Cities for us: engaging communities and citizens for sustainable development: Symposium UPE 12: Book of Proceedings

• Autor(a) principal: Marques da Costa, Eduarda
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Ferreira, Carlos, Simões, José Manuel
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/47671
• topic: Sustainable development; Cities; Communities; Citizens

The city is an imagined and drawn space, a densified and volumetric landscape. But it is also a living space, and is memory, work and leisure, tradition and innovation, technology and capital markets; an asymmetric mosaic of wealth and misery, abundance and deprivation, inclusion and exclusion; a place of arrival, both to migrants and tourists, and for people seeking new opportunities. The city is, first and foremost, people! To build a city of citizens -a city for us -is a purpose and a greatest responsibility of a collective effort including elected officials, administration, technicians, business and citizens. This is why public participation in urban planning processes -from diagnosis to strategy and the intervention proposal -should become a more effective practice. Sustainable spatial planning and urban design are keys to human well being. We need a new vision of cities and regions for sustainable urban life after human-cause or natural crisis. Many of the decisions made today will have long-term consequences, and we are certain that we must strive towards creating more inclusive and healthy cities, that are more green and sustainable, more innovative and smart, with greater support for leisure and tourism, economically more robust, and supplying more and better jobs, with inclusive governance models, opening a new era where cities are more livable, effective, competitive, attractive, learning, equitable, and resilient.