The redemption of the commons. Contributions to urban planning from territorial intelligence and ecological economics.

The redemption of the commons. Contributions to urban planning from territorial intelligence and ecological economics.

[SHS:HISPHILSO] Humanities and Social Sciences/History, Philosophy and Sociology of Sciences

Territorial intelligence

urban planning

ecological economics

sustainable development

quality of life

Shine and heat was my first impression of Dolavon, then the contrast of its canal: shadow and water where children play. An intense and pleasant contrast. The town offers the harmony shown by those places where human voracity has been somewhat curbed. It is not a perfect place, no. It is just a place where the ends have not lost sight of each other. This canal is the consequence of a long and tough learning of coexistance with the environment, wich started at the end of the 19th century when a handful of Welsh people and a Spanish storekeeper crowded together in a remote Patagonic spot. This was how, from a small mail office, a general store and a willpower that verged on stubbornness, a town would be born, Dolavon: the "Bend of the River". Providing services to travellers between the valley and the plateau provided sufficient resources and incentives to consolidate the settlement, wich would later include a smithy and a bakery. Meanwhile irrigation companies where created in the area that multiplied the results of the learning about how to sow on a territory with scarce precipitations. Through generations the valley was dyed green... and with the crops also grew its population. In this city located in the Province of Chubut, part of the Argentinian Patagonia, about 3,500 people coexist today. Old small farms were divided into lots to create Dolavon's urban zone, which responds to those actions instead of a planned layout. The railroad, that today is just a scar on the ground -by far shallower than that left by the dismantling of most of the country's railroad infrastructure in the national spirit of the Argentineans-, constituted one of its limits; the canal naturally became the axis of the urbanization. Aproximately sixty years before the first settlers arrived to Dolavon, a few hundred kilometers away from Wales, an Englishman, William Forster LLoyd, described the situation of common pasture grounds where individual incentives created disgrace for everyone involved. The idea that structures this writing is to find some parallels between that story and Dolavon's present, and to explore the options that new knowledge makes available to us to avoid that tragedy from repeating itself.

Gurman, Leopoldo

Conference proceedings " Territorial intelligence and culture of development "

8th International Conference of Territorial Intelligence. ENTI. November, 4th - 7th 2009

2009-11-07

ENG

conference proceeding

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00534215

http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/53/42/15/PDF/salerno09-gurman-en.pdf

Salerno

Italy