The Urban village
A charter for democracy and local self-sustainable development
edited by Aberto Magnaghi
Foreword by Edward Goldsmith


Publisher: Zed Books
Language: English
ISBN: 1 84277 581 2



Buying information

The book is available at ZedBooks:
http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/



Presentation

When first published in Italy, this book sold out in months. It stirred much media interest and was widely welcome across the political spectrum and scholarly circles. Now available in English in an update version, The Urban Village introduces the concept of self-sustainable local development, based on each locality's territorial specificities and traditions. After exploring the significance of local development in all its political, social and technical dimensions, Professor Magnaghi sets out a concrete vision for a new urban regional "utopia". He proposes, in addition to conventional indices of wealth and income, other criteria of social progress - including quality of life, social solidarity, and the development of non-commercial caring relations. Only when local communities value their local heritage, he argues, and build themeselves on a basis of local economic self-government, will they be able to resist the colonization and marginalization that globalization so often inflicts on them.
At a time when the idea of the local, the demand for genuine decentration capable of building effective community-level self-governing institutions, innovative democratic experiments, and ecological sustainability are all attracting more public interest, Alberto magnaghi's blend of theoretical thinking and practical proposals is likely to prove a source of inspiration for politicians, planners and citizens wrestling with the challenge of building urban and rural communities.

Alberto Magnaghi is Professor of Land Use Planning at the University of Florence and leader of a nationwide research project to explore the importance of Italy's local heritage for endogenous development in the country's various regions. Besides many academic publications, he is the author of The Charter for a New Municipium that was presented at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2002.

Contents

Forewor
preface by Edward Goldsmith

Introduction

PART 1 the territorialist approach: towards local self-sustainable development

1.The metroplis form and deterritorialization

Liberaton from the contraints of territory: a short-term and barely sustainable historical event
The morphogenesis of the contemporary metropolis: hypertophy and topography
Fordization and deterritorialization
From the factory city to the post-Forsdist city: continuous deterritorialization

2. Beyond the metropolis form
Is the metropilis form irreversible?
The new deveopment-related poverties
The rebirth of the territory

3. The territory is not a beast of burden
The functionalist approach or the theory of ecocompatibilty
The envirnmentalist and biocentric approach

4. The territorialist approach

Caring for the human environment
Interpreting long-term identity
Enhancing the identity of places
Making local society
From sustainability to sustainabilities

5. Local self-sustainable development
"Development": from economic growth to well-being
"Local": place as heritage
"Self-sustainability": reuniting dweller and producer

6. The agents of change
Opposing energies
Bottom-up globalization: from a network of protest to caring networks of local societies
The social composition of the new movements: from class consciousness to place consciousness
The inurgent city: towards the public space of indifferences
New community practices
Local administrations and governing the economy: from marginality to centrality
Possible convergence between institutional policies and social practices

7. The statute of places
Territorial heritage and resources
Definitions of "the statute of places"
Identity of place: description, interpretation and representation
Drafting the statute
An initial model of the statute and its parta
A planning process scheme for local self-sustainable development

PART 2 Vision of a strategic scenario
Promise

Concrete utopia and stratecig scenarios
Recovering the role of utopia
The proposed strategic scenario
Scenario and planning

Project fro open spaces: the landscape of a new farmers
The territorial ecosystem
Territorial ecosystems and agriculture
The producers of the landscape and environment

Cities of villages, cities of cities, network of cities
Redefining the limits of the city
Producing complexity
Establishing the primacy of a city dor dwelling
From the metropilitan city to the city of villages
From the metropolitan region to the urban bioregion
An example of the territorialization of rare services: the regional university system
The central role of places with high territorial and environmental territory
A hill civilization

The New Municipium
The municipalities' new tasks in the shift towards self-goverment
The Charter for a New Municipium
Alternative globalization: new institutes of democracy, ethical economics, the new city-rural world alliance and fair trade between regions
Stages in the consistent process
The actors in the constituent process: ethical and fair trading versus the commercial and profit-making economy
Appendix: Charter for a New Municipium

Towards the construction of the urban village: from the hypermarket to marketing networks for local products
from the supermarket to the hypermarket: a further step towards unsustainable development
Is the road from the supermarket to the hypermarket irreversible?
Small retailers as a driving force for local development

Local projects and the South of the world: from co-operation to the development of the fair trade
Changes in approaches to co-operation
New co-operation, new problems

The local project: summing up a political vision
Making local society
From class conscousness to place consciousness
The statute of places: a "constitutional" pact to develop the territorial heritage
New statutes of citizenship
The new municipium to "govern" the local project
Towards bottom-up globalization

References
Index