A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Sustainable development of rural areas - Methodological issues
Sustainable development is both a global and local challenge to managing change. It requires integrating social, ecological and economic objectives and system requirements that are generally expressed in terms of maintaining some suitably defined aggregates of social, ecological and economic capital. Apart from global environmental constraints, these aggregates are mainly determined at the local scale. This is of particular importance for the development of rural areas that more directly depend on environmental resources than urban economies, and that are characterised by a semi-natural to natural landscape which provides amenity and recreational values to the urban and rural population. Yet, the threat to rural areas is that they are under pressure of urbanisation. This goes along with land use change and socio-cultural change, and thus with alterations of the regional ecological and social capital. This results in trade-offs between short-term goals of development and long-term goals of sustainability. On the one hand, the development of rural areas depends on available resources, current institutions and technologies, and the competitiveness of local goods and services. On the other hand, sustainability calls for maintaining the regional capital stock (local economic, social and ecological assets) over time. An integrated approach is required to address these trade-offs. To this end, we provide a transdisciplinary synthesis of research on rural development, and present a concept for improving rural development strategies toward achieving long-term goals of sustainability. Apparently, sustainable development is the key concept for integrating the above issues. It does not need each asset to be conserved. Rather, sustainable development requires that conservation and change are balanced through an adaptive process of optimisation across the various system goals. This implies a development path which is constrained by the boundaries of the regional opportunity space for sustainable development. These boundaries ...
Sustainable development of rural areas - Methodological issues
Sustainable development is both a global and local challenge to managing change. It requires integrating social, ecological and economic objectives and system requirements that are generally expressed in terms of maintaining some suitably defined aggregates of social, ecological and economic capital. Apart from global environmental constraints, these aggregates are mainly determined at the local scale. This is of particular importance for the development of rural areas that more directly depend on environmental resources than urban economies, and that are characterised by a semi-natural to natural landscape which provides amenity and recreational values to the urban and rural population. Yet, the threat to rural areas is that they are under pressure of urbanisation. This goes along with land use change and socio-cultural change, and thus with alterations of the regional ecological and social capital. This results in trade-offs between short-term goals of development and long-term goals of sustainability. On the one hand, the development of rural areas depends on available resources, current institutions and technologies, and the competitiveness of local goods and services. On the other hand, sustainability calls for maintaining the regional capital stock (local economic, social and ecological assets) over time. An integrated approach is required to address these trade-offs. To this end, we provide a transdisciplinary synthesis of research on rural development, and present a concept for improving rural development strategies toward achieving long-term goals of sustainability. Apparently, sustainable development is the key concept for integrating the above issues. It does not need each asset to be conserved. Rather, sustainable development requires that conservation and change are balanced through an adaptive process of optimisation across the various system goals. This implies a development path which is constrained by the boundaries of the regional opportunity space for sustainable development. These boundaries ...
Sustainable development of rural areas - Methodological issues
Hediger, Werner (author) / Dorenbos, Annemarie (author) / Lehmann, Bernard (author)
1998-01-01
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Sustainable development of South Africa's rural areas
| British Library Conference Proceedings | 2004
The Future Ahead? Sustainable Development for Rural Areas
| Online Contents | 1997