1 Introduction

Human communities are facing critical challenges that cause enormous socioeconomic and physical damages progressively more. Abnormalities such as floods, severe storms, extreme temperatures and droughts resulted more than 1,300,000 death records during the past five decades [1]. This requires firm, effective and integrated immediate actions; as well as, long-term planning, strategies, positive and green thinking. Currently, one million species are in danger of extinction, i.e. an alarming rate of one over eight, a lot of flora and fauna are shortly in extreme risk of disappearance due to human failure on earth [2]. Our ecosystems and biodiversity are not good anymore; the world today is facing complex challenges because our fundamental systems are broken. Climate change, poverty, malnutrition, and civil unrest are outstanding signs in this regard [3]. Dynamic urban areas continue to attract more residences from rural areas, other cities and countries. Therefore, they demand extra spaces and more resources [4]. But the respective urban expansion processes generate excessive natural contamination, basically for water, soil and air. In many cases, urbanization produces unmatched rates of visual, noise and light pollution that develops social stress and cultural tensions. However, residents expect standard efficient public services such as health, education, transportation, green and open spaces, clean environment and sufficient resources that ensure high quality of urban life. Matching these essential needs and expectations on the socio-economic and ecological aspects is core theme for urban sustainable development [5,6,7,8].

The tremendous number of researches pertaining to sustainability discloses that this notion has rich diversity of meanings especially in terms of physical development. The term ‘development’ delineates an event constituting a new stage in a changing situation. In other words, it represents a status of evolution, maturing, expansion, enlargement, or more precisely the gradual growth or formation of something. Development refers to something that gets created or grows over a period of time. In practical terms, a ‘sustainable development’ is generally able to mitigate to a greater extent the conditions, forces and constraints that threaten its continuation in time, as well as benefit from the opportunities that protect or foster that same continuation. And so, the main difference between a sustainable and a regular development is that those who participate in a sustainable development are more aware of the external and internal ´forces´ that can hurt or benefit them, and they decide to consciously chose the combination of options that will likely offer the best net long term results, even if many of those decisions are unpleasant in the short/medium term.

The concept sustainable development appeared in 1980’s to connect conservation and development objectives. Since that time, it has evoked countless discussions. It describes incremental improvements and changes that aim to achieve more sustainable situation. It includes interventions that aim to reduce environmental impacts and improve, in the same time, social and economic conditions. Sustainability describes a state that is sustainable and is much more specific as it describes a situation where systems and conditions are balanced in such a way that they can continue to exist in the long term. In that sense, sustainability stands for avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain ecological balance. Thus, the aim of the classical sustainable development is to balance the economic, environmental and social needs. Currently, most environmental initiatives such as green policies, reporting and rating systems are based on a sustainable development approach because this is easier and many aspects of current systems can continue. Very few initiatives actually address sustainability because it is far more difficult and will require radical change. This is, however, what required.

2 Dynamics of sustainability

Sustainability is a key subject that intersects with many life aspects. It is considered a global norm adopted by a growing number of people and organizations worldwide [9]. Thus, sustainability is widely presented in a lot of books, research papers, accords and treaties [10]. Historically, the intense attention to protecting our global environment due to increasing ecological concerns in the 1960s and 1970s lead to emergence the concept of sustainability. Since 1980s considerable analytical elaboration and enhancement has taken place to better understand the relationships between development and the environment, and to identify the idea behind sustainability that has many complicated dimensions [11]. In consequence, new sciences have been derived from classical sciences where more integration has occurred between economics, social and natural sciences. For example, environmental and ecological economists, environmental engineering, green architecture, post renewable energies and passive structures. Due to the dynamic nature of sustainability and its far-reaching impacts other disciplines will continue to emerge.

