[Bilimsel Haber] Towards the Sustainable City? Challenges and Strategies in Urban Environmental Policies after 1950

[Gonul Pultar]

*Towards the Sustainable City? Challenges and Strategies in Urban 
Environmental Policies after 1950, Main Session (M20) at the 10th 
International Conference on Urban History, Ghent (Belgium), 1-4 
September 2010 *

	

	

	
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Since the World Summit of Rio 1992 cities are called upon to direct 
their development and to transform their material metabolism in ways 
which would promote their sustainability and reduce their environmental 
footprints. But already since the late 1960s/ early 1970s environmental 
protest questioned major tendencies of urban development such as 
motorization, suburbanization, pollution of rivers by urban and 
industrial waste waters, air pollution due to traffic and industry, 
exhaustion of resources etc. Whereas the focus of environmental 
policies, which derived from this protest was predominantly local and 
regional, the recent commitment to sustainable development is global in 
perspective and local in action. The imperative to pursue sustainability 
as a general goal constitutes a massive challenge for urban patterns and 
mechanisms of problem-solving which had developed particularly in the 
wake of networking the city since late 19th century, the setting up of 
large technical networks for the provision of water, the discharge of 
waste water, the delivery of energy for lighting, power and transport 
within the urban setting.
The goal of this session would be to study, how cities, predominantly in 
Europe and North America, have reacted to this challenge, how they have 
attempted (or not) to redirect their development paths towards the goal 
of reduction of environmental impacts and, more recently, 
sustainability, well understood that sustainability is a flexible 
concept and not a set norm. We do not want to assess the success or 
failure of cities in this process, rate their “environmental or 
sustainability efficiency” but find out, how the imperative of becoming 
more environmental friendly or sustainable was locally mediated, 
translated and appropriated in local discourses, integrated within older 
and more long-term agendas and projects. Who were the actors, the 
driving forces in taking up the challenge, reflecting on local practices 
within the concept of sustainability or environmental protection? How 
did these discourses relate to older urban discourses on environmental 
protection or even to classical discourses on public health from the 
late 19th century? Were (and are) sustainable policies developed in 
continuity with former environmental ones, or did (and do) they 
constitute a rupture in relation to them? How was the place and role of 
‘nature’ (both as nature as opposed to the city and nature in the city) 
envisaged and reshaped? Which obstacles and impediments within the 
‘hardware’ of a city’s infrastructure or the ‘software’ of local 
institutions and traditions were identified as being most difficult to 
transform in the pursuit of sustainability? And how can the relation of 
the global and the local be determined? Does the particular mode of 
reaction to and coping with that challenge in a city show an ‘intrinsic 
logic’, which is locally specific but common and shared with reaction 
and coping patterns in other fields of that urban polity?
Paper proposals are invited which should address the reaction of cities 
towards this challenge, including the emergence of urban environmental 
policies also before the goal of sustainability gained such public 
priority. Papers might discuss the whole field of environmental policies 
in a city or also particular policies (e.g. water, energy, etc.). 
Comparative papers, within a nation or with transnational focus are 
particularly encouraged. Proposals for papers are welcome from scholars 
of any discipline dealing with environmental policies within an urban 
dimension and following a historical perspective of analysing 
longer-term processes and developments. The session organisers aim to 
achieve a regional as well as disciplinary balance and welcome proposals 
from senior as well as younger scholars.
Papers will not be read at the conference but have to be submitted in 
full length by end of July 2010. At the session each participant will be 
given c. 10 minutes to present the main lines of argument.

Proposals should include
- Abstract of not more than one page indicating the main line of 
argument, problems addressed, cities covered and time period analysed.
- Short cv including some of the relevant publications, affiliation etc.
- Email and postal address.

If you are interested in contributing to this session, please contact 
before formal submission to the conference website either of the 
organizers, Dieter Schott (schott at pg.tu-darmstadt.de) and Sabine Barles 
(sabine.barles at orange.fr). Formal proposals must be submitted through 
the main conference website http://www.eauh2010.ugent.be/paperproposals 
between 1 October and 1 December 2009.

Prof. Sabine Barles
Institut Français d’Urbanisme
Université Paris 8
France
sabine.barles at univ-paris8.fr

Prof. Dieter Schott
History Department
Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences
TU Darmstadt
Germany

schott at pg.tu-darmstadt.de

	Dieter Schott
History Department
TU Darmstadt
Germany
+49-6151-162044
+49-6151-163992
Email: schott at pg.tu-darmstadt.de <mailto:schott at pg.tu-darmstadt.de>