Vitality And Requalification Of Cities: A Contribution To A Reconceptualization Of A Sustainable Urban Planning

The present study is focused on the city, as an urbanized space, thought and produced for and by man. It studies a notion of patrimony/ city that is beyond its architectonic and functional importance for it includes, forcibly, the human and humanized dimension, being this later vector the one that will grant it sustainability. Setting out from the will to contribute to the vitality of cities in the promotion of their requalification, we explored the viability of an interactive and mediatory instrument, which can be potentially useful to its management and planning. For doing so, we built measurable, objective but, above all, interactive parameters. This perspective, which is global and complex, claims the conjunction of the pedagogical approach, with factors of motivational capitalization and of the catalyzing of competences and abilities. It also casts a new look at the identification of opportunities able to vitalize the well-being of cities. Therefore, it is our belief that these are indicators of mediation because they aim at rethinking planning through a continuous exercise and systemic action in the intervention in potentially contentious spaces. Being our object of study “the places” in urban space, we built the concept of “entrepreneurial vitality”. We defined it based on the following three dimensions: (i) motivation, (ii) capabilities and (iii) opportunities. The conjugation of these three dimensions leads us to the notion of the degree of people’s capability, which, for us, will be greater (i) the better the motivational environment that structures the dynamic of places is, (ii) the better the factors that qualify and promote skills, capabilities and abilities are, so that they can be seen as social actors and agents and (iii) the more synergic the opportunities to catalyze the degree of participation in the several activities are, including the economic and political, which embody a community. In this reflection we started from an eclectic look at the critical field of social sciences regarding urban planning. Afterwards, we widened the perspective to show the importance of the articulation between analytical procedures and social intervention. We also plead for planning as a mediatory and relational practice in the creation of spaces that will enable social cohesion and convergence. This environment recreates the concepts of competitiveness and competences, here observed as spaces that materialize and instigate economic, social, political and cultural processes, whose interaction constitutes the core of sustenance for the sustainability of spaces.