Environment and
urban sustainability
José Luis Lezama and Judith Domínguez
El Colegio de México
Resumen
Este artículo recoge la discusión sobre el desarrollo sustentable, la sustentabilidad urbana y los procesos dirigidos a conformar una ciudad inclusiva. La sustentabilidad urbana es un proceso que implica cambios estructurales en las instituciones y en los valores y pautas de conducta social. La construcción de ciudades sustentables se orienta a la conformación de sitios habitables, seguros, justos, de
socialización, que preserven sus características culturales y ambientales y permitan el desarrollo del ser humano, sin comprometer el medio ambiente de las generaciones futuras. Debe proveer elementos para efectuar un acceso más equitativo, igualitario y
democrático a la riqueza natural o socialmente generada, así como generar por la vía institucional, educativa y moral, una
mentalidad y una sensibilidad social para pensar a la naturaleza como un valor en sí mismo.
Palabras clave:medio ambiente, desarrollo
sustentable, sustentabilidad urbana, protección ambiental.
Introduction
T
Abstract
This article gathers the discussion on sustainable development, the urban sustainability and the processes addressed to form an inclusive city. The urban sustainability is a process that implies structural changes in the institutions and in the values and social behavior guidelines. The construction of sustainable cities is directed to the conformation of livable, safe, just, of socialization places that preserve their cultural and environmental characteristics and allow the development of the human being, without compromising the environment of future generations. It must provide elements to create a more equitable, egalitarian and democratic access to the natural richness or socially generated, as well as to generate by the institutional, educational and moral ways, a mentality and a social sensibility to think of nature as a value in itself.
Key words: environment, sustainable
development, urban sustainability, environmental protection.
artificiality that it incarnates. The city is the best example of the subordination and the yielding of nature that modernity represents. The city is not only created as a negation of nature, on which is erected, but also from that it nourishes and reproduces it productions, consumption forms and life styles. The city and the processes that animate it are not from the city itself and are not explained by the logic of anonymous processes, but rather by the activity and the task of the actors that interact there, exchanging products, symbols and power. In the city it is also expressed the maximum estrangement from the natural, the reduction to raw material of the natural world, to production consumables. The city not only subjects and denies nature, but it reifies it, transforms it into a dead matter and lives it in an inert way, separate and distant from the source of life and sense it comes from.
The values and principles of the modern society, that constitute the factory and the meaning of the city, represent in many senses the antithesis of the sustainability. The processes that take place there, the economic, social, political and instrumental rationalities that are displayed there become the irrational and non- sustainability consumption of its own natural ambience and from those were the energy and material required for their productive processes are taken. The nature enters the city as material richness leaves it under the form of dead matter and pollution. Converted into capital, in social structures and power structures, nature processed in that way becomes inequity, domination and control systems. The sustainability of some cities or the presence of some sustainability elements in certain urban centers can be given at a very high rate for the other territorial ambiences, regional, national and international which provide the nature that is consumed there.
The dynamic and independent relations of the sustainability and the no sustainability of cities and regions has been exposed by the authors of the called 'ecologic strike', by which the cost, in the called natural capital, can be seen, of the productive processes and of consumption of the cities and also the expensive that the sustainability reached by some urban centers or prosperous regions is for many parts of the world
human needs. Both components: development and sustainability, in their general and urban dimensions, cannot be limited to guarantee or promote the permanence of the minimal natural capital required to ensure the continuity of the human race. They also have to promote necessary elements to produce a more equitable and more democratic access to the natural richness or socially generated and, at the same time, to generate by the institutional, education and moral ways, a social mentality and sensibility to think of the nature also as a value in itself, as an authentic and autonomous part with sense and reason of existence. Even when this notion could seem, on one hand, an ecocentral assertion, on the other it could be understood as a subtle expression of the anthropocentrism, since nothing would be better for the human purposes that a reconstituted, multiplied, diverse and perdurable nature.
