1.2 Towards a sustainable society-the future city
The future city may have different appearance (Berg and Tälleklint, 2005). By an acute resource
and environmental crisis the local self-supporting and the close scale recycling are important means
to survive a sustainable provision. This will lead to a physical more spread out and maybe less
culturally developed city. A strong hypothesis in the planning research in the future urban
environment is instead a dense city, which can gather the resource flows and recycling or recovery
processes in a central effective facilities with much service demand. In such development it will be
reasonable to dense also the surburbs. This creates strong motives to build further on the central
systems already existing. However, the American city development seems to be that the city is
spread out as sparsely residential districts, similar to the Swedish million programme residential
areas, which will promote to install alternative urban wastewater systems (Berg and Tälleklint,
2005).
Sustainable city development demands an integrated handling of the physical, economical,
biological, organisational, social and culture-decided resources of the city. The introduction of new
or modified technologies and processes must be sustainable and each place unique characteristics
must be considered. The success is also dependent on that the citizens can and want support or in
each case accept the system introduced (Berg and Tälleklint, 2005).