Prof., Cultural sustainability in urban management

Ref.: 336
Key theme: 04 Abstracts for which the authors did not indicate a key theme
Date of reception: 05/12/2008

AUTHORS (*Main author)

SO, Jin Kwang * (Viet Nam) - Hanoi Architectural University

ABSTRACT

In no other era than the last quarter of 20th Century, sustainability in human civilization has been open to doubt more. Industrialization process had been thought to make human beings more prosperous forever, and scientific development has been regarded as to enable human society to solve, mitigate or overcome those problems brought about by human activities. In addition, new technology has been always expected to create `Better World' for the next generations. But some new technology, very often, worked contrary to our expectation, and even threatened the only one human nest-the earth. Up to the last quarter of 20th Century, there had been no time when various ethnic groups had common interests each other about their destination for the future. In this context, sustainable development (hereafter SD) began to intervene in all the issues in human society.
However, SD of human beings cannot be realized only from the environmental point of view, focusing on physical conditions of human livings mainly. There may be some other necessary conditions for human beings to survive in changing world. Among them, this paper pays attention to the cultural context of urban management for each ethnic group to hand over its identity to the next generations. Just biological survival cannot be identical with human beings without any connections between the past and the present for the future. Time dimension woven with spatial dimension should be required for human beings to be on this globe for the future.
In this lineage, this paper aims at exploring the requisites for cultural sustainability of human civilization from urban management point of view. Some problems up to date for SD of human civilization will be reviewed and examined. Urban management is concerned about the methods and processes to handle changing construct. There can be some good conditions for cultural sustainability of human beings. These good conditions will be investigated from urban management point of view. The scope of urban management in this paper is approached rather more broadly than that of urban development. Cultural contexts can be categorized into two like tangible context and intangible one. In conclusion, this paper is expected to suggest the possible policy tools to realize cultural sustainability in urban management from intangible context as well as tangible context respectively.

REFERENCES