The sustainable development must then be seen, on the one hand, as a development that, satisfying the present needs, guarantees the future generation the satisfaction of their needs, and on the other hand, as a development that builds the political and social bases for a redistribution of the power that allows, by means of the exercise of democracy, a more equalitarian access to the satisfactors that the human work produces with the resources nature provides. Social welfare must be a human acquisition to which is accessed in a democratic way. The sustainable development makes reference to the viability of the human species, to the viability in the general life and to the viability of the political systems to ensure the justice and equity in the satisfaction of the human needs. The sustainable development, as well as the environmental problems, is explained by the relation of the man with the nature, but also, and almost always, by the relation of the men, by their social structures, their domination systems and the power resources they have at hand to reach their projects of life.
The meaning of the sustainable development
even that they existed in previous periods, they were not perceived socially, as it is the case of the environmental problems. The society begins to perceive the damage and environment risk not because there did not exist before, but because culturally it is, in that new stage, habilitated with another point of view, with other sensibility to perceive them and to transform them in objects of preoccupations. The decade of 1970 starts with clear samples of this conceptual maturity that allows the environmental to emerge within the grand worries of the modern industrial society. Testimony of that is given by the Stockholm Summit on Human Environment as a series of publications that, directly or indirectly, put the environmental in the centre of the preoccupations. In this sense, we can mention works such as Blueprint for survival by Edward Goldsmith et al. (1972), The population bomb by Ehrlich (1972), The limits to growth by Meadows et al.
(1972) Only one earth by Ward and Dubos (1972), The small is beautiful by
Schumacher (1973). All of them, with different emphasis, under different premises and following their own analytical objectives, give place to a sort of a wider social initiation and recognition to the environmental problematic, introducing it in the more general context of the contradictions and central crises of the modern industrial society. At the same time, in the very ecology field, there is a philosophical, political and social reflection that shapes something that has been called political ecology, field where, under different perspectives, most of the constestatary trends start the most comprehensive and general critic of the industrial society and their relation with their natural world. Even when the different authors who form this environmental thinking current are differenced by centering the objective of their worries on the man-nature relation in the human being and their welfare (antropocentrist) or in asserting the nature as a value in itself (ecocentrist), they have in common to criticize the excesses of the industrial society, their developing logic, their support to consumption and the reduction of nature to mere raw materials, consumables for the production or natural resources.
The most notorious consequence of this fact has been the concentration of the intellectual and governmental effort in the search of mechanisms, instruments and strategies to conciliate the traditional economic development with the environment. This is what authors such, as Hajer (1995) have called the
ecological modernization, from which the sustainable development is the most
detailed example. Under its principles, the damage and environmental crisis, that in the political ecology discourse are consubstantial to the deployment of the modern industrial society, appear as distortions that can be dealt with, administered and controlled by the science, the technology and the institutions of the modern society. The utilitarian, productivist and consumist conception of the nature remains intact and the sustainability discourse becomes preservationist, conversationalist and administrative proposals, where the environmental problems that the public policy is in charge of are constructed as pollution problems, of excesses that must and can be controlled, as well of predictable and correctible failures in the functioning of the institutions.
The sustainable development, which is the predominant approach in the present in the academy, government and non-governmental groups, was first planted as a problem related to the environment's charge capacity (limits to growth) and has evolved in some regions until meaning the disconnection of the
tendencies that, when dephasing and pursuing separate goals, they have led to a cul-de-sac, to the base, principles and economic goals of the industrial society, but it gave place to what since the decade of 1970 was qualified as an environmental crisis: the economic development, the environment and the population. It was this need of conciliation, of refunctionalization and administration of the environmental crisis within the logic of the mentioned ecological modernization, what led to the proposals of sustainable development.
A more complete proposal, and even more effective within the same logic of the ecological modernization, must imply deeper transformations of the production and consumption, as well as advance towards a transcendence of the simple economic rationality and the search for a social and political sustainability. The environment problematic is not only about the natural world, but also of the normative and symbolic ones with it constitutes itself. In this perspective, the relation of the man with the nature includes cognitive, ethical, moral, social and symbolic considerations (Ferry, 1992; Eder, 1996).
For many environmentalists, the sustainable development is a rhetoric and contradictory concept and, mainly in its political and discursive use by governments and national and international institutions. For them, the environmental is something that has to be present in the governmental language to account for a phenomenon that is socially perceived as significant, that worries the society and that, sometimes, has been considered as part of the social welfare. The official inclusion of the environmental, of what is green or sustainable is, many times, part of a discursive strategy to "turn green" the governmental action.
