What makes a sustainable community?

The eight components of a sustainable community are:

• Governance - Well-run communities with effective and inclusive participation, representation and leadership
• Transport and Connectivity - Well-connected communities with good transport services and communications linking people to jobs, health and other services
• Services - Public, private and community and voluntary services that are accessible to all
• Environmental - Providing places for people to live in an environmentally-friendly way
• Equity - Fair for everyone in our diverse world and for both today's and tomorrow's communities
• Economy - A thriving and vibrant local economy
• Housing and the Built Environment - High-quality buildings
• Social and Culture - Active, inclusive and safe with a strong local culture and other shared community activities

Building cohesion is vital part of building sustainable communities:

Cohesion is fundamentally about the social element of what makes a community sustainable – the relationships between neighbours – but the degree of cohesion that exists in an area is usually the product of a mix of economic, social and environmental factors together.

It is important to identify cohesion as a distinctive component of sustainability more widely, because that will make it easier:

• For learning to be shared between practitioners
• For the factors influencing it to be pin-pointed
• For practitioners to more quickly get to grips with how cohesion can be addressed in their specific locality

Our country needs more and better housing. That means improving older properties and, crucially, building new homes in well-connected, carbon-efficient communities with a range of facilities such as schools, health centres, shops, pubs and parks.

Such neighbourhoods – what we call sustainable communities – don’t happen by chance. Some, in towns and cities, have taken years to develop. Others, more recent in origin, were born out of a strong partnership between planners, developers, local authorities and community groups.

Yet too many places are neither cohesive, connected, well-designed nor well-planned. Some, for various reasons, have lost the essential glue that binds them together. Newer areas, often big estates, are sometimes soulless places, disconnected and car dependent, wasteful of energy and built with little recognition of the wider environment where planning seems to have been an afterthought and public transport connections are poor.

We need a radical reappraisal both to reinvigorate older neighbourhoods and to create new places where people want to live – carbon-efficient, socially cohesive and well-connected.

We were created because there are huge gaps in the skills and knowledge required to create these sustainable communities across the country.

To sum up, whether it's a city, town or village, a sustainable community is a place where people want to live, work, play and invest in. It has good quality homes, local shops, things to do and opportunities for young people to get a good education.

A sustainable place is one:

• where leaders manage the area well and local people have a say
• that is environmentally friendly
• with good transport links
• with good public services that everyone can use
• with a strong local culture and lots to do
• that has a thriving local economy
• with good quality buildings and public spaces
• that is fair for everyone