PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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10.3 Cross-Cutting Conclusions on “Sustainable” Decision-Making
10.3.1 Normative Challenges: “Interpreting” Environmental Sustainability
Many of the more daring, more radical and more original writings on transport
and environment to date are heavily influenced by post-modern ideas. They reject
mainstream environmental discourses as “totalizing” and instead advocate antiestablishment
ideals of situated, bottom-up knowledge and resource exchange. By and
large, this is good news for environmentally-minded planners and policy makers. The
bad news is that it is more difficult to establish normative meanings for abstract terms in
a postmodern world of multiple discourses. An ironic, regrettable dynamic has emerged
where many postmodern environmentalists simultaneously argue for an acceptation of
multiple, equally-valid viewpoints on “environment” and “development” on one hand
and a rejection of mainstream, eco-managerial approaches to sustainable (transport)
development on the other. Many avowed post-modernists thus in fact harbor rather
normative views on sustainable development, typically demanding the increased
protection of natural habitats, decreased motorization and tighter land use controls.
While I am very sympathetic to the idea of stricter environmental and development
norms, such an approach seems rather contradictory to me. One needs to try to be
consistent at the meta-theoretical, the theoretical and the prescriptive levels. Ensuing
definitions of transport and land use sustainability should offer as little room for
interpretation as possible. In my view, this underlines the need for empirically grounded
definitions of environmental sustainability, both at the local and at the European (or
global) level. Multiple viewpoints may be fruitful, but we have to establish certain