The different approaches to explain the urban sustainability has to do with philosophical developments on the position that the man assumes within the nature (Sprout, 1978).
The sustainable development makes compatible the economic and social development with the protection to the environment, others recognize that even if they are more utopian orientations, are necessary as proposals of an alternative development to the ruling model in the search of an ecologically responsible society (De Geus, 1999). All of them, however, imply a change of attitudes and social and cultural values, that are orientated towards what has been called the post-modernity (Inglehart, 1997), being econcentric or anthropocentric proposals, that surpass the exclusively technological approach.
geographical concept, is a cultural construction, an element of the conscience, that looks for the harmony of the man with the nature. This idea finds more application in small urban spheres, but that, after a strong institutional commitment, can be applied to big cities where, if successful, the effects will be of a strong positive impact for the environment. Although we have to admit that it meets the limitation of the complexity already lived in the cities, even more in the metropolis. It postulates the self-sufficiency to acquire the goods necessary for the social reproduction, using the rural environment surrounding the city (urban hinterland) by means the exchange of goods.
In this approach is mentioned the reconciliation between the man and the nature, more than the conquest and competition attitudes (Atkinson, 1992), and implies that acknowledgment of traditional practices, constituting an approach different from life planning and organization. Then, the bio-regions are the product of the interaction between culture and nature. For Gudynas (2002) the bioregions are "geographical spaces where there are homogeneous characters from the ecological point of view, with strong links between the human populations and complementarities and similitudes in the human uses that are made from these ecosystems", but also is a cultural constitution —according to Berg— because it implies questions on fundamental issues for the human being: who am I and where am I going to?
They propose the rehabilitation of the spaces with a state of different conscience. Results an interesting alternative because it implies substantive changes in the way to sustainability (Campell, 1996) giving it the character of method within this process (Berg, 2005). The idea of an environmental arrangement by watersheds is congruent with this way of approaching the environmental problematic.
The urban environment sustainability
The econsystematic approach sees the city as a series of systems that interact among themselves and that are interdependent. The systematic perspective allows the understanding of the interaction among the environmental systems, the human systems and the constructed systems (Young, 1994) more adequate to the current functioning of the man-nature relation and the modifications it had suffered; with subsystems (water, soil, air) that are also in constant dependency. This approach was adopted in the Summit of Rio and in the elaboration of the
Agenda 21, and is the one that prevails in the approximations of the European
Union to the urban problematic in the design of sustainable cities.
To talk about urban sustainability we have to refer to the three dimensions that integrate the principle: the social, the economic and the environmental. It does not have a uniform meaning, but, on the contrary, it varies according to the urban environment it is applied to, this is, there is not an ideal type of sustainable city, but this is conformed according to its own environmental, regional characteristics and social or economic conditions, acknowledging that not all the cities have the same problems.
The environmental sustainability, however, should have a privileged place since it constitutes the support for the other two dimension of the sustainable development concept. The development processes that only favor the economic or social aspects have led to the depletion and degradation of the natural resources and to the anthropogenic pressure, each time stronger, demanded from them, as raw material or environmental services.
The different national or international informs show that we live in an urbanized world (75 percent of the world population lives in cities) and that in the Third World there are urbanization phenomena of the poverty due to the large migrations from the rural to the urban spheres since the cities concentrate the most profitable economic activities. This fact brings along a strong demographic pressure on the natural resources and the increasing demand for human satisfactors and raw material, reaching to unsustainability situations and of high dependence of the city to distant environments (Castells and Borja, 1997). It is not surprising, then, that the worries of environmental nature are one of the more important reflections on the future cities.
instrumentalist and exclusive vision of the urban system (Kasarda and Pornell, 1993).
Nowadays, the urbanism must be oriented toward more environmentalist trends not only for environmental protections matters, but of coherence with the adequate environment necessary for the development of the human being. The instrumental vision that prevails, not only in the design of policies but also in the social perception, requires a reorientation and re-planning on what was constructed (Inoguchi et al., 1999). It also implies creative processes that have in mind the
diversity and the capacity (Carta de Aalborg) changing the orientation of the function of the city to its origins of human socialization space (Bookchin, 1995). In the international sphere, the Second Conference of the United Nations on Human Settlements, Habitat II, of 1996, reflected on the satisfaction of the needs and the impact of the human settlements in the environment, proposing institutions and strategies. The urban environmental sustainability process in the European ambit started as a policy in 1990 with the Green book on urban environment, the letters of the European cities towards the sustainability of 1994, better
known as La Carta d'Aalborg, to the informs on sustainable cities destined to the local authorities (2005) and the Thematic strategy for the urban environment of 2006, that show that the local sustainability is a process and that
the concept of 'sustainable development' has been progressively concreting for the urban environment to stop being an empty concept.
