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

So how do we proceed to implement some or all of these suggestions?
Some of the problems of project assessment that have been retained in sustainability assessment can 
be overcome by integrating ‘impact prediction’ with processes for auditing impacts of existing areas.
The confusion, in practice, of prediction and auditing activity has meant that, while we may reduce 
the ecological harm we plan to do, we do not use development as a lever for reducing impacts already 
created. Planners could analyse defects in the design of the surrounding development and region to 
determine design objectives for new development. For example, an assessment of a new commercial 
building in an urban area should consider the negative impacts of surrounding development that 
could be ameliorated or reversed by a new building. Likewise, an assessment of a proposed regional 
shopping centre should consider how to support or modify existing shopping areas and public 
transport patterns. But major project assessments should 
also
map de facto cumulative resource 
transfers by conducting what we have called resource transfer (RT) analysis. This would map the 
transfer of resources over time (from poor to rich, rural to urban, public to private, etc), in order to 
identify inequities that a new development or policy might help to reverse.
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This might help build 
political momentum to address the inequitable resource transfers that are obfuscated by traditional 
(ostensibly neutral) planning analyses and incremental perspectives. Having seen how development 
assessment and control processes often fail to examine wider ethical and ecological relationships, the 
next step in developing SmartMode is to look at regional auditing methods.

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8 
Regional 
Sustainability