Indeed, sustainability along with the relevant revolutionary sciences offered tremendous excitement and hope for people worldwide. It generated consolidated vision and promise for multidimensional integration centered by aspiration. This fact was reflected in political discourses, and therefore, traversed the political boundaries of a single state to become more universal trend. In this sense, the UN report [12] highlights that development and environment represent one inseparable agenda, since sustainability is the life support system for development. Still, sustainability is not a simple question to be tackled easily. It is rather dynamic, complex, and wide spreading notion that crosses over many perspectives where lot of dimensions can be singled out as shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Dynamics of sustainability (author)

Full size image

The changing dynamic status of sustainability remains unclear and not easy to be interpreted. In consequence, the dualism of that concept was discussed and exposed critically by Heather and Zachary [13]. In their critical writing, they highlight the interdiciplinary of that notion, and continue reasoning whether sustainability is ‘embedded’ in everything. Many researchs show that considering sustainability, poverty and environment produce complex relationships that become confusing [14]. In that orientation, problems are perceived through multiple spatial scales: household problems such as indoor housing conditions, city-level problems such as air quality and water contamination, besides global problems such as climate warming. To overcome such challenges, Pfister argues that national, regional, local governments, hand in hand with international organisations, have declared sustainability as political objective and put forward agendas to achieve it [9]. According to Brandon [15] the problems generated by the human development impact our physical environment on the short-range; however, their significant impacts on the long-range become fully apparent to future generations. To mitigate adverse consequences of physical development, ensure respecting non-physical (social) components [16], as well as, re-evaluating the economic behavior to limit the so called ‘artificial needs’ become a priority [17].

3 Classical sustainability

The world witnessed exceptional mutation in all life aspects after the wide industrialization introduced by the industrial revolution that forced transition to new manufacturing processes. It facilitated that communities could produce more and expand much faster, however, the resulted urban sprawl and uncontrolled development generated, in many cases, social fragmentation, unacceptable living conditions and environmental degradation [18, 19]. This fact urges rethinking such development patterns. Sustainability raised this reconsideration and highlighted multiple challenges for planners and decision makers [8]. Grubler [20] points out that sustainability is a cornerstone for sciences as it demarks environmental protection while attaining better communities and quality life. Likewise, Adams [21] argues that the ecological sensibility introduced by sustainability has impacted different knowledge and sciences. In terms of physical development, the basic definition of the classical sustainable development is introduced by Brundtland report, in 1987, as: ‘paths of human progress that meet the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. The report presents economic and political outlines, besides, democratic and environmental concerns for development in different scales [22]. Thus, sustainability proposes new outlines and solutions for the physical development and socio-economic demands. Nonetheless, the reactions to satisfy the cumulative needs of rapidly growing population worldwide are undermining the planet essential life-support systems [23]. Figure 2 presents the classical sustainability model with the associated development-generated conflicts. Perfectly, sustainability aims at controlling the essential sources of conflicts, i.e. the ecological and socio-economic concerns to guarantee conflict disappearance and thus better integration of goals.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Classical sustainability model associated with the traditional poles of conflict (author)

Full size image

In reality, understanding and resolving these multidimensional conflicts offer complex matrices that are not easily manageable, this justifies why most of the current development processes are not sustainable [24]. The degree of complexity goes higher when taking into consideration the growing impacts of the worldwide ecological alterations and the intense transformations underway in socio-economic life patterns. Key indicators for those adverse consequences are troubling global climatic change, deterioration of ecosystems, degradation of living conditions and acceleration in poverty rates, misuse of natural resources, and excessive levels of pollution [25]. In this regard, the concept of sustainability becomes uncertain and brings back debates of imperfect idealism introduced against comprehensive planning [26]. So far, planners challenge hard decisions to reach holistic solutions and preferred alternatives, to satisfy essential demands and offer reasonable supply that will respect environment, promote local economy and advocate social justice. In consequence, the role of planners becomes more central in controlling unlimited growth, deteriorated environment, and vulnerable social justice. Kates [24] highlights an interesting conclusion of the threatened sustainability due to the sharp contrast of resource distribution between the developed countries and the developing countries. Therefore, spatial disparities will continue to expand between the North and the South. Eventually, the socio-economic and environmental oppositions are aggravated by the deepening global divide illustrated in Fig. 3 that outlines the global failure accompanied by the classical sustainability approach. Accordingly, the debate concerning sustainable development can be considered as ‘terminology game’ that does not resolve the older growth debate, but disguises it [27]. Thus, questioning the classical sustainability model becomes an urgent need, in the meanwhile proposing a ‘‘revolutionary’’ rather than ‘neo-classical’ models remains, an urgent demand, in consequence.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Classical sustainability within a divided world (author)