The Latin American cities require of development strategies ad hoc their
peculiarities. In Latin America, in contrast to the rest of the world, there are large natural resources so that the base of their development could be in those and from that the academic proposals of sustainability (Leff, 2004) give more importance to the environment; but not the governmental proposals that give the first place to the economic development, as the case of some Asian countries. This does not impede, in the globalized world we live in, to test experiences that have already been affective in societies with a more advanced environmental conscience, or those from the Third World that were first focused on the restructuring of their cities with international help, given the grave urban-environmental crisis they were experiencing.
The construction of sustainable cities
We consider as adequate the use of expressions as "construction" or design of sustainable cities" because it evokes the sociocultural perception on the city and its problematic, so that it is variable according to the countries; however, we can define the minimum or common criterion. The sustainable city is that which implies being a livable place; no matter its dimensions; global, mega city, intermediate or small city.
So, with different approximations, but the livability axis, the green and sustainable cities are built, and different local authorities have been compromised, in both the design as in the impulse of this new kind of urban environment, being able to transform in many cases, degraded environments into livable places, that demonstrates the fact that it is possible to reverse the urban environmental degradation.
skyscrapers and artificial environments, but they provide safety, which is another characteristic of the livability, even that for many is the negation of the self and the place (Fernández, 2000). This shows that the needs hierarchy, even more the secondary ones, can vary according to the different cultures and temporal epochs, given priority to other aspects (efficient cities).
The governmental approximation
In the globalized world, the local and regional governments are looking for the insertion in the benefits this offers, and in this way they design competitive cities focusing on the economic aspect. Even when there are technical documents of international organisms that highlight the environmental aspects, the orientation has a strong economic content.
The construction of a city with identity requires other factors to be included
and what nowadays is asked is for a city to be a livable, safe, just, of socialization place that provides homogeneous life quality for the population. In this attempt, the governments are not only administrators of a territory, or have in their charge the responsibility of the care of the environment, but also the promotion of the development, that is not only economic, but that makes reference to a concept of integral development of the human being (Potter, 1990); are, now, regulators and promoters of the society. The latter has a fundamental role, that means its participation, preferably active, this is, involved in the public tasks.
intention is to mention these orienting criteria that allow establishing a test when determining the urban sustainability.
Sustainability criteria
Quality of life
The last objective of the design of every city must be providing a quality of life adequate for their inhabitants, overcoming the idea of modernity of the industrial stage, based solely on comfort economicist, of more consumption capacity and accumulation of modern gadgets for the satisfaction of needs criteria, oriented to a ecologic modernization funded in the change of values.
This problem of access of all the citizens to improve their quality of life implies to approach at least two facts: an equity problem regarding the distribution of the distribution of the economic and environmental resources, and a conscience problem with post modern values.
The principle of social justice of the sustainable development implies that everybody lives in a city they can enjoy in a more or less homogeneous way of conditions related to the quality of life, this is, it should be allowed that the condition of "citizens" that is attached to the city implies, more than a political acceptation, a participation of the benefits that generate in it, economic, social or environmental, overcoming the inequities among those who live in the centre and those who live in the periphery. The problems of quality of life are present mainly in the periphery and in the Third World suburbs. The quality of life implies adequate environments, access to basic public services, green, public, cultural, recreational and spare areas that allow socialization.
Institutional changes
The governments and the institutions are very important social agents for they are the ones in charge and legitimate for, to begin with, taking decisions according to the representative democracy system. The reality has demonstrated, however, that before the inefficacy, inaction or the excesses of the "legitimately" in charge of the environmental protection, the civil society started to open spaces and the legitimacy is linked now to the principle of affection, widening the spectrum of social agents that intervene in the decision taking. The global environmental problems affect those who live in a different place where the risk is originated, "socializing" the latter, and not necessarily the benefits. The risk society (Beck, 1994) obliges to modify the current comprehension of the institutions, since not even the juridical forms, with their universal validity pretension, conserve this character of permanence, generality or justice.
