Concepts and definitions for a sustainable planning transition: lessons from moments of change

ABSTRACT

Urban agendas are struggling to challenge conventional planning paradigms, to improve environmental, economic, and social conditions in cities and meet sustainability goals. Such problems call for a critique of existing planning structures, which determine how planners and urban designers work, and thus condition cities themselves. While it is widely acknowledged that descriptive or paradigmatic urban concepts have multiplied in recent years and play a part in shaping development strategies, it is unclear that they reach the desired outcomes. This paper addresses this gap in the case of Portugal, seeking to compare two specific periods of Portuguese planning history: the 1960s and nowadays. For different reasons, both moments urged urban planners and designers to seek urban change. We retrieve key concepts and definitions to call for an observation of how planning at each of those time-periods approached social, political, environmental, and economic challenges. By observing such paradigmatic changes, we aim to identify their advantages and limitations for current urban policies, while gathering eventual lessons for spatial planning to handling the need for a sustainable transition.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• urban planning
• urban concepts
• planning paradigms
• Portugal

Acknowledgements

The authors thank LNEC for providing the access to archived documentation in the scope of ‘Project L’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [grant numbers POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016431, SFRH/BD/148556/2019, SFRH/BPD/117167/2016].