COMPLEXITY IN PLANNING SUSTAINABLE CITIES

In addressing the topic of the self-sufficient city, it is fundamental to start from the concept of sustainability and understand its theoretical and applicative developments that have been determined over almost thirty years of debate. The concept of sustainable development became established as an interpretative category of the contemporary world beginning in 1987 with the Brundtland Report. Sustainability presents itself as an appealing and affordable challenge, if rules, tools and models indicated, promoted and supported by public policy and international bodies are adopted. Sustainable development has, therefore, also become a point of reference for scientific debate in the field of urban planning by translating its interpretations to the sustainable city. Recently, many researchers have developed extensive studies on the spread of such terms in the scientific literature, capturing nuances of different meanings and even total or partial overlap. Analysis of the scientific literature shows that the attributes listed above are often used synonymously without highlighting their interpretive differences (de Jong et al., 2015). Although the attributes reveal an attempt to conceptualize aspects that have been progressively constituted in pursuit of the satisfaction of needs, and particularly the balance between environmental preservation, economic convenience, and social equity, the narratives on the idea of green, eco, smart, low-carbon, and biophilic cities often overlap and confuse. From the plethora of definitions of city, the “self-sufficient city” idea, sometimes has been mentioned but not always convincingly. A self-sufficient city means a city with a well-defined boundary within which the demand for jobs as well as resource conservation, the ability to produce clean energy for the local community is met. Guallart in his book self-sufficient city describes his vision of the self-sufficient city that assimilates with the technological and digital networks themselves. Cities are composed of buildings, infrastructure, blocks, neighborhoods up to hyperconnected cities. Each node is self-sufficient and contributes to the self-sufficiency of the system. In conclusion, it is useful to introduce the concept of complexity, which has also been running through our disciplinary field for some decades. Complexity changes the scientific context and induces us to think about the complexity not only of the object but also of the subject, the observer of the system.