Teaching through Design for Sustainability of the Built Environment and Heritage Awareness
HERSUS online Seminar scheduled for 18th and 19th of February, 2021
TITLE: Trees versus Heritage: Reflections of a strategy shaping dilemma in the case of the historic site of Pavlos Melas ex-military camp
Our civilization has spent many decades considering city (human environment) and nature as contrasting concepts. It took us too much time to realize the interdependency of the two factors and thanks to a major shift in social action towards the protection of the environment we now have to focus intensively on sustainable and resilient urban policies. That is an idea more or less embedded among political, administrative and knowledge communities at national and supranational formations. Policies and their funding back-up are intensively moving towards to green and carbon neutral solutions, cycling economy and climate resilience represented at the European level by the new and ambitious “Green Deal”.
According to these policies, cities and the man – woman made environment could and should be turned from a factor contributing to environmental crisis into units where problems can be resolved in a comprehensive and sustainable way through state-of-the-art science and most importantly through nature-based mentality and solutions. While this seems as a simple idea it presupposes a huge transformation in social, cultural, institutional and economic action-taking that involves many actors and issues on many levels. The presentation under the above title aims at highlighting such implications through the phase of decision making and strategy shaping at a municipal level and for the case of the historic site of the ex-military camp of Pavlos Melas. It focuses on the preconditions that shaped a “pseudo” dilemma among community members and political personnel concerning funding prioritizing of “green” interventions over the restoration of cultural heritage. It also discusses institutional, economic and technical factors that should be taken under considered in a process of overcoming analogous dilemmas.
PhD Paraskevi Kourti, Managing Director of Strategic Planning, Urban Development & Funding of Pavlos Melas Municipality (Thessaloniki)
Her knowledge fields include Cohesion Policy, Public Policy & Analysis, Local Administration, Strategic Planning, Urban Policies and Urban Planning.
