Our principles of town planning, urban planning, city planning or municipal planning incorporate aesthetics, economics, design, ecology, sub-urbanization, geography, law, political science, transportation, heritage, culture, security, safety, quality environment, standard pf living, decay and statistics to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities.

Sustainable development and sustainability influence our every step of the decision-making process. Modern lifestyles use many natural resources, polluting or destroying ecosystems, increasing social inequality, creating urban heat islands, and causing climate change. Sometimes the concept, instruments, technologies, and methods considered to be sustainable, actually have a larger and more hazardous ecological footprints. The first academic publication about the ecological footprint was by William Rees in 1992, where he created a standardized measure of demand for natural capital that may be contrasted with the planets ecological to regenerate.