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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled Urban sustainability in the information age from 2010 by Manuel Castells published in the City, analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see the sustainable city in action and as a personal matter instead of being an abstract utopian ideology. This article is a transcript of a lecture and it investigates sustainability in urban, sociological and political terms as intergenerational solidarity.

Sustainability implies the fight for control over space and time. Space, in this understanding, means the space of places, a space of experience and a space where people organise their lives. This space is independent from the evolution and dynamics of the space of flows where most dominant functions and power are organised. So, place versus flows, though not necessarily eliminating the space of flows but to avoid it taking over the meaning, the function, the autonomy, ultimately the political capacity of decision-making in the space of places.

To characterise time is also a challenge. Castells constructed a new understanding in the information age for time: the timeless time, the annihilation of time. Thus, time can eliminate time. Meaning that there is no tradition, there is nothing, simply the moments and a huge patchwork of different sensations, feelings and images, like the video clips and images occupying our minds. This timeless time is in contradiction with the glacial time which is the slow motion of time in which nature and planet and the species live, and we measure it from the point of evolution. With glacial time, there is a connection across periods and generations, creating solidarity with our children, grandchildren and nature itself.

There is a cultural battle in time understandings. The glacial time can mean that we may be eternals collectively. The opposing understanding is that we are nothing in time, and in an instant everything, savings, pictures, ourselves, can disappear, therefore every minute needs to be used to enjoy. The battle of these two undermine the notion of sustainability.

Sustainability with these understandings can be approaches as something static or conservative. It’s not necessarily a satisfactory concept because we don’t want to conserve some of the things that happen in cities, so we need a dynamic sustainability which is both conservation and improvement leading to an enhanced quality of life including social justice. Thus, Castells proposed that the concept of sustainability, should not be simply the conservation or the preservation of the conditions of the reproduction of what it is, but an expanded reproduction, that addresses the issues of the new aspirations and corrections of illnesses of cities as they are today.

So how sustainability manifests in cities in the information age? There are three dimensions of sustainability: economic, social and ecological. Economic sustainability for cities in the information age means the ability to generate wealth and resources and to create wealth by increasing productivity and competitiveness of the city in a market environment, as the planet seems to be entire capitalist. Economic sustainability depends on two features: connectivity with networks and every infrastructure supporting that, and the stock and the renewal of the stock, human resources capable of creating added value in the information economy.

Social sustainability consists of many subdimensions: the ability to acknowledge plural identities which will increasingly characterize our cities and bridge them over. Acknowledging simply is not enough without creating the bridges. Another one is the avoidance of social exclusion. Social exclusion is not needed in the information economy but it is embedded in the logic of the system. The system can be very dynamic and very productive if it is at the same time constantly corrected to reconnect on other grounds. A third subdimension is human cooperation and competition within society. A deliberate policy of social mobilization against structural violence is also needed, not to mention sustainable governments within the information age. On the one hand, this is paralysis, on the other, it is powerlessness and the solution could be the decentralization of power and resources to create greater accountability and flexibility over control, adaptation and relationships.

Ecological sustainability means the fight against the apparently irreversible deterioration of the environment and of the quality of life, including nature in cities, reducing endless cities and undifferentiated suburbs. Additionally, environmental sustainability includes a systematic ecological filtering of all economic strategies. Environmental sustainability means that the cost-benefit analysis is part of the business plan of any economic strategy. Castell emphasised the importance of meaning of space in relation to mega cities. This is an idea of an agglomeration of activities and population which doesn’t have beginning or end and internal structures. There is no public sector, and its collapse leads to the increasing of the piece-meal nature of cities because there is no coordination, no authority, no public responsibility.

With these problems, cities are not so sure to survive, so the main problem for urban sustainability is the sustainability of the notion of the city in itself. It is possible to attack these negative processes to reinforce the trends that are pushing for sustainability, like strategic and flexible planning, regional planning. Peripheral centrality can also help: that is the centrality of each periphery until the point that you regroup the meaningful structure of the city. The net and telematic instruments can really help renew citizen participation to strengthen grass roots democracy and interactive democracy at the same time. Local governments are critical elements in re-establishing the legitimacy and efficiency of the democratic state. We should not give up the idea of the democratic state because that’s all we have, but it has to be shifted to the emphasis increasing towards local government.

Castell closed with the final criterion for sustainable cities: the consideration of children. For Castell, children suffer in many parts of the world. All this potential creativity, all the possibilities created have to be contracted with what is happening to the life of children. We are constructing the information age through the children, so the idea of a city to be safe, fun and open for children is where you could build most legitimacy and, at the same time the most vitality of life. So, what is a sustainable city? It is a city which will allow children to grow up happy.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Sustainability is intergenerational solidarity to create solutions for the now without jeopardising the future.
2. Sustainability has three main dimensions: economic, social and environmental or ecological sustainability
3. The truly sustainable city is where children can grow up happy.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How can we solve the tension between the glacial time and the urge to live in the here and now?
2. Is your city a sustainable city? Would you be happy to grow up in it? How can it be more sustainable?

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