Taking urban sustainability seriously: A call for radical “small” approaches to urban change

In the last decade of planning and policy making, radical or experimental approaches to the organisation of society and the way we plan, design and manage cities have been rare. What has instead evolved during recent years is a firm consensus that sustainable societies and cities can be achieved within the frames of our current unsustainable path (economic, organizational, consumerist patterns) through small steps such as biking lanes, light-rail, densification strategies and growth boundaries.

Critical researchers, such as Erik Swyngedouw and Roger Keil, argue however that this “light greening‟ of current society and cities cannot reach deeply enough to fundamentally redirect the destructive dynamics of today’s urbanism. They are not enough to handle the threats posed by climate change, uneven global development, and growing socio-economic segregation (see this blog’s post Green Building alone won’t save the planet). Instead they call for visions and initiataives of alternative futures and more deep-reaching approaches that can help change the structural problems of our unsustainble society. As Zev Naveh well said it “our present environmental crisis has to be recognized and resolved as an all-embracing cultural revolution”.

Therefore attention needs to be paid to the growing number of initiatives of social movements, communities, and non-traditional practitioners that challenge today’s predominant social order and the ways in which we traditionally plan, design and manage our cities.

In this blog I try to share alternative practices that have the potential to creat big difference in our cities. Some of these can be seen in posts such as the ones about Park(ing) Day, Space Hijackers, The Bottle city project, or the practice of Atelier d’architecture autogérée. Although most of these examples and their initiatives and projects are small in scale, I believe that it is through these small bottom up initiatives that we can create the structural change that it is needed. Initiatives that do not only change the way cities are physically, but that also dig deep and create a change in the way people and communities think, how they organize, how they use the city and what they value in it. The accumulation of many of these small initiatives can help us create a shift to our current unsustainable path. Therefore a call for much more radical “small” approaches to urban change.

parts of the text are based on: Green Futures Symposium: Form Utopian grans schemes to micro-practices