Man as the measure of all things: a limiting approach to urban regeneration?

Urban planning and change in the last century has been guided by concepts of Modernity rooted in the Age of Enlightenment that placed the needs of "rational man" at the core of human endeavors of all kinds. Yet, rather than leading to aesthetically beautiful cities characterized by sustainable resource utilization processes, the anthropocentric approach to urban and economic development has created global problems of depletion of natural resources, massive pollution and growing social imbalances within and between nation states. The widely heralded concept of (economically, environmentally, and socially) sustainable development has not yet produced a fundamental rethinking of our patterns of production and consumption. A multi-systems level framework with which to think about sustainable urban development and regeneration is outlined. It is based on an evolutionary perspective of systems and their emergent qualitatively different properties. A distinction between chemical/physical, biological, human/individual, social and cultural systems levels is made. Broadly framed guiding questions at each system's level are proposed as the basis for the development of sustainability criteria and indicators that can be tailored to any type of project in the planning or evaluation stage. A case study addressing the renewal of urban villages in the mega city of Guangzhou in Southern China illustrates the application potential of the framework to the challenge of urban regeneration.