Incorporating sustainable development into redevelopment

Recent UK Government strategies and planning policies have embraced the principle of sustainable development, presenting this as a framework for future planning and land-use decisions. This paper will review those policies that emphasize the need to re-use previously developed land. Resulting from these policies is a need for local authorities, in particular, to adopt a sequential testing approach in terms of land-use decisions. We evaluated the sequential testing approaches advocated, examining how they equate with the assessment of indicators of sustainable development. Current sequential testing approaches tend to evaluate over-arching considerations within the planning framework and do not necessarily assess site-specific characteristics. This paper argues that if optimum adherence to the principle of sustainable development in land-use decisions is desired, the pre-determination of end-use should be ended or at least minimized since it does not facilitate sustainable development. It is suggested that in order to achieve sustainable development in land-use decisions, a sequential approach to determine end-use, based on those characteristics exhibited by the site is necessary. Therefore, there is also a need for a mechanism that can assess whether the development decision has reached an optimum choice concerning sustainable development. The paper concludes by proposing that a framework for expressing site characteristics as elements of sustainable development is needed to enable best possible sustainable land-use decisions. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.