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Problematising Sustainability: Overcoming Pitfalls and Inconsistencies in Urban Transformations Policies...
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Problematising Sustainability: Overcoming Pitfalls and Inconsistencies in Urban Transformations Policies and Planning Practices

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Urban and Rural Development".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2020) | Viewed by 21137

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Valeria Monno

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
DICATECh, Politecnico di Bari, 70125 Bari, Italy
Interests: planning theory; socio-ecological justice; urban democracy and governance
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue reflects on the role of sustainability in urban transformations. It adopts a critical point of view so as to give rise to debates concerning controversial and problematic issues underlying sustainability, and outline some crucial features of more democratic, just, innovative and ecological urban policies and planning practices. While being considered as a panacea and a guide towards ecological urban transformations, from a critical standpoint, current urban policies for sustainability have left the uneven socio-ecological dynamics underlying the planetary urbanization of everyday life fundamentally intact. The incorporation of this concept into visions, strategies, politics, policies and actions has consistently led to prioritize economic interests and intensive urbanizations over the conservation of vital ecological assets and the pursuit of social equity and environmental justice. Its use in urban politics has favored the depoliticization of the environmental discourse and weakened the democratic construction of alternative policies and practices of urban transformations.

This Special Issue asks: How can the transformative potential of sustainability be revitalized in the production of urban space? What should be changed in existing conceptual and evaluative frameworks of sustainability in order to enable them to originate a lively democracy, social equity, environmental justice and stronger nature-society ties? Alternatively, do we perhaps need completely different conceptions of sustainability, urbanization and policy making? Should we adopt a more relational perspective on sustainability and urban transformations?

Papers are expected to reopen the ‘black-box’ of sustainability both theoretically and through case studies which shed light on the interplay between theory and practice. They shall tackle a variety of crucial problems characterizing current urban transformations (such as climate change, migrations, mobility, social housing, public spaces and the ‘right to the city’, the revitalization of urban ecological assets, gentrification, expulsions) and explore emerging formal and informal, small or big, antagonistic, transitional and experimental theories and practices underpinning the production of urban space.

Prof. Dr. Valeria Monno
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Urban transformations
  • Governance and democracy
  • Strategies and spaces of political action
  • Formal and informal policies and planning practices
  • New conceptualization of sustainability and urban space
  • Social equity and environmental justice
  • Revitalization of urban socio-ecological assets

