Culture and sustainability: How new ways of collaboration allow us to re-think our cities

• Autor(a) principal: Duxbury, Nancy
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10316/44061

In this period of “planetary urbanism”, it is alarming to see that artistic images of the future city are frequently dystopic, machine-dominated constructions that tend to erase the presence of people and social interaction from their scope[1]. In contrast, we observe the rising importance of building “people-friendly cities” in which collaborative social processes, diverse knowledge and perspectives, and citizen participation in city planning are central and highly valued. In this latter vision, grassroots organizations, networks and multi-sector partnerships constitute key building blocks for decision-making, taking action and ongoing monitoring and stewardship. And within this purview, new narratives and means of collaboration – new forms of sociability, exchange, cooperation, bonding and joint endeavors – serve to stimulate experiments and innovate new pathways to interlink the socio-cultural, economic, environmental and other dimensions of cities. Cities are strategic terrains where the multiple dynamics of globalization and technology are highly concentrated and where creative responses and innovations to these global dynamics are made legible in concrete, localized forms. Cities are thus central to the political-economic and socio-cultural knowledge systems, decisions and actions that must evolve to collectively address our unsustainable patterns of human relations with the planet and each other. The challenge of the future city is to re-think the city, our way of being, and how we design and enact new models, solutions and possibilities. This is simultaneously a local and global issue. Today, a wide range of “future city” research and design projects, consultancies and collections of crowd-sourced ideas are focusing on ground-level ways to build the future city and improve daily lives through imaginative alternatives to current urban challenges. Through networks of these actors, local actions on the spaces and practices of daily life are propelled by powerful imaginaries that others around the world are engaged in the same or aligned struggles, and opportunities are created for translocal learning, sparking new ideas and local adaptations. While art and culture tend to be found on the margins of debate among futurists, they are often highlighted in these information contexts focusing on concrete actions and social change, as a means to re-think our relations with our urban environment or as tangible projects that change our ways of living together. Experiences internationally have shown how artistic and socio-cultural activities have transformative power to build and change the meanings of the city, relations with the urban territory and connections with each other. Cultural artifacts, activities and narratives can recover, create and embody the symbolic resources and “marginalized wisdom” (Chan 2010) that individuals need to navigate the world around them and potentially become change agents for more sustainable living and urban development practices. However, culture’s place within contemporary urbanization processes to build more sustainable cities is not yet widely understood and thus insufficiently recognized.