Economics in time, space, and footprints 61Economic sustainabilityfocuses on one portion of sustainability, for instance,
one leg of a three-legged environment/social/economic stool (Barbier1987,
Campbell 1996, Permanet al.2003,Rogerset al.2006). This concept is quite
different from sustained economic growth. Measures of economic sustainabil-
ity have attracted particular attention (Pearce and Atkinson1993,Pezzeyet al.
2006).Also, sometimes sustainability economics is used to refer to ecological
economics or environmental economics as described in the preceding section.
Just as in those cases, a rich array of policies has been proposed based on sus-
tainability (Howarth and Norgaard1992,Pezzey2004).
Finally,urban sustainabilityhas a nice ring, but realistically is an oxymoron.
Energy efficiency in buildings, public transport, growing food in window boxes,
recycling of materials, self reliance, and such proposals are usually listed to
describe urban sustainability, and typically are all positive goals. Given a city’s
huge concentration of people and massive inputs and outputs, the gain in
energy, materials, food, etc. from such proposals is small or negligible. No pre-
tense of a balance, where both people and nature thrive in a city, exists. People
overwhelmingly dominate the area of a city or metropolitan area, and nature sur-
vives as shreds. However for a whole urban region, a nature-and-people balance
is worth considering and evaluating (also see the ecological footprint section
below, and especially Chapter 12 ,foralternative, more promising, ways to think
about urban sustainability).
Spatial arrangement
Abare introduction to this often overlooked, but potentially large
topic in economics highlights two dimensions: (1) urban-region patterns and
economics; and (2) economic disparities: poor and rich.
Urban-region patterns and economics
As mentioned earlier, economic models are largely non-spatial (Costanza
1991 , Jones2002). In addition to the spatially explicit dimensions of ecolog-
ical economics, two exceptions are noteworthy for the urban region. Urban
economics is a mixture of market and regulatory approaches focused on the
city, and to a lesser extent, the metropolitan area.Economic geography,onthe
other hand, evolved with an early spatial foundation (Christaller1933,Losch
1954). It has a much broader focus on the land, and integrates, e.g., agricultural,
forested, and urbanized lands with transportation. Economic geography con-
siders the form of cities and spatial arrangement of land uses. This approach,
thus, is consistent with the combined growth, regulatory, and ecological eco-
nomics approaches elucidated here for the urban region (Braat and Steetskamp
1991 ).