Buku

Cities After Crisis

A study carried out by YouGov in 2019 revealed that the environment was con-sidered by Europeans as the second most important challenge that the European Union should face in the upcoming years (29 percent of those interviewed). Only immigration (35 percent) came ahead, although in some countries, such as France and Germany, the environment was the main concern (El País, 2019). Just five years earlier, in a similar poll, the matters that most worried European citizens had focused on economic issues like unemployment, financial stability, public debt, etc. The rise of the environmental issue to the podium of citizen anxiety has boosted the role of environmentalism as a spiritual guide for contemporary society. Slavoj Žižek stated: Ecology has all the “probabilities” of turning into the form of dominant ideology of the new century, a new mass opium that will replace deca-dent religion: it carries out the traditional main function of religion, that of proposing an unquestionable authority that imposes some limits. (Žižek, 2012, p. 83, translation and adaptation from Spanish by the author) In fact, environmentalism has all the ingredients of the great monotheistic reli-gions: an original sin (the damage of nature), a threat (the destruction of it), a penance (a more modest living), a doctrine (the discourse of sustainability), and a final reward (the salvation of the planet). Environmentalism also leads in the field of knowledge. An encompassing approach that spreads throughout philosophy, geography, economy, art, and so on, has taken shape around the discourse of sustainability, its doctrine. By connecting such diverse areas of knowledge, that approach has succeeded in weaving a metanarrative which has challenged to the limit the discourse con-structed by twentieth-century modernity around the idea of progress. Unlike the latter, which was articulated by the axis of science and technology, the former is driven by a moral principle, the “ethics of scarcity”, an ascetic vision of the world that is based on the exhaustion of natural resources. This book deals with the way in which the most recent version of such a metanarrative is colonizing the areas of urbanism and urban design. Its main argument is that, in the decade of the 1970s, the environmental crisis prompted a change in values which brought forth a way of life and an aesthetic option, which are referred to in the text as “eco-lifestyle” and “eco-aesthetic”. Both are rooted in the counterculture movements of the 1960s, many of whose val-ues were adopted by the baby boom generation. At present, such values define a vision of the world, the core principles of which are environmental matters, but that also entails ideological, cultural, philosophical, and economic positions. The infiltration of these principals in urbanism and urban design took place in the 1990s, although its spreading occurred during the second decade of this cent ur y. The f inancia l cr isis of 20 08 st rong ly in f luenced th is process. Paradox i-cally, the policies of austerity that neoliberal governments implemented were in tune with the originally progressive set of ideas of environmentalism. Either out of interest or out of conviction, both coincided in key matters, such as the commitment to frugality or citizen self-management. As a result, the vision of the world that had come as a response to a crisis of an environmental character was confirmed as the response to a crisis of an economic nature. Will such a ratification be repeated in the coming years, in this case as a response to the 2020–2021 health crisis? These facts and suppositions lend weight to the initial hypothesis of the book. The period that is known as “late-capitalism” has been marked by a sequence of crises: one environmental in the early years (1970s), one economic in the middle (2008), and a health crisis at present. The assumption is that the first of these crises triggered a process of reinvention of the city that was backed by the second crisis and again could be endorsed by the one caused by Covid-19. As mentioned above, what articulates this redefinition is the ethics of scar-city, which is becoming increasingly stronger, fueled by the perception that not only natural resources but also financial and healthcare ones are becoming exhausted.

Baca Juga:  Bioeconomy Shaping the Transition to a Sustainable, Biobased Economy

source :

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/52663

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