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Hochschulseminar – Mythos grüne Stadt

Sustainability - A holistic concept
Félix Chiron, 23.02.2015

Sustainability is a new development goal but it remains complex to understand and it leads to many interpretations.

npsp.sa.gov.au

The sustainable development was first described in 1987 in Bruntland as “the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs”. It contains 3 aspects: Social, Economy and Environment and they are all three gathered into “sustainable development”.

This definition is the common goal for the whole world however each culture and society context has its own interpretation because of its own history and technology.

The holistic approach would aims to think sustainability as a global thing in order to reach a higher result. This idea would be reached with a high level of conscience from the society, that’s why we can say that all is in Human who has the key for a better future. In this sense, local culture takes place as contextual thinking and actions.

That’s what Jacques Chirac told in 2002, that placing Culture as the 4th pillar of sustainability would place human as the focus point in order to protect cultural diversity, defend biodiversity and go against technical superiority.

Surprisingly, the concept of culture was already implicitly there in the first definition when we see that “needs” and “state of technology” were linked to the three mains concepts. These are about culture of each society because they depend on History, Context, Country…

In this perspective, human being has to become the central point of the development, in each design people has to be involved to be able to respond in context. We have to redefine relationships between designers and users.

The actors for this “context sustainability” are all the persons (individuals, collectives or institutional) that can “think global, act local”.