A natureza como suporte da cidade sustentável

Abstract

The city has in its agenda a series of issues that challenge its own sustainability. Due to an asymmetrical urban growth in the last decades, mainly supported by the economic and financial system. Today’s reality demands a closer look over the impact that the urban fabric has over nature - its live support. The industrial revolution plays a key role in understanding today’s reality, due to the economic, social and environmental transformations that took place along the 19th century, that reflect its matrix in contemporary cities and societies at a global scale. Many thinkers of that time reacted to the way that the city was developing and to the life conditions of the least favoured classes. Some of them developed alternative solutions to the matrix of the cities of that time, where nature played a key role. The answer to today’s urban questions lies on a strategic vision over local public policies, putting in place the instruments for urban regeneration under the principals of sustainable development, to mitigate the negative impacts of energy dependency, urbanization effects, the automobile and consumption levels that today play a key factor in the planet’s load capacity. (…) Sustainable development is defined precisely as a way to change the paradigm in which our societies are formatted, supported by four pillars : the economy, the environment, society and the culture. These pillars can only be activated by a strategic vision that integrates, a governance model where the natural capital and immaterial, prevails over the material capital, with respect for diversity. A strategic vision is essential to activate, with clarity and creativity, different tools for planning and land management, enabling the principles of sustainability in order to find operational component methodologies that extend in time and can be ripened by a continuous processcontributing for the purpose of a sustainable development (…).