Sustainability in Urban Areas: how can sustainability become mainstream?

The explicit attention to sustainability and related concepts within the context of housing and urban development dates back to the 70’s of the last century. Since then, a lot of efforts have been done to define the concept and to bring it into practice. This involved efforts from national to local governments, to create the proper policy conditions, from commercial partners like developers, constructors, and housing corporations, to realise sustainable residential areas and houses, and from other partners like NGO’s and research institutes. And of course it involved efforts from residents, who lived in the (more) sustainable houses, experienced some benefits but sometimes also were confronted with disadvantages of their (more) sustainable houses. Certain successes were achieved, but the complete housing sector at this moment is still far from ‘sustainable’. The need for further improvement is getting bigger, both for environmental reasons and for reasons related to other dimensions of sustainable development, like for example social and economic quality.