Full size image

4 The four dimensional spatial sustainability

Reconsidering the classical definition of sustainability, principally during the persistent territorial risks in global scale—remarkably urban cultural conflicts, considerable migration and immigration, urban sprawl, unregulated growth and dissolving heritage, climate warming, poverty, and the spread of epidemics— becomes more sensitive and alarmingly necessary. Urban growth can be described as a standard, but risky, response to organic human society needs. The modernization processes of the historical societies have widened debates and raised attention to the multidimensional related side effects which become increasingly unbearable. Thus, rethinking the community growth patterns and the physical development paradigms becomes more pressing by time. Therefore, the interdisciplinary science of sustainability has emerged highlighting substantial challenges for planners and policy makers who should try to balance needs and concerns. Sustainability is a growing concept, so no wonder that the definition of sustainable development has been changing, it has exceeded hundreds of presentations shown on multiple millions of internet sites and the numbers will continue to augment [28], however conceptions of the term remain vague [4].

The term sustainability is systematically connected to the continuously growing ecological challenges that foster integrations and advancement in contemporary sciences. In the developed countries, urban spaces and rural zones have rapidly changed due to that concept; nonetheless, a lot of the risks that provided impulse to the emergence of that notion have not so far been solved. On contrary, the irretrievable damage of natural resources, rapid shrinking of reserve of fossil fuel, worrying climate warming, and social struggles are observed. As a result, empirical and ethnographic researches on sustainability showed progressive development over the last decade [29]. Sustainability investigates long-run interrelations and consequences between wide-ranging social, economic and environmental systems. Generally, the sophisticated reorganization processes lead to deterioration of these systems, and serious threats to mankind. Therefore, sustainability analyses the natural and social systems, by investigating the respective plausible interrelationships, aiming at attaining equilibrium in terms of physical entities (e.g. natural resources, ecosystems, biodiversity, cultural heritage and spaces) connected to the growing needs of the current communities, in addition to those of the future, in order to sustain quality welfare and conserve the basic key systems on the long term.

The multidisciplinary scientific approach accompanied by the multi-criteria analysis highlights the importance to link the interrelationships between the different scientific paradigms and the classical separate intellectual disciplines. Despite the proposed holistic approach offered by sustainability, the world’s present development path is not sustainable, as balances have not yet been achieved between communities’ organic demands and the capacity of the planet [28]. Additionally, lots of researches show that human responses to sustainability remain ineffective, as they consider mainly short term policies [30], and thus the unequal world has continued undermining the earth’s essential life-support systems [31]. As such, D’Alisa [10] highlights the criticisms of the major methodological approaches to sustainability, arguing that the traditional definition of sustainability is not exhaustive and lacks institutional dimension in form of participative democracy, and discusses dividing sustainability in technocentric and ecocentric poles to facilitate systematization of processes. This underlines again that the classical sustainability in its traditional outline presents fragile, vulnerable, incomprehensive and rigid concept rather than holistic and dynamic one.

Moreover, Najjar [25] argues that sustainability in its classical definition shows significant temporal deficiency in terms of the spatial time-line analysis, and so it has been regarded as an ‘observation’ instrument that could partially ‘guide’ development processes, since it incorporates only two temporal statuses, the present and the future, but it neglects and discards the back-records of time, i.e. the past. Thus, critical temporal deficiency is proved in the traditional sustainability outline model. This past-tense temporal deficiency generates risks, threats, weaknesses, and even problems when adopting the classical model of sustainability because it neglects also very significant other aspects of human communities, namely the cultural and the historical dimensions in terms of both: humans and places. Hence, it could be argued that the analytical methodologies related to classical sustainability disregard the different identities, cultural social marks, community history, and adopting the classical model of sustainability may transform adversely the cultural identities and generate societal conflicts that could lead to crucial cultural heritage deterioration and degeneration.

