Sustainable development: the new tyranny of good?

For issue 375 of Architecture d'Aujourd'hui of October 2009, in a dossier entitled Sustainable development: a profitable religion?, Atelier Franck Boutté and architect Rudy Ricciotti dare to question very early on, to make it sustainable, this new undisputed and almost indisputable imperative at the risk of appearing retrograde or malicious.

The Atelier asserts the need to restore the importance of a questioning approach. Far from its normative and guilt-inducing aims, sustainable development must be an opportunity to think, in a jubilant way, about the diversity of human habits and urban contexts.

To do this, the Atelier approaches sustainable development as a religion, the religion of sustainability. Between labels, fads, marketing and speeches, sustainable development assumes the role of a tyranny of good. It is therefore essential to fight against the evangelization of territories, which transposes the principles of sustainability without nuance, ignoring cultures and climates by promoting a theoretical model of the perfect city based on the ecology of the north. The Atelier defends the importance of context and develops two other urban ecologies, each characterized differently, and which it is essential to grasp: the ecology of the south and the ecology of the environment.

For the Atelier Franck Boutté, sustainable development is above all a way of rethinking the question of man's relationship to the world. Freed from its dogmatic shroud, it can be considered as an approach capable of calling into question its own hypotheses according to the effects of their application. “Sustainable” is what can last, rather than what must last. By initiating a space for questioning and openness to possibilities, sustainable development once again becomes a space for the jubilant re-enchantment of architectural and urban planning thought.