The contemporary city between administration and geomanagement

Abstract

The city, judged from the perspective of complexity sciences and tackled in a functionalist manner, is seen by many as a living organism, which is a geosystem that tends towards a finality, called sense of existence. Reaching this finality, that acts as an epistemological axis, offers the chance of a new definition for the city and its functions. Starting from this construction, we are faced with several questions: Must today’s city be subjected to a sustainable development or must it be geomanaged in the spirit of a sustainable evolution? Does the concept of sustainable development have a future or must it be replaced with sustainable evolution? What is the revolution brought by changing the concept of sustainable development with that of sustainable evolution? In the substantiation of the leap from development to evolution, we propose the concept of managerial geography, as a new step of the urban management paradigm, offering the openness for establishing a new taxonomy of urban functions, which introduces concepts like: civic functions; vital functions, frontier functions, etc. By applying the taxonomy to the geography of Cluj-Napoca, respectively the taxonomy of the functional tertiary subsystem, we propose new approaches that will lead to the establishment of this new paradigm: urban geomanagement for attaining sustainable evolution.

Keywords

• administration
• geomanagement
• paradigm
• frontier
• sustainable development
• sustainable evolution
• functions