In order to surpass the prevailing deficiencies and to rectify the discussed temporal and cultural-historical gaps in the CS model, and its corresponding traditional definition, there is no choice but to set forth an innovative outline definition that copes with the multiple spatial aspects of sustainability. Namely, a revolutionary concept that assures sound development which respects ecological balances, social justice and economic prosperity, in parallel to inclusive temporal analysis in incorporating effectively the cultural and the historical domains. Therefore, the rigid concept of classical sustainably should be shifted to more dynamically inclusive model, that is, the “four-dimensional” spatial sustainability (4DSS), which was first introduced by the author in [25], as shown in Fig. 4. The 4DSS model interconnects new interesting, but critical, poles, dimensions, axes and spatial orbits, in order to overcome the aforementioned CS deficiencies, i.e. the temporal and cultural-historical. In this concern, Najjar [25:222] states: ‘‘This [model] adds a new comprehensive time-based dimension allowing the integration of the past of a referenced space by evaluating its cultural and historical identity and to assess the consequential cause-effect impacts of the projected, future development. Furthermore, considering the cultural-historic dimension within the development process enhances the integration toward a well-balanced time scale focusing on understanding a past-present trajectory before linking it into the future.’’.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Model 1: Spatial presentation of the 4DSS model and the generated SEEC orbit (social, economic, environmental, cultural-historical)–centered by multiple polar tensions (author)

Full size image

These independent, but time-based, interconnected, and mixed poles are presented spatially to emphasize conducting integrative 4D analysis to each. The combination of these different poles: social, economic, environmental, and cultural-historical shape together a fascinating orbit of spatial sustainability, the SEEC (identified in details in Sect. 5 below), which is centered by concentrated polar tensions due to polar conflictual powers. The 4DSS model, can therefore, better enable us understand notably the spatial urban-based stresses, in addition to, the development-based conflicts. This underlines the complexity encapsulated in theorizing that concept, as well as, in defining its relevant sustainability dimensions in holistic approach that allows examining the past, present, and future of spatial sustainability within local and global scales. As will be shown, the 4DSS model forms the foundational base that inspires adopting more advanced derived models (see Sects. 6, 7) which together offer charming, inclusive approach of eluding the manifold development challenges.

5 Dimensions of sustainability

The term ‘SEEC’ stands for the four critical dimensions of sustainability, specifically: social, economic, environmental, and cultural-historical aspects. Spatially, the SEEC renders a holistic approach to sustainability by catalyzing common commitments to develop community-led participatory processes in order to balance and regenerate the social, institutional, physical, and natural environments. Furthermore, these commitments would allow the inevitable community modernization processes in the different life aspects take place but in balanced way, assuring thus, positive transformations and desired long-term changes in key systems, especially in the institutional and the political levels. The SEEC promotes this gradual transformation (institutional and individual) toward collective sustainable vision based upon multi-dimensional perspectives connected into the temporal analysis and historical contexts, on both, the micro (individual or intra-community) level and the macro (inter-nations) scale. As such, the SEEC promotes integrating democratically the individuals to reform the institutional and political structures regularly.

