The term “sustainability” is frequently used in various contexts, even though there is still not a full awareness of what it should represent…

The concept of “sustainable development” gained prominence due to the global movement that took place on March 15, 2019, in support of the solitary protest of a sixteen-year-old girl who skipped school every Friday to demonstrate in front of the Swedish parliament against the ongoing climate change. Her name is Greta Thunberg.

The term “sustainable development” was proposed by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, as the guiding principle of environmental policies in the report “Our Common Future” (better known as the Brundtland Report). According to the definition given at that time, development, to be sustainable, must meet the needs of the present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

This definition does not necessarily imply a link between economic development and the environment, although it is entirely reasonable to consider that the relationship between economic development and environmental conditions is the appropriate ground to apply and verify that definition.

Since its introduction, and especially in recent years, policymakers have been repeatedly urged to act in respect of sustainability. Unfortunately, the strong social will to alter current practices is not enough to provide a serious direction for public intervention because the deep ambiguities surrounding the concept of sustainability complicate the choice between alternative policies.

On Wikipedia, we read:

“Sustainability is the characteristic of a process or state that can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely.”

Capital has three components:

1. Artificial capital (buildings and infrastructure);
2. Human capital (science, knowledge, technology);
3. Natural capital (clean air, clean water, biological diversity, etc.).

Based on this general concept of capital, some argue that while the value of the global capital is preserved, one of its components (e.g., natural capital) can be spent, provided that another component (such as artificial capital) is increased by the same measure. This view is called weak sustainability and is frequently (and conveniently) adhered to by many politicians and businessmen in the name of progress.

Advocates of so-called strong sustainability argue instead that natural capital should not be further depleted because the consequences could be irreversible (desertification, diseases, climate change), and that the long-term impact on human life and biodiversity is a major unknown. The vast majority of scientists and ecologists support this latter view, but the debate remains open.

A proponent of the “weak” philosophy is Howarth, who interprets the constraint of non-decreasing utility as a principle that ensures future generations the opportunity to enjoy at least the same quality of life as the current generation, understanding sustainability as the condition that ensures that the expected utility of agents does not decrease over time.

The “strong” philosophy, instead, places particular emphasis on the problem of uncertainty surrounding environmental issues and the irreversibility of some processes of depletion of natural resources. Suggestions from this school of thought take the form of “precautionary principles” according to which it is necessary to safeguard natural heritage in the present against possible catastrophic effects in the future.

IN PRACTICE, THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE CONCEPT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT HAS BEEN INTERPRETED IN A VAGUE MANNER, BUT IT IS NOT VAGUE.

ITS FAULT LIES IN BEING BOTH APPEALING AND CHALLENGING AT THE SAME TIME.

TOO APPEALING TO BE PUBLICLY REJECTED, TOO TOUGH TO BE FULLY IMPLEMENTED. THE STAKE IS NOTHING BUT THE DEVELOPMENT MODEL OF MARKET ECONOMIES, BASED ON THE UNLIMITED GROWTH OF CONSUMPTION, WHICH IS NEITHER ECOLOGICALLY NOR SOCIALLY SUSTAINABLE.

A new development model is needed that questions lifestyles, especially in rich countries. This is what was indicated in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro based on the interpretation that the Brundtland Commission gave to the concept of sustainable development.

That this indication is not vague at all, but on the contrary strong and meaningful, is demonstrated by the political premise with which the President of the United States, George Bush Senior, presented himself in Rio de Janeiro: “Our way of life cannot be subject to negotiation.” In Europe and other Western countries, the approach is certainly less assertive than the American one, but perhaps also less clear. There is not a full awareness of the stakes (or at least it is not explicitly stated), and therefore there is never a coherent and definitive choice in favor of or against the idea of ecological and social sustainability.

A concrete example of unsustainability is the management of waste disposal in Italy: instead of reducing waste upstream and incentivizing and concretely implementing nationwide waste sorting, the focus remains on building and filling landfills and constructing new waste incinerators, two complementary and not mutually exclusive solutions as their promoters would have us believe.

A renewed awareness of the concept of strong sustainability is spreading across our country, in the form of protests and demonstrations mainly driven by the evidence that the development model imposed globally, in the form of “lifestyles” aimed at rampant consumerism promoted by an increasingly international cultural industry, is undermining the foundations of potential sustainable development at the local level, is seeking to irreversibly transform the land use of our territories rich in characteristics from which cultures derive that are somewhat “old” but should not be discarded for this reason, rather they should be recycled or better reused.

So, the watchword is glocal, increase knowledge of the different and maintain the specificities of territories and cultures for a global awareness of local characteristics.

Sustainable development is understood somewhat as the pursuit of prosperity, but not in the consumptive sense and with planned obsolescence of the “progress” that is presented to us, but rather in the sense of widespread well-being in a production chain inserted in a context of informed and responsible consumers.

What meaning, then, do we attribute to the concept of sustainability?

Innovation in production processes in the agricultural sector can contribute to responsible exploitation and sustainable development of our countryside, thereby promoting the sustainability of our cities in return.