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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18 pages, 285 KiB  
Article
The Rise of Resilience in Spatial Planning: A Journey through Disciplinary Boundaries and Contested Practices
by Carlo Rega and Alessandro Bonifazi
Sustainability 2020, 12(18), 7277; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12187277 - 4 Sep 2020
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 4410
Abstract
Resilience has become a popular term in spatial planning, often replacing sustainability as a reference frame. However, different concepts and understandings are embedded within it, which calls for keeping a critical stance about its widespread use. In this paper, we engage with the [...] Read more.
Resilience has become a popular term in spatial planning, often replacing sustainability as a reference frame. However, different concepts and understandings are embedded within it, which calls for keeping a critical stance about its widespread use. In this paper, we engage with the resilience turn in spatial planning and we dwell on the relation between resilience and sustainability from a planning perspective. Building on insights from ecology, complex system theory and epistemology, we question whether resilience can effectively act as a ‘boundary object’, i.e., a concept plastic enough to foster cooperation between different research fields and yet robust enough to maintain a common identity. Whilst we do not predicate a dichotomy between resilience and sustainability, we argue that the shift in the dominant understanding of resilience from a descriptive concept, to a broader conceptual and normative framework, is bound to generate some remarkable tensions. These can be associated with three central aspects in resilience thinking: (i) the unknowability and unpredictability of the future, whence a different focus of sustainability and resilience on outcomes vs. processes, respectively, ensue; (ii) the ontological separation between the internal components of a system and an external shock; (iii) the limited consideration given by resilience to inter- and intra-generational equity. Empirical evidence on actual instances of planning for resilience from different contexts seems to confirm these trends. We advocate that resilience should be used as a descriptive concept in planning within a sustainability framework, which entails a normative and transformative component that resonates with the very raison d’être of planning. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Problematising Sustainability: Overcoming Pitfalls and Inconsistencies in Urban Transformations Policies and Planning Practices)
18 pages, 3207 KiB  
Article
Smart, Sustainable and Citizen Centered: A Network Analysis of Urban R&D Trends in Seoul, South Korea
by Bo Wang, Sang Do Park, Jong Youl Lee and Jesse W. Campbell
Sustainability 2020, 12(15), 5933; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12155933 - 23 Jul 2020
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 3886
Abstract
Although it is now recognized that place matters for urban development policy, most case studies focusing on particular cities tend to adopt a high-level perspective that imperfectly captures the full spectrum of context-relevant urban development issues. This study applies semantic network analysis to [...] Read more.
Although it is now recognized that place matters for urban development policy, most case studies focusing on particular cities tend to adopt a high-level perspective that imperfectly captures the full spectrum of context-relevant urban development issues. This study applies semantic network analysis to a corpus of 13,852 accepted R&D project proposals on issues related to the urban development of Seoul, South Korea. Through our analysis, we highlight important research trends and also make connections between these trends and the policy orientation and priorities of successive mayoral administrations over a period of 16 years. Although the results suggest that there is significant overlap between policy orientation and scientific research activity, the interests of research scientists cannot be reduced entirely to political priorities. The study contributes to the literature by fusing the place-based approach to urban development studies with the computational content analysis methodology. We raise several questions for future research, including questions about the relationship between policy priorities, scientific research, and academic research. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Problematising Sustainability: Overcoming Pitfalls and Inconsistencies in Urban Transformations Policies and Planning Practices)
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19 pages, 266 KiB  
Article
The Quest for an Adequate Test: Justifying the Sustainable City as an Order of Worth
by Meg Holden
Sustainability 2020, 12(11), 4670; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114670 - 8 Jun 2020
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2816
Abstract
The sustainable city represents an ideal of good and just living that has inspired urban development work for at least 25 years. While criticized by many for its scientific, social and political vagueness, the concept of the sustainable city has nonetheless continued to [...] Read more.
The sustainable city represents an ideal of good and just living that has inspired urban development work for at least 25 years. While criticized by many for its scientific, social and political vagueness, the concept of the sustainable city has nonetheless continued to frame material and political efforts in urban redevelopment. From a perspective grounded in the pragmatic sociology of critique, this article takes this phenomenon as evidence of an international movement to generate not just political pronouncements or technical fixes, but a new order of worth, from the concept of the sustainable city. After presenting the pragmatic sociology of critique and the application of this body of social research as it pertains to better understanding sustainable urban development, we reflect on the factors that challenge the acceptance of the sustainable city as an order of worth, or as a mode and manner of justifying significant decisions in the public domain, recognizable and understandable to a majority. For efforts to create the sustainable city to justify themselves, socioculturally, in this way, the work demands a clear test of worthiness. This article illustrates the search for an adequate test through a review of two distinct efforts to generate new systems of assessment for sustainable building projects, and points out the contrasting nature of these two tests: one which aims to be accessible to thoroughgoing public debate fit to transform a context toward a political discourse of urban sustainability as well-being; the other that interprets the need for a test as affirmation of expertise related to the unfolding climate emergency. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Problematising Sustainability: Overcoming Pitfalls and Inconsistencies in Urban Transformations Policies and Planning Practices)
