Dan Silver and Amina Lone on why sustainable urban development must take a more pro-active and systematic approach to include the perspectives of people who live and work in communities.

In this essay, Debbie Ellen and Lucy Danger focus on food to address sustainability in Greater Manchester.  In particular they illustrate the significant part played by food in the city region’s carbon footprint but the difficulty in producing a coordinated GM-level response.

In this Perspectives Essay, the Leader of Manchester City Council, Richard Leese, argues that for the foreseeable future a healthy, sustainable future for Manchester and, by association, Greater Manchester depends on maintaining a growth trajectory. This is not growth at any cost. The city should continue to be capable of sustaining human life in a socially acceptable and civilised way. Drawing on evidence from the city’s recent history of urban development, he concludes that Manchester is going in the right direction, and that the city-region is taking the right approach, building consensus and taking people with it, but that the pace of change needs to quicken.

In this Perspectives Essay, written for the University of Salford and Mistra Urban Futures GMLIP programme, Eamonn Boylan promotes a view of sustainability based on transforming the quality of provision of public agencies as a means of creating opportunities for people to make logical choices that support sustainable outcomes and increase personal independence.