It is talked about the green State, of green cities or sustainable cities, to refer to these changes that are not easy to establish due to the inertia of the economic development; besides, they imply the transition of a liberal State to a democratic green State (Eckersley, 2004). The liberal State favored the concentration of the decision taking in few social actors, those with economic power, experts or in the government, ignoring the society as a whole and alienating it from the decision taking. The environmental problematic, however, obliges to think again the concepts of democracy and legitimacy in the internal and international spheres, due to the affection or the latent risks in an activity. It also implies to think once more in the concepts such as the sovereignty, affection by the global character, trans-border or transgenerational of some environmental problems.
Integral approaches
approach of management by watersheds. In the second place, the called integration of the decisions, which implies the coordination of the competent authorities and organs, is a critical point in the effectiveness of the policies and actions to protect the environment.
The diffusion of responsibilities and functions is provoked by the inadequate approximation and sectorization of the urban problematic. The systemic approach that allows knowing the interaction of the systems and sub-systems present in the city favors this integration. The Agenda 21, proposal in the Summit of Rio,
was elaborated with a systemic approach; it talks about the urban sustainability subject, the principle of subsidiarity of the administrations and the closer to the citizen performance.
The role of the local authority in the urban management
The urban environmental problematic is located spatially, that is the reason why the urban management has to be done locally, although the highest levels of the government act complementarily, attending the shared responsibility principle.1
the local or regional approximations are the adequate for solving the urban problematic and the local authorities play a very important role in the design of the sustainable cities. The urban problems are related to the way of living of the citizens, with the ordering of the human settlements, with the planning of the soil uses, the transport, as well as the closest problems, such as the management of residuals, the water supply and the quality of the air or the need of public spaces. In Mexico, with a centralizer tradition, the function of the local authorize has been underestimated, attracting the functions to higher levels to make more efficient the governmental performance, but not all the functions must be done by the national authorities or by the government exclusively.
1 In Mexico, from the Secretaría de Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales y Pesca (Semarnat, Ministry
of Environment, Natural Resources and Fishing, federal level) content is being given to the urban
sustainability, where authorities such as the Procuraduría Federal de Protección al Ambiente (Profepa,
The article 115 of the General Constitution of the United States of Mexico establishes that the municipalities are the base of the territorial, political and administrative organization, with juridical personality and autonomy to manage their patrimony; they have the regulatory jurisdiction to regulate "their matters" and guarantee the "civil and local" participation. The functions they perform and the public services under their charge are those that directly affect the life of the citizens:
1. Potable water, drainage, sewerage, treatment and disposition of residual waters.
2. Public lightning.
3. Garbage removal, recollection, transfer, treatment and final disposition of wastes.
4. Markets and supply centers.
5. Cemeteries.
6. Slaughter houses.
7. Streets, parks and gardens and their equipment.
8. Public security, in the terms of the article 21 of the Constitution; municipal preventive police and transit.
9. The others the local Legislatures determine according the territorial and socioeconomic conditions.
always from these local instances, through regional or metropolitan coordination figures; so that there is not a decided process from the top, from the state governments of the federal government. This means that the municipalities must assume their constitutional attributions and to coordinate regionally,2 so that the
exception is the exercise of a higher level when the goals can only be reached by means of the intervention of other government levels (subsidiarity principle)
The urban-environmental planning
The urban planning has been at the margin of the environmental, being functions of different organisms and dependencies, even when the plans include the reference to the coordination, there are still some de-coordinated performances to be seen. In the environment subjects, the integral perspective cannot be left aside, (theory of the ecosystems and postulates of the ecology), the sectorial and regional plannings can be more effective, but they have to be effectively coordinated, even when it is about a specific problem.
The sustainability is not understood in the same way in the different cultural spheres; at the same time, the specific characteristics of a territory are different, so that the urban-environmental development programs solve specific problems. So, many of the urban plans focus their sustainability objectives on the regeneration of degraded zones or the recovery of public spaces and green zones, when these have been abandoned. Examples of this constitute the Revitalization Strategic Plan of Bilbao, the transformation of some forgotten and dangerous zones of Valence or the recovery of the Seoul natural surroundings. In Third World cities, the social pressure is strong and is tightly liked to the territorial occupation and the services the environment provides, there are also the environmental degradation problems that are approached when they are too notorious. The urban sustainability development strategies, therefore, are different in different contexts.
