Sustainable development and urban identity a social context

Abstract

The most attractive idea within the scope of the present considerations of global future is the planning of sustainable development. The recent treatments of this idea have established a new paradigm of urban and territorial development. Presently, however, the thesis of sustainable development is acquiring negative connotations because it is being exploited for various manipulations. To demonstrate fully its value in the sphere of urban projecting, the theory of sustainable development should include a clearly expressed component of cultural-urban pluralism. In other words, the global strategy should retain the important local characteristics, to a measure and in a way that would contribute to the coherence of (European) urban system. In an urban-cultural context sustainable development implies a satisfying of social needs on a higher level of aspirations than is the case in a vulgar interpretation of the economic, urbanistic and ecological assumptions of sustainability for a community. In this it is assumed that the natural and necessary needs of the individual have been previously meet. For a holistic concept of sustainable development cannot be based only on strategies which insist on a full stomach for the world population, on normative approaches to the economic measuring of the growth and development of a society, on the premises of ecological purism or on the comprehensive urban planning. The main idea within the framework of general concern about urban future may be condensed to the following two questions: (a) how much are the social upheavals which characterize the modern world and which involve all European cities a prearranged framework and (b) how much are they a conceivable framework for urban future? Despite of holistic concept of sustainable development, reduction of the problems of the prospective city to geopolitical and cultural planes is not only possible and reasonable but necessary. This, however, does not mean that the apparently narrower view will make the search for possible answers any easier. The urban reality operates with a widely accepted syntagm about a large set of specific but unessential social and spatial characteristics of the (East European) city. But the reality is that these cities deserve all attributes that make them a full-fledged factor of the European urban milieu.nema