Indian Journal of Fundamental and Applied Life Sciences ISSN: 2231– 6345 (Online) An Open Access, Online International Journal Available at www.cibtech.org/sp.ed/jls/2015/01/jls.htm 2015 Vol.5 (S1), pp. 707-716/Mahsa and Arefeh Research Article © Copyright 2014 | Centre for Info Bio Technology (CIBTech) 707 COPING WITH CONFLICTS IN VISIONS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND LIVABLE COMMUNITIES *Mahsa Mostaghim and Arefeh Karamipour Department of the Urbanism, Islamic Azad University, Najaf Abad Branch *Author for Correspondence ABSTRACT Twenty- first century land use planning faces both an opportunity and a threat. On the one hand, it is widely counted on and expected to deliver both sustainable development and livable communities. On the other hand, it must cope with serious conflicts in the values related to these two beguiling visions, which represent the big visionary ideas of contemporary urban planning. The future of land use planning may well depend on how it resolves these conflicts and creates settlement patterns that are both livable and sustainable. What is the nature of these conflicts? Can we construct a tool- a lensor filter- to help communities identify and understand them? Do today’s popular planning approaches adequately uphold the values and resolve the conflicts? If not, what can land use planners do to remedy the situation? These are important questions for the future of land use planning if the resulting participatory processes, planning proposals, and urban places are to satisfy the needs and desires of present and future residents. Keywords: Livable Communities, Sustainable Development, Smart Growth INTRODUCTION Value Conflicts in Sustainable Development Land use planning in the U.S and abroad at the turn of this century is energized by the challenges of planning for sustainable development. At the same time it reaches out to incorporate new visions of livable communities, exemplified by two movements, New Urbanism and Smart Growth. Advocates of these three distinct but related normative visions (cousins from the same intellectual family) dominate contemporary planning discourse. Today’s planners are defining and testing the visions of sustainable development, New Urbanism, and Smart Growth and in the process are exposing and tackling their inherent tensions. Like acrobats without a net, land use planners are working on the frontiers of sustainability and livability practice, without benefit of a profession- wide consensus on standards and methods. These are exciting times. Sustainable development seeks to reconcile the conflicts among economic development, ecological preservation, and intergenerational equity, as reflected in the familiar definition from the report Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987): “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (p:8). As its United Nations origin attests, sustainable development is a global vision, although it has been taken up by planners in the U.S. and other developed countries (Krizek and Power, 1996). Its central value can be boiled down to a balance among the three “E”s: environment, economy, equity (Breke, 2002). While this balance is beguiling in theory, efforts to manage the conflicts arising from the separate thrusts of environment, economy, and equity have often met with limited success, as noted by Ownes and Cowell (2002), In practice land use lining proved to be one of the most important arenas in which conceptions of sustainable development are contested. Here, more than anywhere else, it has become clear that trying to turn the broad consensual principles into policies, procedures, and decisions tends not to resolve conflicts, but to expose tensions inherent in the idea of sustainable development itself (p.28).