The institutional dimension of urban sustainable development

Abstract

Sustainable urban development consists of the intentional construction of a dynamic balance between the different logics of the private, public, social (or civil) and natural economic systems, through new organizational rules. These are the institutions. For a co-evolution of the four systems, they should not only ensure the conservation of natural and man-made capital, but also produce human and social capital. The production of social capital is the crucial issue for the sustainable development of cities without this form of capital, any strategy of institutional techno-modernisation (either decentralised or centralised) is bound to fail.