The UNH IGUTP forms a wonderful heuristic, aspirational document, but they may overpromise on recommendations. Each pillar has many recommendations that are about different aspects and scales of land use/urban planning. The environmental recommendations in Section B3 of the UNH Guidelines are a good set. However, upon closer examination, only about half address traditional environmental topics, with some environmental planning imperatives missing and other recommendations providing for infrastructure services: energy, transport, and municipal environment. The other half is about adapting to climate change. They therefore may be perceived as not constituting the entire universe of environmental sustainability planning concerns. 

However, it is clear that UN-Habitat intends for the environmental guidelines to be implemented in conjunction with the many land-use-related recommendations provided in their economic and social planning guidelines. This may be a limitation of the best practices presented here in that they are only part of the larger story of the IGUTP, including recommendations relating to the economic and social pillars which are presumed to be implemented as well. It is hoped that the present Ukraine guidelines can be expanded to cover the economic and social recommendations at a later time.

The organization of the IGUTP suggests that the local authority’s role is presumed to occur within the context of the national role and include a larger “territorial” frame. The present guidelines for environmental sustainability planning strive to address the full range of geographic scales, geopolitical and natural, inferred by the terms “urban” and “territorial”, in Ukraine, ranging from cities to metropolitan areas to oblasts to rural agricultural areas to river basins and other naturally defined areas. It is notable that the IGUTP appears to skip over the territory scales in between metropolitan areas and the national scale.

This IGUTP is a set of guidelines mainly applied to developing nations transitioning to modern urban form, economies, governance, and social conditions, but they also reflect the characteristics of modern cities in general and, as such, are also applicable to transition economy countries. They are good reference points, a checklist, to see what has already been accomplished and if more attention is needed. 

On the one hand, the IGUTP is a remarkable statement of the characteristics of modern society and of the idealized role of planning in producing it. On the other hand, they reflect, it would seem, a modernist view of urban development in the world, with which we may agree, but which is not held in as much ascendancy and high regard as it once was. Also, it is not clear that “planning” as a practice had much of a role in creating the conditions for modernization in the industrialized Western countries. The fundamentals were developed in the American/European cases, in its constitution initially, and flowed from the evolution of the market and legal precedents. Even then, it has a rocky history with many twists and turns. Do the best practices even exist to achieve many of the UN-Habitat IGUTP’s recommendations?