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Key Dimensions of Language and Terminology : City as Habitat in Space and Time

Nathalie Blanc brought the French notion of habitabilité urbaine, or urban habitability, to the fore of the discussion of what is needed for sustainable cities. From her critical political ecology perspective, habitability constitutes a redefinition of the English catchphrase urban livability, shifting the meaning toward the collective work needed to generate and regenerate social and ecological contexts suited for life and co-living. L’habitabilité urbaine relates to the logics of la coexistence, les enjeux éco-territoriaux, and la solidarité écologique.

As habitat, the urban context is an overlay of scaled sites, spaces and places to be situated, embedded in collective social and ecological lives; and urban habitat is also embedded in time, sometimes reflecting different timescales and periodicities. When referring to the temporality of ecological transition, Blanc is talking back against the technicist orientation of . She is instead referring to the ways in which timescales and periodicities are continuously in play in ecological transition, from the briefest moments of taking the time to consider one’s relationship to other co-inhabitants of the city, to the seasonal timescale of adapting one’s activities to ecological cycles of growth, maturity, decline, and rest, to the long timescale needed to shift one’s thinking about the impacts of colonialism from a perspective that includes precolonial times and patterns of generational relations.

The city in the midst of ecological transition is not a set of infrastructures to be modelled, constructed, installed, maintained, and repaired; but a relational set of spaces and life forms, coming to recognize one another in space and time across their different habitability needs and lifeways.