Development and the Sustainable City : The Limits of a Technical Approach

This book examines the city and its rapid growth, as well as the sustainability issues it poses, in several ways. First, there is a critical approach to development, as expressed by the concept of sustainable development. The city, as a complex system, primarily refers to questions of sustainability performance, which we believe to be capable of resolving problems and difficulties, even when viewed from a local perspective, and therefore from the point of view of the areas in which it must act.

Lastly, the issue of sustainability cannot be addressed without contemplating and concluding how acceptable it is to the populations concerned. All challenges raised by the urban character of the city are therefore linked to the more general question of how to define the concept of sustainable development and the sustainable city as a key area of concern.

Nadège Gunia is Senior Lecturer in Management at the Université Paul Sabatier, France. Her research focuses on cities at all scales and on global cost analysis.

Jean-Pierre Mignot is a researcher in Economic Sciences at the Université Paul Sabatier, France. His research focuses on sustainable development and its application to cities.

Marc-André Mequignon is a qualified architect and teacher-researcher at the Université Paul Sabatier, France. His research focuses on sustainable development and its applications in buildings and cities.

Isabelle Bouchardy is Senior Lecturer in Management at the Université Paul Sabatier, France. She specializes in public strategic management, service performance measurement tools and organizational change representation among other topics.

Yann Ferguson is a sociologist of cities and work at INRIA, France, a research associate at Jean Jaurès University and Scientific Director of the LaborIA research program. His research focuses on the instrumentation of human decisions in complex environments.