geographical record
The Geographical Review (): –, April
Copyright © by the American Geographical Society of New York
* Our thanks to everyone on the team who worked on the environmental audit of Sant Sadurní d’Anoia.
Likewise, many thanks to Isidor Rando, environmental counselor of Sant Sadurní d’Anoia during the audit
process, for his efforts in fostering relations with the urban planning team. We would also like to thank Craig
Colten for his suggestions and for reading earlier versions of this essay.
Dra. Alió is a professor of geography at the University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia,
Spain; [alio@ub.edu]. Dra. Fracasso is a professor of geography at the Academy of Fine Arts of Foggia,
Foggia, Italy; [liliana.fracasso@abafg.it]. Ms. Estrella is an independent scholar in urban envi-
ronmental planning in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain; [sandraestrella@hotmail.com].
GEOGRAPHICAL RECORD
ECOPLANNING AND ENVIRONMENTAL REFORM
IN A METROPOLITAN FRINGE:
SANT SADURNÍ D’ANOIA, CATALONIA*
MARIA ÀNGELS ALIÓ, LILIANA FRACASSO, and SANDRA ESTRELLA
Urban planners normally consider a territory, be it a town, city, or region, as
merely a physical location for economic growth and urban expansion. Yet the
tension between expectations in terms of quality of life linked to the enlargement
of urban systems, on one hand, and the degradation of natural resources, on the
other, has put the spotlight on the relationships between environmental and human
systems within the framework of contemporary social processes. The recognition of
the coevolutionary dynamic involving society and environment represents a great
responsibility for urban planners and has led them to propose new and necessarily
more complex tools. It is also a great responsibility for geographers, especially
since the emergence of the concept of sustainability in public policies, which has
led to a thorough reappraisal of the relationships between nature and society.
In the late s Robert Kates emphasized the implications of the concept of
sustainability as a new theoretical framework that was beginning to establish itself
(, ). Other geographers soon began to work on the subject. In the mid-
s Karl Zimmerer referred to a new ecological human geography that investi-
gated the social and economic interconnections between local and extralocal spatial
scales in order to understand environmental impacts (, ). At the same time,
in Europe Torsten Hägerstrand researched the impact of construction and the
possibilities of building along ecological lines and using natural raw materials
(Díaz Muñoz ). Attempts to analyze the relationships between modern tech-
nological societies and the environmental problems they generated characterized
the s. Studies also focused on the ability of public policies to resolve these
problems and to introduce changes favoring models of sustainability, including
criteria for prevention (O’Riordan and Jordan ). A more critical vision, one
that emphasized the role of social inequality in environmental policies, emerged
alongside this growing interest. In Raymond L. Bryant discussed the possibil-
ity of applying political ecology as a framework for research on environmental