The vision of a truly sustainable city presents project planners with a raft of challenges but perhaps the most difficult, says Martyn Best at Cultural Innovations, is preserving and integrating a sense of cultural identity.
The Drive for economic development, and for a more equal standard of economic prosperity across different regions, has given rise to a hectically competitive race between nations for inward investment, both of financial and intellectual capital.
This is especially so amongst developing countries, who need the investment to fuel the implementation of the domestic economic infrastructure which will help them ‘catch up’ with the more established Westernised economies. But in this objective they all too often have to grapple with a chicken and egg problem: without inward investment they cannot create the infrastructure necessary to attract inward investment.
Article originally published in Project, September 2009, and reprinted with publisher’s kind permission.
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