ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters developed three major areas of concern: the relation between sustainable development and the globalization of capital, the spatialization of this relation through urban environmental agendas, and the sensibility of citizens to environmental issues through the social and cultural experience of space. We intimated the relations between these three fields through key analytic concepts such as the ecological modernization, neoliberal urbanization and social regulation, whilst at the same time indicating the logical inconsistencies and practical limitations of urban environmentalism in both social and ecological terms. Whilst lack of results is frequently the cause of frustration and dismay among planners and environmentalists, our interest has focused on what might be called an evident ‘success’ of urban environmentalism: the political currency of ideas on the environment, especially in transforming the propositions within which space is debated, appropriated and administered. The aim of this chapter is to provide some theoretical order to these themes.
