Sustainable Regionalism: Evolutionary Framework and Prospects for Managing Metropolitan Landscapes

Developing effective spatial structures for mitigating the negative effects of the expansion of metropolitan areas continues to be problematic. Metropolitan growth has exacerbated urban sprawl, fragmentation of landscapes, environmental degradation, dislocation of viable neighborhoods, social and economic inequities, and homogeneity of regional cultural values. These negative effects of metropolitan growth continue to intensify, despite an impressive array of urban spatial forms and structures that have been proposed to mitigate them such as new urbanism, smart growth, and sustainable development. This paper proposes sustainable regionalism as a way to manage metropolitan growth. Sustainable regionalism seeks to create, revitalize, and restore the ecological region in metropolitan areas through the physical design and planning of neighborhoods, villages, and cities within a region from a regionally-based sustainable perspective. It fuses specific ideas from the Geddes-MacKaye-Mumford-McHarg concept of natural regionalism, Kenneth Frampton’s notion of critical regionalism, and the sustainable development paradigm, adapted to contemporary social, cultural, political, and environmental forces shaping the metropolitan landscape. What sustainable regionalism is, how it evolved, its key features, and promise for managing metropolitan landscapes, comprise the subjects of this paper.