The trend world wide is towards urbanization. By the year 2000, more than half of the world's population is expected to live in urban areas. Of this, the greater part, nearly two thirds will be found in developing countries. Many cities in developing world are experiencing environmental problem which often lack direction at the strategic level to address them.
At the most obvious, a sustainable city will imply ecological sustainability. Stated otherwise, it will imply working with the natural environment; that seeing nature as a system, planning and design in accordance with its proccesses and cycles. The sustainable city, at the second level, implies economic sustainability; the issues of how to achieve production that will have a low impact on the environment, and low energy use-in one sense they are the same issues that arise in ecological sustainability. A third level of understanding of the sustainable city would typically focus on cultural sustainability, in the face of an increasingly global civilization; that local culture and diversity have to be sustained. Landscape is strength of a concept lies in the way in which it focuses on the interaction between people and nature. Landscape is both a way of viewing the environment which is more than objectively scientific, and a means of describing the world about natural and the human aspects.
The notion of landscape has certain distinctive characteristics:
- It contains both natural and cultural values and features, and focuses on the relationship between these;
- It is both physical and metaphysical, with social, cultural and artistic association.
- While landscape is how we see the world, it must more than mere scenery and appearance.
- While we can experience landscape only in the present, it is the sum of all past changes to the environment it is where past and present meet.
- Landscape is universal - it exists throughout each country
- Landscape gives identity to place, and hence diversity to the setting places of our lives
To develop an urban lanscape prospective we need to build 'sustainable-city concept' in approaching landscape sustainability and will support in strategy for sustainable development that ensuring a better quality of life for everyone, now and future generations to come.
