Genevieve Ferone, Sustainable development director
"A sustainable city is an economically attractive city"
Genevieve Ferone, Sustainable development director
What will it take to make cities more livable?
Like the human body, a city is a living organism with a complex metabolism. Rehabilitating a city and making it more livable starts with a precise inventory of its resources, that is, a map of its fluids and flows. This is a prerequisite for making the right tradeoffs between the economic value and the ecological interest of so-called environmental measures and for obtaining the best leverage in terms of appeal.
Now that cities are in competition with one another, the notion of appeal is vital: every euro spent must help create jobs and improve quality of life. So the decision to create a green space, for instance, must also be looked at in terms of utility and cost-effectiveness.
Let us be objective: without a solid economic model, no solution, even the most ingenious, can succeed.
Surely there is a risk of conflict between economic and sustainability interests? How do we move past this?
Sustainable development can require stark tradeoffs between divergent interests or concerns, between the long and short term, and in some cases between the world we dream of and reasonable financial responsibility.
That is why, for example, eco-neighborhoods cannot be the blanket solution, even though what they are doing is interesting. We have to shift our action to another scale.
Today, even though major research organizations are working on comprehensive urban planning schemes, no city anywhere in the world has been able to propose a comprehensive development plan yet. We are just beginning to carry out multifactor analyses of cities.
What about community consensus-building/joint action?
It is essential, but tough to implement. Only a minority is aware of what is at stake and is ready to take action.
Reaching people and trying to change habits takes a sense of ownership of an area. The best scale, the one on which the community is fully aware of quality of life and most sensitive to human factors, is the neighborhood.
However, as we have seen, it is on too small a scale. In its role as a teaching tool, the Internet can help create this sense of ownership.
Are local Agenda 21s well suited for community consensus-building and joint action?
They are interesting planning and dialogue tools that are part of a quality assurance process. However, we have to be more ambitious and proactive, especially when it comes to the vital issue of reconciling land use and various urban functions (work, housing, leisure), both in terms of space and time. We need to think increasingly in terms of mixed use, of stepping up the shared use of city resources.
Definition A local Agenda 21
A local Agenda 21 is a regional participatory process that drafts a plan of sustainable development actions involving public, private and association stakeholders. Agenda 21 was a United Nations recommendation at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. It is a voluntary commitment on the part of the local community, not a mandatory process. The word agenda means "what we need to do" in Latin.
To facilitate the deployment of local Agenda 21s, France's sustainable development ministry has prepared a reference framework to achieve the following five objectives: tackling climate change; preserving biodiversity, environments and resources; ensuring social cohesion and mutual regional and generational support; improving conditions for all of the world's people; and basing development on responsible production and consumption patterns.