Perhaps sustainability should be sought precisely in agricultural and rural areas rather than in cities, which by natural evolution are unsustainable. Reduce consumption primarily of land, water, and air, the resources that have allowed and continue to allow life on earth.

The desire for moments of healthy country life is increasing more and more; we are moving towards the “re-ruralization” of cities. During the Renaissance, the city was synonymous with civilization, the countryside with rusticity; leading people out of the countryside and bringing them into the city meant civilizing them. The city was the seat of knowledge, good manners, taste, refinement, the arena in which man fulfilled himself, and yet long before 1800 it had become common to assert that the countryside was more beautiful than the city.

In the nineteenth century, this became a widespread opinion, supported by the material deterioration of the urban environment, which in industrialized England materialized in the mythical London smog. The coal burned at the beginning of the modern era contained twice as much sulfur as is commonly used today; the smoke darkened the air, soiled clothes, ruined curtains, killed flowers and trees, and corroded building facades.

Highly harmful was the pollution caused to rivers by waste materials produced by industries operating in the city center; so much so that since the reign of Richard II, laws against Thames pollution were regularly enacted.

John Graunt in 1965 tells us that overcrowding made London notoriously unhealthy, but many other industrial cities were in little better condition, so it was inevitable that the plague would affect cities more than the countryside, and that the mortality rate would be higher there.

THUS BEGINS THE SPREAD OF THE CONCEPTION OF COUNTRY LIFE, A PLACE WHERE PEOPLE LOVED TO SPEND THEIR WEEKENDS AND SUMMER SEASON, AND WHERE ARISTOCRACY MEMBERS BUILT SPLENDID RESIDENCES.

A trend that is returning. The desire to preserve fields near the city for recreational use partly explains the numerous attempts to prevent the construction of new buildings around London until 1940 when Sir Patrick Abercrombie, a member of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), proposed and subsequently implemented the plan for Greater London, which imposed a green belt, a zone of respect assigned to agricultural production around the city’s periphery, averaging 11 km wide. Any urban expansion beyond this belt was rejected, and this is the current law known as the Green-Belt.

Religion also played a role in shaping this new taste for country life, described as a more sacred place than the city, and much of the literature of the period displayed what poet John Clare would call the religion of the fields, as St. Francis said, every leaf, every plant, every bush was a page of God’s book, proclaiming its power and goodness.

Many writers explicitly stated that the countryside was created by God, the city by man; in 1928 David Herbert Lawrence, after a period spent in Italy in his travel book called Etruscan Places, wrote: as beautiful as the countryside is, so ignoble is England made by man.

In industrial England, the passion for the countryside was intensified by the enormous development of London, but it was also reinforced by the phenomenon of the city’s deruralization, which became increasingly evident: the reduction in the size of urban gardens and orchards, the disappearance of trees and flowers, and the increase in construction density in response to population pressure.

In Italy, on the other hand, urban life had a very early but harmonious development with nature, so much so that the taste for vacationing (summer retreat in an elegant country villa) first manifested itself in Renaissance Italy, whose true essence lay precisely in recognizing the greatness of the countryside through a competitive action with the city.

Recognizing himself as a transformer of the places he occupied, the Renaissance man perceived the greatness of the surrounding territory without first having to damage it, as happened in England.

Thus not only the city, but also the countryside became the place of transformations, of the ingenious intervention of man who rises as the builder of his places.

It is from such a conception of human intervention that the great architects and urban planners of the Renaissance built villas and gardens, palaces and cities conceived as theatrical stages, and it is from a conception of constructed nature, from an architecture open to the countryside, that the landscape acquires visual dignity, as Lévi-Strauss rightly observed.

These are the values that also guide Walt Disney in the realization of the EPCOT project.

The worship of the countryside, in Italy as in England, did not prevent more and more people from moving to cities, but proportionally as agricultural activities within cities diminished, the idea that the most beautiful city was the one with a more rustic appearance and less cemented urban environment became increasingly widespread.

An example of this thinking is Ebenezer Howard, who in 1902 in Garden Cities of To-morrow declared that city and countryside must marry, thus promoting the ideals of garden cities and green belts; the problem of combining what the city can offer economically and socially with the physical environment of the countryside remains one of the dominant themes of urban planning today.

ONLY AFTER WORLD WAR II DID REFLECTION REGARDING GENUINE LIFE AND THE DAMAGE CAUSED BY MAN TO NATURE REACH ITS PEAK, WITH THE CONSEQUENT BIRTH OF ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNITED STATES, LATER DEFINED AS AN IMPORTANT REVOLUTION OF FEELING.

Environmental issues and respect for nature are at the center of media agendas in the new millennium; pollution of the food chain, deforestation, the reduction of agricultural areas in favor of industrial uses are now public domain.

A renewed environmental consciousness is stimulating a re-ruralization of cities from below, with the emergence of urban gardens and the rediscovery of traditional farming practices; young people are rediscovering the pleasure of a healthy country life and are increasingly pursuing careers in rural areas, jobs simplified also thanks to the advantages of technological development…

What type of technological development do you think could favor Ebenezer Howard’s dream in the near future, namely celebrating the marriage between Country and City? Can we look to the past to act in the present?