Further the coordination, which is a recurrent subject in the urban studies, the urban planning has to keep in mind the issues of gender equity, adjusting the spaces, activities, transportation, in sum, the functioning of the city, to the needs
2 For example, the Secretaría de Desarrollo Social from the Mexican federal government (Sedesol,
Ministry of social development, in charge of the management of the Habitat program) promotes a
of a large part of the population, as women and immigrants (foreign and national), for whom development opportunities and mobility should be offered; in a way that in this efficiency are included the social justice criteria.
Another of the aspects to be considered in the city planning must be the vulnerability before the risks generated in the city or the global ones that affect it, avoiding future social and environmental disasters. In Mexico, a fifth part of the population live in high zones in danger of floods and in the centre zone of the country is concentrated a large part of the human settlements and the economic activities. Mexico City's periphery is a zone of high social and environmental vulnerability, it presents problems associated to the climatic variations such as landslides, floods or shortage of water supply, many of these urban areas are above aquiferous mantles, with a pollution potentiality; but also there is an interrelation with the rural zones. All these factors must be included in the territorial, urban and urban planning with an integrated perspective, and not through three different and not coordinated planning. It is a reality that the soil policy is not far from the environmental policies.
Participative processes
A democratic State implies the participative decision taking. Nowadays, the integration of the environment in the policies, the decision taking, in the daily life, obliges to the change of many of the normative categories, of the State functions, of the consideration of the civil society, of the role of the private initiative and further the representative democracy, start to emerge demands for more inclusion, experiences of environmental management that are not exclusively done by the administration and the need of a re-proposal of the modernity, of the institutional and juridical schemes and the social performance.
Concepts such as 'participation', 'information' or 'democracy' take validity and new concepts such as 'governing', which has allowed articulating the legitimacy with the decision taking, making it rest on the consensus of the social agents. So, 'environmental governing' (Eckersley, 2004) refers to a participative government system, that in the social sphere find a fertile soil since its own spatial dimension refers to those aspects that directly affect the citizens and the reason why they feel motivated to demand this participation.
of the city (Cuervo, 2005). So that that is it refers to the existence of participative spaces and of consensus and accepted decisions by its addressees.
The democratic principle implies the decentralization of the decision taking towards a level that is more efficient in the achievement o the urban sustainability (subsidiarity) and the participation of all the directly or potentially affected, locating here the legitimacy (effective exercise of the citizenship).
We have to keep in mind that in order to being able to participate there must be previous conditions that allow it, such as reliable, complete, systematized information and to guarantee the access to it with demanding and responsibility mechanism, so that a change is generated in the individual and social conscience. The participation is not reduced to expressing previous opinions that can be considered or not by those who take the decisions, rather, to participate in the decision taking implies a transit from a representative democracy to a participative and deliberative democracy, or agreement and acceptance from the larges number of affected or involved people.
If there is not a local government facilitator or promoter of the civilian participation, this participation can be presented as an anomaly or a demand before the lack of participative spaces (social movements). The reflexive participation is oriented to this participation to be a normal process, and as it was mentioned in previous lines, previous institutional reforms are necessary that guarantee the right to the environmental information in order to practice the civil rights.
Cultural and social changes
The conformation of an urban ecologic conscience that modifies the current human-nature and city-nature relation (Magnaghten and Urry, 1998), as part of a global world, must be another of the goals of the urban sustainability (Castells, 1998). These are common proposals from the sustainable development approach as from the deep ecology, even if the former is implies the satisfactions of human needs as a previous step that allows worrying of another kind of more existential needs, and in the latter there can be seen egocentric characteristics, placing men as one more species within the ecosystem; both imply the existential questions of "who am I" and "where am I going" of the human being, whose responses are outlined from the values and demands that the city where they want or would like to live imposes (Gore, 1993).
