Abstract
Two out of three Europeans live in towns and cities, and this number is (still) increasing. By attracting more inhabitants, urban areas are facing new challenges, particularly in terms of social and environmental issues. Meeting the challenges of increasing urban pressure may rest on citizens’ active involvement and cross-commitment promoted by local authorities, simultaneously exploring and respecting the social, cultural and heritage structures – the city’s identity. Some cities face more demanding challenges than others. There are other factors associated with the identity process, where the culture and history tend to be relevant indicators, especially in historic cities. Reinforcing the bonds of local identity may facilitate the citizens’ engagement in the common effort to build an environmental and sustainable city. The city of Guimarães faces such challenges. In this context, the European Green Capital Award, which yearly distinguishes a European city based on its environmental, economics and life quality efforts, encouraging best practices sharing, corresponds to certifying a certain city management paradigm.
This chapter intends to report on the perspectives of four areas, education, landscape, urban and natural environment and economics, towards the process and the implications of applying to the Green City Award and the challenge of sustaining and developing this new management model (environmental education of young adults and children being a key for the development and sustainability of a green city way of being). These perspectives were discussed by the authors at the roundtable held under the II World Congress of Environmental History (July 2014, Guimarães) and constitute the basis for this paper. The paper elaborates on these perspectives reviewing the history of the urban development of the city, exploring the concept of green city and the criteria established for the award of European green city, and also by exploring a novel methodology to read the history of a city by identifying changing patterns. The paper concludes that Green cities can be viewed as new management paradigm. A paradigm that is inclusive, integrated and cohesive of people the natural environment.
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Notes
- 1.
A collegiate church, from the Latin collegium means a non-cathedral church possessing its own charter of canons, headed by a prior subject to the bishop’s authority or independent from it and under the direct hierarchy of the pope. The Collegiate of Guimarães (Colegiada de Guimarães, in Portuguese) considered itself and from its origin nulius diocesis, therefore independent from the episcopal (bishop) authority and only subject to the Holy See for spiritual issues and to the Portuguese king for temporal issues.
- 2.
These were later named Candido dos Reis and Miguel Bombarda Avenues respectively, as depicted on the bottom of Fig. 20.2.
- 3.
Actually, the Municipality of Guimarães and the University of Minho, through its School of Engineering, formalized a partnership to implement the Campurbis Project, aiming at the urban requalification of part of the historic city through an urban campus in the historic center. With this strategic investment in knowledge, technology and innovation, the Campurbis Project emerged as an important component in the application of Guimarães to European Capital of Culture in 2012. The project was the predecessor to the Couros Campus as it is known now.
- 4.
Tallinn, Helsinki, Riga, Vilnius, Berlin, Warsaw, Madrid, Ljubljana, Prague, Vienna, Kiel, Kotka, Dartford, Tartu and Glasgow.
- 5.
Macedonia, Iceland, Montenegro, Switzerland, Serbia and Turkey.
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Agnoletti, M. et al. (2017). A Green City: Impossible Dream or Necessity?. In: Joanaz de Melo, C., Vaz, E., Costa Pinto, L. (eds) Environmental History in the Making. Environmental History, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41139-2_20
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