5.1 Social sustainability

The social dimension plays central role in the 4DSS, as will be illustrated later (see Sect. 6). The essential philosophy behind this dimension is to cultivate the people pertaining to the urgent need for adopting sustainability on the micro and macro levels. Standing upon this point of view, public awareness surfaces to top, and consequently, needs to be promoted to ensure maximum understanding, and thus acceptance, for comprehensive and constant transmission. Reasonable and accountable social commitments will better support attaining social justice by working on building social confidence, cooperation, coherence, openness and trust between people, and to ensure that they feel empowered, seen and heard, thus more involved to establish standard welfare. In this regard, the social dimension will: embrace diversity and build community; empower participatory leadership and good governance; cultivate inclusive, responsive and transparent decision-making; ensure equal access to holistic community services; develop fair, effective and accountable institutions; promote democracy, conduct regular institutional and political reforms. Therefore, continuously growing social forces will be formed and will, in consequence, generate the social momentum needed to create responsible and democratic community that puts sustainability first.

5.2 Economic sustainability

The economic dimension in this model sheds light on the economic solidarity respecting the other interlinked dimensions of the 4DSS. In other words, it aims to establish economic cycles that contribute to: promote prosperity, preserve resources, collaborative support, durable micro (local) and macro (regional) economies, besides territorial networks which serve the needs of local communities and ecosystems, through intra-community and inter-nations scales. In that sense, the absolute value of ‘economic’ profit is not the sole objective. Hence, other values are integrated into the economic upstream and downstream activities. Thus, this dimension reclaims and questions the classical ways of thinking about wealth and progress in the different life aspects. Innovating, caring for sharing, entrepreneurship towards social solidarity, green economies and responsible forms of collaborative ownership are leading examples in this regard that will lead to reinforce healthier territorial economies; invest in fair business and ethical systems of exchange, enhance generating public and common wellbeing through economic justice. Normative result to this dimension is the prosperity of ‘eco-just’ commerce, ecological technologies, innovative environmental norms and regulations of green trade and industry.

5.3 Environmental sustainability

The environmental dimension underlines respecting manifold ecological aspects. It aims to enable communities to share essential organic needs such as access water, habitation, food, clean energy and open spaces in just ways that respect the life support systems, cycles of nature, biodiversity and ecosystems. It also aims to link different multicultural societies with environment and wild nature in a manner that: enhances balanced biological diversity, regenerates more powerful ecosystems, and gives people a chance to experience their interdependence in their particular life style with key systems on a direct and daily basis. Ecosystems, biodiversity and natural resources are thus valuable treasures that should be kept away from depletion and misuse. Renewable clean energies are inevitable choice in this sense. Bio-agriculture, organic livestock, soil and water protection, less consumption, waste recycling, green industries, technologies and constructions are among the major trends in this model. Hence, the environmental dimension will form the upper limits of development and will control most of its related decisions.

5.4 Cultural-historical sustainability

A soft but critical dimension is the cultural-historical aspect. While culture characterizes the identity of community, history represents its mirror through which community can read its deeply-rooted stories, customs, traditions, events, festivals, feasts, marks and symbols. Both, culture and history reflect and establish the temporal bridges between people and places. The basic aim of this dimension is to better understand and sustain the community’s culture and history, to preserve them as much as possible on the one hand, while maintain community modernization take place on the other hand. This two-sided balance is paradoxical, thus critical sensitivity is presented when dealing with ‘soft’ projects that impact the cultural aspects of people, and ‘physical’ projects that influence the historical heritage of community. Change is a must; accordingly assessing its processes to mitigate and preempt the probable adverse impacts formulates the indispensable role for the cultural-historic sustainability. In this regard, it aims to protect identity, preserve and enhance diverse values that support tolerance and care for people, communities and the planet. This encourages people to better respect and appreciate their historical roots and their different background. Thus, the strong community will protect and empower the weaker rather than restricting, eliminating or imposing changes for its characteristics, features and history. As such, this dimension helps better connect to values that lead to a higher purpose in life, enrich multiculturalism and collective growth, respect cultural traditions and ethnic differences that protect human dignity, encourage community tolerance, reconnect to nature and embrace low-impact lifestyles, and support people, fauna and flora, and respect life and the beings and systems that sustain it.

