Eighteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

While the manipulation of space has been an important theme in sustainability, resistance to reductions in mobility are growing in many world regions. Sustainability is often presented as an expression of spatial constructions, technological or social or both. Responses are to remake space according to a set of preferred practices. There are set of problems with this approach, both in terms of the actual direction of planetary urbanization and the loss of legitimacy in on the part of publics, particularly national publics. After rehearsing these difficulties in terms of the rubric of city as object, I turn to a brief discussion of alternative conceptions of space that might be recalled in order to provide a positive context for sustainability proposals. Some of the intellectual and cultural traditions that are worthy of mention include: (1) towns in relation to civic humanism and as an expression of the Anthropos; (2) planning traditions in the Anglo-American world, e.g. garden cities and landscape regionalism; (3) vernacular landscapes and in particularly the understanding of the relation of landscape to the house/building. What these very diverse traditions have in common is the acknowledgement of aesthetics as necessary to satisfying a necessary sense of place, the grounding of sustainable projects cultural contexts and the practice of negotiation between actually existing forms and proposed changes.