24 pages, 2431 KiB  
Article
Learnings from Local Collaborative Transformations: Setting a Basis for a Sustainability Framework
by Pedro Macedo, Ana Huertas, Cristiano Bottone, Juan del Río, Nicola Hillary, Tommaso Brazzini, Julia M. Wittmayer and Gil Penha-Lopes
Sustainability 2020, 12(3), 795; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12030795 - 21 Jan 2020
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 5230
Abstract
The complexity of the sustainability challenge demands for collaboration between different actors, be they governments, businesses, or grassroots movements, at all levels. Nevertheless, and according to previous research, many tensions and obstacles to partnership still exist and results are far from meaningful. By [...] Read more.
The complexity of the sustainability challenge demands for collaboration between different actors, be they governments, businesses, or grassroots movements, at all levels. Nevertheless, and according to previous research, many tensions and obstacles to partnership still exist and results are far from meaningful. By investigating potential synergies, our purpose is to define a sustainability framework to promote better collaboration between community-based initiatives and local governments, in the context of transformation. Specifically, the research aim presented in this paper is to harvest learnings from existing collaborative experiments at the municipal level. As a starting point and using exploratory literature review concerning areas like policy (e.g., public administration) or business and management research, we propose a ‘Compass for Collaborative Transformation’. This heuristic device can support the study of these sustainability experiments. We also introduce a method to map the governance imprint of these collaborations and to provide a ‘proxy’ of transformative efforts. We then present and discuss results from 71 surveyed cases happening in 16 countries in America and Europe, comparing distinctive frameworks involved. Finally, we consider the preconditions of a framework to improve these local collaborations—namely the capacity to support joint navigation through transformative efforts, facing high levels of uncertainty and complexity—and present ongoing efforts to codesign a new sustainability framework. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Problematising Sustainability: Overcoming Pitfalls and Inconsistencies in Urban Transformations Policies and Planning Practices)
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9 pages, 211 KiB  
Commentary
Challenges of Governing Off-Grid “Productive” Sanitation in Peri-Urban Areas: Comparison of Case Studies in Bolivia and South Africa
by Denise Silveti and Kim Andersson
Sustainability 2019, 11(12), 3468; https://doi.org/10.3390/su11123468 - 24 Jun 2019
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 4213
Abstract
Globally, peri-urban areas are experiencing rapid urbanization. Conventional infrastructure development is generally slow to catch up and the lack of basic sanitation in peri-urban areas is a constantly growing—and often overlooked—problem. There are examples where these challenges have been addressed by off-grid “productive” [...] Read more.
Globally, peri-urban areas are experiencing rapid urbanization. Conventional infrastructure development is generally slow to catch up and the lack of basic sanitation in peri-urban areas is a constantly growing—and often overlooked—problem. There are examples where these challenges have been addressed by off-grid “productive” sanitation systems that provide opportunities for recovery and reuse of valuable waste stream resources. However, governing such systems and ensuring effective municipal policies can be challenging since the socio-economic contexts in many peri-urban areas are transforming rapidly. A comparison of two initiatives in Bolivia and South Africa offers valuable insights for introducing functional off-grid “productive” sanitation systems relying on urine-diverting dry toilets (UDDTs) in peri-urban settlements. Findings suggest that acceptance of the UDDTs by households largely rely on consistent awareness raising and capacity building, in addition to adaptation to the local needs and creating a sense of ownership over the toilet system. Changing perceptions of what constitutes an aspirational toilet, and developing services for waste management collection, seem to be crucial components for ensuring long-term use and functionality of the UDDTs. Investments and further innovations for upscaling of resource recovery systems are needed to make these systems cost-effective and logistically viable. To attract these additional investments, it will be crucial to assess the societal economic benefits of off-grid “productive” sanitation compared to centralized wastewater systems. The comparison also highlights that off-grid sanitation requires a clear division and coordination of roles and responsibilities among different authorities, in order to transcend political difficulties that emerge where these boundaries overlap. Thus, integrating clear boundaries into urban planning policies, and including informal processes in communities, play an important role in improving governance of basic services in peri-urban areas. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Problematising Sustainability: Overcoming Pitfalls and Inconsistencies in Urban Transformations Policies and Planning Practices)
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