests will, by hastening global warming, burden future generations with such problems as coastal flooding, migration of agricultural regions and habitat loss and, by reducing biodiversity, deprive them of the opportunity to study species and use them to improve the human condition. The conservation of the tropical rainforests of Indonesia may depend on the rediscovery of its indigenous natural resource systems, which are tantamount to a regime of environmental law and policy. These systems include the water temple system of Ball, the home-garden system of Java, the adat and sasi systems of Nusa Tenggara and Maluku, the land-tenure system of West Kalimantan, the shifting cultivation system of East Kalimantan, and the traditional non-timber production systems of forest dwellers. These systems, which are characterized by permaculture, biodiversity conservation, property rights, and sustained yields, prevent Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons' (Hardin, 1968), and foster Leopold's 'biotic integrity' (Leopold, 1968). As a paradigm of land use governance, such systems have sustained the economy and environment of Indonesia on behalf of its people for millennia. It is concluded that the indigenous natural resource systems of Indonesia have a vital role to play in its sustainable development.

SUMMARY As an alternative to deforestation, nations with tropical forest ecosystems are experimenting with sustainable development methods. ‘Royal Development Projects’ underway in Thailand involve reforestation, new crop development, appropriate rural technologies, multicropping, forest preservation and alternative agriculture. Integrated resource management emulates natural resource patterns there. The Cousteau Society has drafted a development plan for Nayarit (Mexico) that identifies land suitability in the coastal zone for different types of development in order to minimize impacts on marine and terrestrial ecological communities. Under the plan, an Environmental Protection Council will serve as a ‘one-stop’ permitting agency and a Community Participation Committee will facilitate citizen involvement. In Papua New Guinea, established forestry practices involving rings of successively mature trees, and reef ownership based on ‘limited entry’ fishing are threatened by commercialization. These must be protected from encroachment for popular self-sufficiency to be preserved. In Bali, farmers use a temple-based system of water allocation and agriculture. This ancient, highly productive practice is being enhanced with the aid of modern computer technology. By fostering biodiversity and protecting the interests of future generations] sustainable development methods in Thailand, Nayarit, Papua New Guinea and Bali may provide models of land-use governance for the developed world. Key words: sustainable developmentforestrymulticroppingland governance