Since the city is considered as a shared experience, it was emphasized in the existence of common interests that are determinant and that limit or condition the urban change. The values are considered as post-modernist. The post-modernity is understood as that modernity that has a critical view of itself (Brand and Thomas, 2005), in which three aspects are object of criticism: the idea of rationality, particularly the instrumental rationality from the scientific point of view; the idea of history as a lineal and coherent development of the civilization, with Eurocentric postulates, and the idea of progress funded in the trust of the rational action of the society as producer, by itself, of welfare and self-realization, so that rejects explanations with global validity, at the same time that debates the subjects of the diversity, difference and discontinuity.
The absence of this ontological safety Giddens (1990) talks about, that puts the human being in uncertainty and distrust situations regarding a world that he controls no more, makes the inhabitants of the modern world vulnerable; and the cities, these spaces where they live, stop giving that safety (Beck, 1996) as a consequence of the industrialization. That is why, the sustainable city is that which is livable and allows the integral development of the human being.
Conclusion: the sustainable city guarantees the
inclusivity
Bibliography
AGUILAR, A, and I. Escamilla, 1999, Problems of megacities: social inequalities,
environmental risk and urban governance, UNAM, Mexico.
ALEXANDER, D. 1996, “Biorregionalism: the need for a firmer theoretical foundation”, en Trumpeter,University of Waterloo.
ATKINSON, A., 1992, “The urban biorregion as sustainable deveolpment paradigm”, in
Third World Planning Review, vol. 14, num. November 4.
BAKER and McCormick, 2004, “Sustainable development: comparative understandings
and responses”, N. Vig and M. Faure, in Green giants? Environmental policies of the
United States and the European Union, The MIT Press.
BALBÓ, M., 2003, “La ciudad inclusiva”, in La ciudad inclusiva, Cepal, Chile.
BARROCH. P., 1988, Cities and economic development, from the dawn of history to the
present, University of Chicago, Chicago.
BECK, Ulrich, 1994, Risk society: towards a new modernity, Sage Publications, London.
BECK, Ulrich., 1995, Ecological enlightenment: essays on the politics of the risk society,
Atlantic Highlands, N.J., Humanities.
BECK, Ulrich., 1996, “La modernidad reflexiva”, in J. Beriain et al (comp.), Las consecuencias
perversas de la modernidad, Anthropos, Barcelona.
BERG, P., 2005, http://www.bioregionalismo.com/analisis/BergBioregionalismo Definicion.html
exchange of goods and services, or activity or human beings concentrator space. The effective integration of the environmental considerations allows more human spaces, a wider social development, an exposition from the social point of view, the reconstitution of the nature by the change of collective and individual consumption patterns, and a more harmonic economic development with the environment.
BOOKCHIN, M., 1995, From urbanization to cities. Toward a new politics of citizenship,
Casell, New York.
BORJA, J., 2000, Ciudad y ciudadanía. Dos notas, UAB, Barcelona.
BORNE and Simmons, 1978, Systems of cities, reading on structure, growth and policy,
Oxford University Press, New York.
BRAND, P. and M. Thomas, 2005, Urban environmentalism. Global change and the
mediation of local conflict, Routledge, Canada.
CAMPELL, S., 1996, “Green cities, growing cities, just cities? Urban planning and the
contradictions of sustainable development”, in Journal of American Planning
Association, num. 62, 3, Proquest.
CASTELLS, M. and J. Borja, 1997, Local y global. La gestión de las ciudades en la era
de la información, Taurus, Madrid.
CASTELLS, M., 1998, “La era de la información. Economía, sociedad y cultura”, vol. 2,
in El poder de la identidad, Alianza Editorial, Madrid.
CROSS, M y R. Moore, 2002, Globalization and the new city. Migrants, minorities and
urban transformations in comparative perspective, Palgrave, New York.
CUERVO, L., 2005, El falso espejo de la ciudad latinoamericana, Cepal, Chile.
DÁVILA, J., 1997, “Enlightened cities: the urban environment in Latin America”, in H.
Collison, Green guerrillas. Environmental conflicts in Latin-American and the
Caribbean, Black Rose Books.
DOBSON, A., 2000, Green political thought, Routledge, London.
ECKERSLEY, R. 2004, The green state. Rethinking democracy and sovereignty, The MIT
Press, Cambridge.
ECKERSLEY, R., 1992, Environmentalism and political theory: toward an ecocentric
approach, State University of New York, Albany.
