Sustainable cities:
Public authorities and local initiatives

 Issue editor: Annick Helias

Editorial
François Valérian

Sustainable cities in Europe: Conceptions, issues and implementation
Lydie Laigle

The economic regulation of sustainable development in urban areas can be approached by evaluating a city’s “metabolism” and its global costs, thus taking into account indirect, deferred and displaced effects. However the share to be paid by public authorities and by private interests is still an open question. An economics of sustainable development is yet to be invented that comprises the whole economic cycle and all operations in an urban system.

Shifting issues: A turning point in European urbanism
Cyria Emelianoff

Sustainable urbanism is not free of contradictions and deviant effects that shift issues. Examples of this are worsening environmental inequality and the ineffectiveness of eco-technological advances that do not engage lifestyles. In a context of rapid global changes, the issues are shifting as feedback comes in. What used to be unthinkable — a city not using fossil fuel, for instance — is now on the horizon of local politics.

Understanding and controlling urban metabolism and the environmental imprint of cities
Sabine Barles

Every city has a set of “imprints” that, despite changes over time in their dimension, form, localization and depth, accurately reflects its “metabolism” and, thus, its inhabitants’ lifestyles. It also reflects urban — but also national and international — socioeconomic, political and technical structures.

Hanover, an example of urban development crowned with success
Hans Mönninghoff

Sustainable development reaches much farther than conservation of the environment. The city of Hanover wants to prove that reinforcing ecology, especially in energy matters, does not impair economic development, since the two are advantageous to each other.

Measuring sustainable development: Experiences and questions
Yvette Lazzeri

Globalization, the upsurging new economy, communication technology, changing lifestyles, new time patterns, demographic changes and mutations in rural areas are all modifying the spatial distribution of people and human activities. Sustainable cities must work out their position in a context of openness and territorial competition. Though unable to significantly influence global social and economic changes, the parties involved do have to foresee such changes and take them into account in their strategies.

Rennes, the archipelago city and its corollary, the city of proxemics
Jean-Yves Chapuis

We are facing a twofold challenge. It is necessary to both save cities and call into question sprawling “urban archipelagoes”. What has become of the “city that invents itself” (in Yves Chalas’s words) with which fellow-citizens increasingly identify? What about the “exurbs”, which professionals have long considered with contempt by pointing out that peripheral areas did not belong to “the city”?

The land supply
Vincent Renard

The supply of land, a major problem in urban policy, underlies the making of a city, including “sustainable” ones — regardless of the meaning given to this general, fuzzy word.

Controlling movements and sustainable cities
Jacques Morel

Much has been said about the daily trips made in vehicles and, too about sustainable cities, but very little about controlling such movements. How to do so as part of a project that fits into a sustainable development policy?

Preserving nature in the city
Philippe Clergeau

Sustainable development necessarily implies balancing economic, social and environmental objectives. Nowadays, urban systems are calling for a strong reinforcement of environmental measures in pursuit of the objective of improving the quality of life. At stake are a reduction of man-made nuisances and, too, an increase in the presence of nature, which is expected to render many ecosystemic services.

At the origins of the sustainable city: Improving the urban environment in France from the mid-19th to mid-20th century
Stéphane Frioux

Even in a France that was more rural than neighboring industrialized lands, concern for the urban environment had emerged by the end of the 19th century. Thanks to it, living conditions improved during the first half of the 20th century.

Conclusion: The sustainable city — toward a model of joint action
Cyria Emelianoff

When political issues shift toward “environmental justice” and the question of living with each other and with other forms of life on earth, political involvement entails material changes in both environments and lifestyles. For this reason, it is more promising to help inhabitants take part in managing their lives and their neighborhood’s ecological development, to become the authors of their environment, far and near, than to lay down blueprints for a life with a prefabricated sustainability.

 
Miscellany

Zoonoses, the surveillance of animal diseases and the crossing of the species barrier
Marc Savey

The diseases passed from animals to people, an important subject in the work done by Pasteur and Koch, have become major topics in public health.