Sustainability and the Hegemony of Technique Towards a New Approach to Cultural Sustainability

Abstract

The existing literature of sustainable development originated from the classic understanding of sustainability based on the triple factors of economy, ecology, and society, suffers from extensive attention on the physical and the material aspects at the expense of immaterial and cultural ones. For example, in the field of the sustainable city, concepts like ‘green city’, ‘eco-city’, ‘zero-emission city’, ‘post-carbon city’, ‘resourceful city’, and ‘environmental city’, all underline material aspects of a sustainable life and focus on physical problems of energy, pollution, urban infrastructures, traffic, marketing, etc. This dominant ‘technical story line’ derives from this presupposition that new technologies are able to transform the built environment into sustainable functioning ecosystems and provide a sustainable collective life. This article reviews the existing predominant technical understanding of sustainability and explains how it follows the essence of technique. It argues that this hegemony of technique could be ameliorated by opening new perspectives to the question of sustainability and highlighting its nonmaterial, existential aspects. At the end this article formulates the concept of ‘cultural sustainability’ and suggests that an authentic sustainable development plan should provide a ‘cultural infrastructure’ through which a sustainable collective as well as an individual mentality for the inhabitants is achievable.

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