wants.At the urban level, the interaction of the land use-transportation/social and economic systems create needs and aspirations for enhanced accessibility.Sustainable mobility (rather than transport per say), then, should aim to sustain these systems' capabilities to provide such accessibility, over time, on an affordable basis. Sustainability and sustainable developmentUse of the terms The use of the term sustainability has become almost trite.The concept itself can be traced far back in the fields of economics and natural resources, relating to the capacity of natural stocks (of natural resources such as fish, forests, soil etc), the Malthusian concern of population growth exceeding basic subsistence capabilities (Malthus, 1798) and fundamental Hicksian economic principles relating to income, consumption and wealth (Hicks, 1939).By at least the late 1960s, one can find prominent ethicists and economists focusing on relevant issues.Baumol (1968), for example, writing on social discount rates, highlights the special attention necessary for possible 'irreversibilities,' such as 'if we poison our soil…[or] destroy the Grand Canyon' (ibit 1968: 802). 1 Rawls (1971), in his landmark A Theory of Justice, suggests that we (should) have a natural inclination to promote the well-being of our descendants.The prevailing modern usage of the term sustainability finds its recent roots in the environmental movement.The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and Meadows et al's (1972) Limits to Growth greatly helped push environmental concerns onto the global agenda.A follow-up to Limits to Growth, Alternatives to Growth (Meadows, 1977), includes papers from a wide range of disciplines, aiming to chart paths to potential 'sustainable futures,' which are associated with a 'steady state' economy and a 'just' society.Rees (1997) credits the World Conservation Strategy of 1980 with the first explicit use of the term sustainable development.By the late 1980s, the idea of (environmental) sustainability became formally integrated into mainstream development concerns with the release of the now well-known Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987).This report formalised the concept of sustainable development, recognizing the fundamental need to live within the earth's means and the implications for passing on the same (or greater) amount of total resources to future generations.2 By 1992, sustainable development hit centre stage, so to speak, when the United Nations convened the Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (often referred to as the 1 Interestingly, Baumol recommends subsidised investments for such protections, not a lower general discount rate; beyond such 'irreversibilities,' He suggests "the future can be left to take care of itself" (Baumol, 1968: 801). 2 While not rigorous nor comprehensive, a database search on the topics (sustainability, sustainable development or sustainable) in the ISI 'Web of Science' citation index (which includes journal articles from Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index) is somewhat indicative of the 'growth' of interest in sustainability.The number of articles cited including at least one of those topics returns the following number of citations (in 7 year periods; 1973 being the earliest period available, 1980 marking the supposed first appearance of 'sustainable development,' 1988 being the first year post-Brundtland): 1973
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.