EDER, Klaus, 1996, Thesocial construction of nature, Sage Publications, London.
EHRLICH, Paul, 1972, The population bom, Pan/Ballantine, London.
FERNÁNDEZ, R., 2000, Gestión ambiental de ciudades. Teoría crítica y aportes
metodológicos, PNUMA, México.
FERRY, L., 1992, The new ecological order, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
GIDDENS, A., 1990, The consequences of modernity, Polity, Cambridge.
GOLDSMITH, Edward et al, 1972, Blueprint for survival, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
GORE, A., 1993, Heartht in the balance, Ecology and the human spirit, Plume, USA.
GUDYNAS, E., 2002, “El concepto de Regionalismo Autónomo y el Desarrollo Sustentable
en el Cono Sur”, E. Gudynas (comp.), Regionalismo en el Cono Sur, Coscoroba
Ediciones, Montevideo.
HARDOY, J. y D. Satterthwaite, 1987, Las ciudades del tercer mundo y el medio ambiente
de la pobreza, Grupo editor latinoamericano, Argentina.
HAUGHTON, F. y C. Hunter, 1994, Sustainable cities. Jessica Kinsley Publisher,
INGLEHART, R., 1997, Modernizations and post modernizations. Cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies, Princeton University Press, New Jersey.
INOGUCHI, T, E. Newman y G. Paoletto, 1999, Cities and the environment. New
approaches for eco-societies, The United nations University Press, USA.
KASARDA, J. and A. Pornell, 1993, Third world cities. Problems, policies and prospects,
Sage, London.
LEZAMA, J. L., 2004, La construcción social y política del medio ambiente, El Colegio
de México, Mexico.
LIGHT, A., 2002, “Restoring ecological citizenship”, en Mynter and Taylor, Democracy
and the claims of nature. Critical perspectives for a new century, Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers Inc.
LUKE, T., 2002, “The people, politics, and the planet: who knows, protects, and serves
nature best?, Mynter y Taylor, Democracy and the claims of nature. Critical perspectives
for a new century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.
MAGNAGHTEN, P. and J. Urry, 1998, Contested natures, Sage, Great Britain.
MARTINO, D., 2005, Bioregionalismo: Introducción a los conceptos y alternativas
para América Latina, http://www.bioregionalismo.com/analisis/Martino
BioregionalismoConcepto.html.
MASLOW, A., 1992, Motivación y personalidad, Ediciones Díaz de Santos, Madrid.
MEADOWS et al., 1972, The limits to growth, Pan, Londres.
POTTER, R., 1990, “Cities, convergent, divergent and Third World development”, en R.
Potter y A. Salau, Cities and development in the Trhird World, Mansell, Great Britain.
RUBIN, CH., 2002,”Civic Environmentalism”, Mynter y Taylor, Democracy and the
claims of nature. Critical perspectives for a new century, Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers Inc.
SATTERTHWAITE, D., 1998, “¿Ciudades sustentables o ciudades que contribuyen al
Desarrollo Sustentable?”, in Revista de Estudios Demográficos y Urbanos, num. 37, vol.
13, num. 1, Jan - Apr.
SCHUMACHER, E., 1973, The small is beautiful, Abacus, London.
SPROUT, H. and M. Sprout, 1978, The context of environmental politics. Unfinished
business for America’s third world century, the Universitu Press of Kentucky, Kentucky.
UNIÓN EUROPEA, 1990, Libro verde sobre medio ambiente urbano, Bruselas.
UNIÓN EUROPEA, 1994, La Carta de las ciudades europeas hacia la sustentabilidad,
Bruselas.
UNIÓN EUROPEA, 2005, Informes sobre las ciudades sostenibles destinado a las
autoridades locales, Bruselas.
UNIÓN EUROPEA, 2006, Estrategia temática para el medio ambiente urbano, Bruselas.
VALENZUELA Aguilera, A., 2003, Más allá del funcionalismo: sustentabilidad urbana
en América Latina, LASA, Texas.
WESTENDORFF, D., 2000, “Sustainable cities and views of southern practitioners”, in
D. Westendorff, From unsustainable to inclusive cities, UNRISD, Switzerland.
YOUNG, O., 1994, “The Problem of scale in human/environment relations», in Journal
