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Sustainable Settlement Criteria, Eco-cities and Prospects in Central and Eastern Europe

Fleischer, Tamás (2004) Sustainable Settlement Criteria, Eco-cities and Prospects in Central and Eastern Europe. Project Report. Institute for World Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Science, Budapest.

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Abstract

Eco-city movements constitute a special segment of the sustainable settlement aspirations. Using the classification devised by Mark Roseland, the paper established that the eco-city movement aims at achieving a new, consistent urban solution, while trying also to implement this solution in practice. The movement itself can be traced back to the 1970s in Berkeley, California. Since 1990, a series of international conferences has helped those following this approach to exchange experiences internationally. Eco-city models make efforts to create comprehensive solutions, so that their approach amalgamates the social (community, cultural), economic and ecological dimensions. Implementing solutions in practice requires a manageable, people-centred scale and participants who handle it as their own objective. These conditions make eco-city initiatives territorially limited sustainability experiments. The last decade and a half have brought huge and rapid social changes in the CEE transition countries, with post-industrial views and pressures combining with a learning process for collaboration in a new market economy. There were overestimates of the degree of environmental consciousness to be found in transition societies. These expectations were belied. The main trends have been along the Western path, with replication of all its mistakes. Under these circumstances social lifestyle experiments such as the eco-city movement enjoy relative narrow support: very few followers and relatively little public interest in such experiments. Sectoral division is frequent within environmental (and other) projects. Although there are several movements, they are on the scale of an eco-village, rather than an eco-city.

Item Type: Monograph (Project Report)
Subjects: G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation / földrajz, antropológia, kikapcsolódás > GE Environmental Sciences / környezettudomány
G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation / földrajz, antropológia, kikapcsolódás > GF Human ecology. Anthropogeography / gazdasági-társadalmi földrajz > GF1 Settlement geography / településföldrajz
Depositing User: Tamás Fleischer
Date Deposited: 27 Jan 2013 15:36
Last Modified: 27 Jan 2013 15:36
URI: http://real.mtak.hu/id/eprint/4024

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