Restructuring the urban landscape: A“critical reconstruction”of permanent structures in historic cultural and urbanlandscapes

This study focuses on an important aspect of sustainability: the permanence of the spatial structures in urban and landscape fabrics, which hosts such qualities as social identity and cohesion, cultural heritage and scope, and resource saving and conservation, or in other words, social and ecological stability and resilience. These qualities are bound to site-specific spatial forms. To shed light on the relationship between sustainability and spatial form, the paradigm changes in the European urbanistic discipline are reviewed. These experiences are then transferred to the contemporary challenge of improving the social and ecological qualities of (sub)urban landscapes.