‘This is a wonderful book that should be on the desk of every architect and planner. It shows how

Why is it that audits don’t tell us who loses or gains control over time?
Curiously, 
financial
audits can tell us who benefits at whose expense, whereas 
sustainability
audits 
do not. They sometimes consider externalities (the private costs that are dispersed over the general 
public), but not internalities. Historically, growth itself has generally been seen as an adequate public 
benefit to compensate for externalities. To guide sustainability, we need to:
•
Audit trends in the access to, and control over, land and resources in time and place –
from nature to development, from poor to rich, and from public to private
• 
Audit ‘internalities’ as well – the disproportionate public benefits that are captured and
privatized by private interests and which can constitute unjust enrichment
The concept of unjust enrichment can be used to draw attention to cases where excessive benefits or 
profits are gained at the public expense.
2
Cost–benefit analyses can (ostensibly) measure the losses 
of social and ecological capital against economic gains. However, they do not capture the transfer 
of excessive benefits to developers or irreversible losses to the environment. RT analysis would put 
auditing in a time and space context. The proposed modifications to assessment and auditing tools to 
support systems re-design form part of SmartMode. SmartMode aims to combine ethically informed 
design
thinking with auditing processes in a constitutional framework, to drive institutional change 
[Chapter 13]. The aim is to assist in making planning, design and decision-making more relevant to 
fundamental sustainability issues, which requires ethics and creativity, as well as eco-efficiency.
What measurement methods are used in regional sustainability audits?
Currently, the best known regional auditing method that considers equity issues is EF analysis.
3
The 
EF is “the area of productive land and water (ecosystems) which is required to produce the resources 
consumed, and to assimilate the wastes produced, by a given population … wherever on Earth that 
land may be located”.
4
This is calculated by converting fossil fuel consumption, air pollution and 
other impacts into ‘equivalent’ units of land or ocean areas, in addition to the land actually occupied 
by the development. The EF concept makes the environmental consequences of poor systems design 
more easily grasped by the public. It was an important advance over previous ways of conceptualizing 
environmental problems, because it related resource consumption to land area. Economic analyses, 
by contrast, are largely ethereal and often ignore biophysical realities (ie the life support system). By 
linking consumption and production to the spatial dimension, EF analysis helps to bring home the 
reality there are critical 
spatial
as well as total resource limits to growth. It shows that if all people 
lived like those of us in well-off nations, we would need several planets. Interestingly, EF analysis has 
been used to compare the impacts of eco-tourism in relation not only to other forms of tourism, but 
also to staying at home: that is, behaviour change as opposed to behaviour-as-usual.
5
Eco-tourism 
can have lower impacts than staying at home. This suggests people can reduce their overall footprint 
while having a good time.