| According to UN-Habitat (2006), cities of the developing world will absorb 95% of urban growth in the next two decades. Moreover, more than half of the world's urban population lives in cities of fewer than 500,000 inhabitants. Therefore, small cities in developing countries will be the place where the big part of the urbanization will occur during the next decade. They have a double challenge to address: avoid harnessing the environment as developed countries do and solve all the social, economic and political issues that currently occur in their boundaries and will be worsened by their growth. However, the advantage to being still small cities is that they can learn from modern big cities to avoid unsustainable and wasteful patterns that occur there.;The purpose of this thesis is to provide recommendations for small cities to help them to manage a sustainable growth since the start of their expansion. By defining a set of indicators to use as a framework to study the issues occurring in big cities and realizing influence diagrams for each indicator, some important connections between the indicators have been highlighted.;Most of issues take root in a deficient or inexistent urban planning process. Moreover, some indicators directly impact others and therefore by addressing them first, other issues can be avoided. In fact, creating a sustainable urban planning process linked to the development of strong urban policies is the first step towards a sustainable future. |