6 Spatial participative sustainability

The spatial participative sustainability (SPS) is a model that represents a particular intermediate case of the 4DSS. It represents two foundational phases, the preparatory and the translational. The SPS is based upon participatory and transparent approach that accounts on adopting the 4DSS on the micro scale (individual, i.e. personal and family dimensions), as well as, the macro scale (collective, i.e. intra-community and inter-nations dimensions). The SPS is an inspiring, but time demanding, philosophy that promotes global social, socio-economic and ecological-democratic reforms. To attain that status, it is recommended to begin by restructuring the 4DSS model’s diverse components. In other words, to decompose the problems and to separate the conflict poles aside as shown in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Model 2: Decomposing the 4DSS, conflict separation model for generating social driving force–short term initiation model (author)

Full size image

This rearrangement incorporates and evaluates all dimensions of the 4DSS but handles, on purpose, their impacts differently. On the short term, during the initiation ‘preparatory’ phase, the application of the 4DSS model-restructuring approach allows prioritizing the social factor. As such, it proposes a two-sided, 50/50 scaling, that enables prioritizing the social dimension in order to enhance and accelerate the processes of comprehensive social reform that aims at curing gradually, but effectively, the gaps of the global divide presented previously in Fig. 3. This social reform factored by ½ (i.e. 50% of the total model’s weight) will act ultimately to rectify: the community unawareness, unenlightenment, illiteracy, lack of knowledge and education, inexperience, ills, cracks, struggles, and thus, will minimize the social gaps between the different intra-community and inter-communities strata. It accounts on upgrading the public awareness continuously, through: multiple awareness campaigns, implanting democratic participation, enriching civic engagement, empowering the women and the elderly, youth encouragement in decision-making and leadership. Thus, all these actions will help forming effective and participative platform that will generate the necessary social momentum needed to enhance the other three dimensions (environmental, economic, cultural-historical) which are factored by 1/6 for each, i.e. the other 50% of scale of the total model’s weight. This 50/50 scaling technique will facilitate smooth and efficient model launching, and will therefore, guarantee its long-term auto-played functionality, as well as, durability provided by intra-generational awareness.

Effectively, the proposed inter-linked philosophy of conflicts separation underlines how the social factor will be the motor that directs and enhances the other three equal-scaled dimensions; namely: the environmental, economic and cultural-historical aspects. This happens as the dynamic social involvement will establish collective responsibility on the micro and macro scales. Furthermore, this approach will develop social rearrangements concerning not only the intra-community common values but also will implant new inter-nations mixed-values more coherent with respect to the SEEC orbit of sustainability. On the medium term, the different social techniques proposed by this model, altogether supported by sufficient public social awareness, will formulate a powerful ‘‘social sphere’’ surrounded by renewable ‘social forces’ that will continue to reorganize the model toward more territorially harmonized 4DSS as shown in Fig. 6. The collective social momentum forms ‘social sphere’ that stands on deeply-rooted ‘cultural base’ and headed by the ‘environment’, meanwhile the ‘economy’ lies in the core of this sphere in a manner allowing to support all these inter-connected dimensions. This model will, on the medium term, induce, develop and reproduce effectively the multiple intra-community and inter-nations life-cycle aspects, such as production processes, consumption patterns, construction and expansion trends, modes of transport, technologies, and thus, it will lead to the desired translational status of change in a definitive manner.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Model 3: Harmonized socially-driven economically-centered 4DSS on global scale–medium term impact model (author)

