Eclosion in urban society: urban disorder or an environment

Abstract

The paper draws attention to the fact that over recent years and more swiftly so during recent months, Spain has witnessed an eclosion in the number of appeals for meetings and articles and books on the 'urban environment' and sees this as answering to, first, a growth in the expressing of environmental problems the upshot of urban activities showing an expansion greater than that of the population that gives rise to them (for example, the generation of waste material [fig. 1]), second, a fall in the environmental standard of city life born of an over exploitation of inherited city amenities/structures along with a gradual abandoning of the city by just such activities as were once most economically efficient there, these now preferring supposedly better suburban alternatives and third, from a spread in socially pathological phenomena which are the outcome of the economic crisis that came in with the New World Order. Further to this and of more importance, the paper speaks of the inability to inspire any hope in the rehabilitation of the city as it is of the system of wealth accumulation in force, here making mention of a recent work by Ramón Fernández Durán. The paper sees all the fore-going as having led to the city's being understood as a problem to be solved through rehabilitation to which end the standard of living seen as the sum of a series of social, economic and environmental quality factors is held to be a touchstone. This, when coupled with the putting into effect of the economic policies of the EEC aimed at remedying the major environmental problems of Spain's cities is here held to account for this upsurge of interest as well as a call for a defining and a practicable articulating of policies intended to improve the urban environment.