Building sustainable urban communities

Population growth and increasing social and cultural diversity in cities create sustainability problems and put stress on living together in a shared space. Traditional concepts of community, for instance in terms of ‘shared values’ or of ‘social cohesion’, are inappropriate to grasp the dynamics of community building in the light of sustainability issues. Community building is interpreted in terms of processes of social learning with a political character. This implies a critique of a communitarian agenda and of practices of participation without a view on power relationships. Instead, relevant processes of participation are confrontational and take into account the ways in which people already act in the places where they live. Here, citizenship arises as a shared responsibility for a concrete place. Three cases are analyzed from this point of view.status: publishe