Abstract
Worldviews are ways of thinking and lenses to look at the world; they organise visions and systems of beliefs guiding the interpretation of the phenomena that shape the space we inhabit. This chapter discusses the mechanistic and ecological worldviews and paradigms, which have different and sometimes contradictory principles and divergent understandings of sustainability. Nevertheless, they made valuable contributions, each in its field. The former generated the technological sustainability paradigm, based on the metaphor of the machine. The latter, based on the metaphor of the ecosystem, created the regenerative sustainability paradigm that sees the integration of humans and their activities with the other forms of life in a harmonious and mutually beneficial manner, leading to restoring the regenerative capacity of natural and social living systems. This standpoint heads to understand the built environment as a social-ecological system that embeds living systems and engineering and technological ones. It affects design practices and is facilitated by new knowledge drawn from biology, urban ecology and ecosystem services analysis that are proposing new approaches to architecture and urban design and planning emulating the functioning of ecological systems. This is an essential concept to re-establish health and wellbeing within cities, not only to ensure liveability in densely populated environments but importantly, to create a symbiosis between humans and all forms of life.
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Zingoni de Baro, M.E. (2022). Why Working with Worldviews and Paradigms?. In: Regenerating Cities. Cities and Nature. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90559-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90559-0_3
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