The city to come: Critical urban theory as utopian mapping

Sustopia or Cosmopolis? A Critical Reflection on the Sustainable City

“…This means that the assessed literature is not exhaustive but rather channels towards a perspective grounded in these sources. Through a Critical Theory lens [13][14][15][16][17] the first part of the essay sketches a general historical development of the city-nature relationship and the place of citizens and citizen empowerment and identifies some general trends in conceptualising the sustainable city. In the second part, a number of contemporary sustainable city projects have been reflected through a heuristic framework provided by Cultural Theory [18][19][20][21][22][23][24] as pioneered by Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson [21,25] and developed further by other scholars, mainly in the field of sustainability science [19,20,22,24,[26][27][28][29].…”

“…Examples of such unravelling can be seen in the identification of the (ancient) unequal development between city centres and the periphery [69], spatial polarisation [59], marginalisation and exclusion [13] or access to facilities and resources such as healthy food or green spaces [70,71]. In the words of Eduardo Mendieta, "all critical urban theory tears at the Potemkin façades of neoliberal megapolises of affluence and megaurbs of destructive accumulation to unveil the realities of squalor and dispossession so that we may claim our place in the properly human polis ( [14], p. 444)".…”

“…Science is often instrumentally employed to legitimise the power of the regime [62][63][64], but it can also be employed to question its legitimacy and appropriateness. Critical theorists the 'classical' critical thinkers as well as the recent ones emphasise the exploration of democratic and emancipatory alternatives of organising social capacities and human-nature relations [14,16].…”

“…In Plato's Cosmopolis, the centre of the city represented the highest order of the moral hierarchy (high reason, represented by the governing 'head' located in the citadel), whereas towards the fringes and outside of the city, the lower moral 'faculties' (or limbs) were represented, from sentries to farmers and wild, uncivilised nature outside the city walls. Achieving the highest 'Good' becoming a Philosopher King, or a little later for Aristotle, realising one's true human potential [14] was possible only through the symbolic and social geographies embedded in the structural and physical geography of the Polis [11,14,30,33,34].…”

“…Therefore, this essay provides an exploration of the question how the ideal of a sustainable city can be realized while taking into account the inherently ambiguous character of the city-nature-people relationship. Parting with the notion of Sustopia can evolve into a more pragmatic conceptualisation of the 21st Century sustainable city; a conceptualisation that includes the chaotic and dynamic processes of a globalising world and does justice to human well-being as a fundamental value that can be advanced through critical citizenship [12][13][14]. In order to guide the conceptualization process, the city-nature-people relationship will be explored through the lens of the ancient notion of Cosmopolis.…”