L’utopia della sostenibilità Sustainable Utopia

How can humanity overcome the challenge of the environmental crisis only improving measures to efficiency technology? Is the concept of environmental sustainability just a slogan generator, which stimulate a Western asphyxiated market trying, at the same time, to contain the unstoppable growth of the countries economy in the developing world? Can a redundant socio-economic structure, since it is based on consumerism, find a balance through processes of exploitation of resources from 'cradle to cradle'? What is the role of architects and designers, as manipulators of space and metaphors modelers, in the fight against climate change? Is a sustainable society a sort of utopia and, as each utopia, can it be transformed into a frightening dystopia? This text offers some thoughts on the effects of the application of the sustainable development principles in the activities of territorial transformation at different scales - urban planning, architecture, design – considering the impossibility, for Western society, to achieve a state of equilibrium with their environment only by following a path of technological efficiency. If utopias – as perfect societies - are born as a result of a crisis situation, it is impossible, however, from this position, locate a socio-economic structure in which utopia and dystopia not overlap dangerously. In fact, the 'perfect society' based its perfection on economic and moral principles, whose motivations, which are arguable but not always clearly demonstrable, can not be shared. One kind of humanity in equilibrium with its environment seems today just an utopia and, as such, its achievement is exposed to dystopian visions. In an 'environmentalist' society, occult impositions to consumerism (consuming induction) are balanced by much more obvious impositions, replacing the current use of non-renewable raw materials with transformative processes that do not outsource the impacts, which must be compensated in the process.