Full size image

7 Utopian sustainability

The utopian sustainability (UtS) is an ideal concept that represents the ultimate, perfect, far-reaching end of integrating the previously elaborated models in (Figs. 4, 5, 6). That is, UtS is the long-term resulting case due to harmonized socially-driven and economically-centered status of the 4DSS that leads into perfect standardized spatial sustainability (3S) on global scale. On the long term, getting the harmonized socially-driven 4DSS model well-adopted as time passes by, the social forces will continue to grow and expand spatially to influence and impact positively other places and communities. Hence, its cross-border territorial impact becomes more influential. Accordingly, the inter-nations and intra-generational harmonized common SEEC values become more and more anchored in more coherent and balanced matter between the developed (North) countries and the developing (South) countries. In consequence, these forces will modify the distribution, and thus the alignment of the SEEC orbit by their powers generated by the improved universal inter-nations social mixed-values that not only facilitate, but also guarantee, the auto-transformations of key systems toward ‘utopian sustainability’. Hence, the social powers will adjust the centrality of the SEEC to get it smoothly extended along the North–South axis, formulating accordingly, the harmonized capsule of the 4DSS which delineates the UtS as shown in Fig. 7. By this new unified centrality, the SEEC continues to interlink all the diverse poles of the 4DSS and will generate the required thrust to direct the development universally toward more standardized spatial sustainability (3S). In this logic, the UtS model will inspire both: intra-community development, as well as, inter-nations progress, and thus the cross-borders spatial development guided always by uniform and active social framework.

Fig. 7
figure 7

Model 4: Utopian Sustainability (UtS): Perfect standardized spatial sustainability (3S) resulting democratically by spatial participative sustainability (SPS) on global scale–long term impact model (author)

Full size image

The application of the utopian sustainability model ensures satisfying the urgently needed global balances on the four essential poles (economic, environmental, social and cultural-historical dimensions). More interestingly, the UtS model places the economy in very central position as illustrated in Fig. 8. Again, this reflects the universal prosperity resulting by the spatially growing intra-generational and inter-communities awareness that will proactively lead into multiple life-aspects development and thus achieving stable economic growth, democratic institutional and political reforms, besides territorial solidarity. The UtS model limits the processes of development and growth by strict environmental requirements that guarantees preserving the ecosystems and biodiversity, besides the natural resources, while it is based on respecting the cultural diversity that leads to community multiculturalism and tolerance. Hence, the UtS model romanticizes the spatial development treating it as principal agent of progressive positive change which leads into intra-generational justice and inter-nations coherences that preserve identifies, respect history and accept cultures. Therefore, it is more capable to spread happiness for human communities, conserve flora and fauna, from north to south, west to east and vice versa, forming in consequence, utopian multicultural sustainable societies, and eventual ideal biodiverse environments.

Fig. 8
figure 8

Model 5: Economical outline model of utopian sustainability (author)

Full size image

8 Conclusion

Since the past century many problems in the socio-economic and environmental aspects have shown up to the surface worldwide. Nowadays, despite the exceptional technological development and the advancement of digital world, studies show that the world continues developing more unsustainably. Therefore, more alarming adverse phenomena will continue to expand and evoke critical global challenges such as: unprecedented pollution levels, poverty, social segregation and family fragmentation, excessive degradation of biodiversity, depletion of natural resources, cultural conflicts, massive immigration, historical heritage disappearance, climatic change and global warming. To this end, classical sustainability (CS) can be considered as a tool that does not resolve the adverse development impact, but embellishes it. Thus, questioning its model becomes progressively urgent, while proposing revolutionary alternatives remains a must. As such, the transversal concept of the four dimensional spatial sustainability (4DSS) is proposed as a response to that demanding need, besides a set of philosophical revolutionary models that incorporate comprehensive interlinked temporal analysis, based upon the four principal dimensions, specifically: social, economic, environmental and cultural-historical. As shown in this research, the multiple elaborated models romanticize the notion of sustainability, and therefore the author introduces interestingly the concept—utopian sustainability—that sheds light on an economically-centered socially-boosted model constrained by ecological limits and cultural-historical horizons. Remarkably, these models invest first in the social pole, and mark it as leader to the other dimensions, since it assures forming participative platform and democratic atmosphere that guarantees intra-generational justice on the intra-community and inter-nations scales. Eventually, the models rely on cultivating comprehensive social awareness that will generate social forces to create powers of positive change in key systems (institutional, political, economic and ecologic) through spatial participative sustainability (SPS) that leads, on the long-term, to globally perfect standardized spatial sustainability (3S).