The Sustainable Management of the City: Examples of Implementation of Agenda 21 in Spain

After the Rio Summit (1992), the European Conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns -held in Aalborg in May 1994- ended with the drawing up of the Aalborg Charter, a document signed by 80 European local administrations. This Charter set out the main principles of sustainable urban management through the Local Agenda 21 programme, with public-private agreement and citizens' participation as key principles. The work methodology of the Local Agenda 21 is based on the drawing up of several indicators on economic, social and environmental aspects. There are increasingly more municipalities in Europe implementing Local Agendas 21 and developing them through analysis, action plan and monitoring stages. This essay studies the implementation in Spain of two of the most important issues addressed in Local Agendas 21: sustainable mobility and the recovery of degraded urban areas. EMERGENCE OF THE LOCAL AGENDA 21 During the 1970's, European society in particular, but also the whole Western World, became more clearly aware that the economic growth model based on an irrational exploitation of natural resources and implemented without any environmental control could not be maintained indefinitely due to its unsustainability in the medium term, as some clear effects of environmental degradation were already evident. Thus, the need of a new development model entailing a rational management of natural resources with strict environmental control and protection instruments was recognized. However, it was not until the late 1980's that the concept of sustainable development spread, first appearing officially in the Brundtland Report of the United Nations World Commission on the Environment and Development in 1987, which defined it as: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Taking this new concept as a starting point, there was an attempt to adopt a new alternative development model, which became a reality in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, better known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The Programme 21 came out of this summit. It was a comprehensive document which committed its signatories to boost sustainable development through the concepts of respect for the environment, social equity and durability (1).