La Sostenibilidad en Cuestión: La Ciudad Después de la Ciudad

Abstract

To tackle sustainability problems from a bioecological perspective, focused on environmental conflicts and the impacts caused on the biosphere and the ecosystems, has been the prevailing approach in the analysis, recommendations and apothegms on the environmental matter during the last 40 years. There’s no doubt this is an important issue.
However, within the framework of the rights of nature, diverse and biased interpretations have been supported about the state of depredation and plunder the Earth has been submitted to during a long period -always depending on the dominant perspective of the hegemonic discursive bloc and the resolution of the struggle for power of that period.
From a human perspective, focused on the socio-environmental conflicts, most considerations about social issues have resulted aloof when trying to stablish the structural causes of the impacts that the production processes and the capitalist development -based on the Leonard’s linear equation: extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal- stamped on nature itself.
Hence, it is fundamental to separate what’s accessory from what’s structural. For this, it becomes essential, both methodologically and epistemologically, to tackle the study of the environmental issues through a comprehensive analysis, which implies acknowledging the complex and random nature of this phenomenon.
In summary, focusing on the production processes of urban space can be revealing, given the obvious interphase produced there-in, manifested in the antinomy of growth-sustainability.
The planet is mostly urban; therefore, global sustainability depends on urban sustainability. Exploring this possibility will be the roadmap leading the way across these words.