1. Introduction

Regional and Development are far from being consensual concepts. The City, in all its translations, has been perceived as a conviviality of differences and a core articulator of these concepts and realities over time. As such, conviviality, as a multi-level perspective, is our proposition for a new regional development formula which enables an emergent territorial social policy. The idea of internationally collaborative ‘bioregions’ from Geddes (Sato, 1998) should be considered together with the new network of city-regions at a national scope, as a new socio-spatial configuration. It is within this interrelation that a local network layer of compact/15 minutes- and intermodal cities with new bio-cultural public places should be designed.

Regions have been used for long to address parts of the world (continents and subcontinents) as well as parts of nations. Nevertheless, since the mid of the twentieth century these two different and fragmented uses got blurred. In course of time, regions started to adjectivize cities and national corridors, or ‘the main street of the nation’; as well as transnational corridors, within a megalopolitan or ecumenopolis network system (Gottman, 1961; Dioxiadis, 1968; Dioxiadis & Papaioannou, 1974). The first Euroregion was created as far back as in 1956. By the 60’s of the same century, the trend of discovering/inventing transnational corridors boomed; whereof their mapping took place in the last quarter of that century (the rusty and sun belt in USA; the blue banana; the golden triangle; the Atlantic axis; the pentagon; and many others in Europe) (Seixas, 2012). More recently, satellite methodologies were used to map these corridors to propose the concept of Mega-Region (Florida, Mellander & Gulden, 2008). This contributed to identify both transnational economic and political new entities (e.g. EU or ASEAN), as well as their transnational or national parts as regions.

Development is another complex concept. It is intrinsically linked with the enlightenment idea of civilization and its counterpart of barbary/savagery. Capitalist and colonial modernity and the north-south division became therefore part of the definition of development. In the 50’s of the previous century with Rostow’s phases of development (Rostow, 1991), the division between the west and the rest became clear, reinforcing this global north-south distinction. These geographic counterparts of hemispheres were mitigated by what was called the ‘social north’ and the ‘social south’ taking into consideration that Australia and New Zealand should be considered as part of the north. This was still more complexified by the ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ concepts. These are a critique to uncover power relations and ‘coloniality’ as sprawling processes that create conjuncture and disjuncture in and between the North and South. Several critical concepts regarding development and North and South reification were elaborated as post-development (Escobar, 1992) and ‘convivial degrowth’ (Parique, 2019: 171-184) and new indexes of development (HDI – Human Development Index and GHI – Gross Happiness Index) to overcome the problem. The Millennium declaration creating the Agenda 2000-2015 (Millennium Goals) as a common planetary development agenda was probably the best attempt to surpass the cognitive division between North and South. Yet, that was not enough.

When ‘Regional’ and ‘Development’ are put together, complexities are emphasised. Eventually, regional development emerged with a triad of authors: Frederick Le Play (contribution on regional focus), Vidal de la Blache (the ‘possibilism’) and Patrick Geddes (the idea of bioregion). This was standing in opposition to the deterministic geographic school of Humboldt (Ritter and Ratzel) and created the avenue of regional development and policies. If Le Play and De La Blache are relevant references, certainly, Patrick Geddes is the most contemporaneous one of regionalists. He was the first sociologist who defended that the ‘bioregion’ should be the focus of sociology integrating nature and culture through the triad Place-Work-Folk. Geddes considered that cities were core, and by this he was probably the first one to highlight competition-cohesion problematics and how these relate with cities through paleotechnic (competition cities) versus neotechnic (cooperation cities). ‘Conurbation’ was coined by Geddes, by now called city-region, and presented evidence of that problematic between competition & cooperation. Furthermore, Geddes envisioned a sustainable human civilization composed of internationally collaborative bioregions.

Considering this framework closer, within this text we propose conviviality as a substitute concept to development and a conviviality regional formula consisting of compact cities, intermodal cities and new public places. The regional element enhances a multi-level perspective with conviviality matrioska designs.

2. Methodological Note

This work is supported by the parameters of the epistemological turn from a probability evidence-based approach to a future test possibilities-based approach, through which science may be understood as a continuous adjustment. We propose (Seixas & Lobner, in press) that the ultimate role of human rationality (and the redefinition of science) is to overcome the two major schisms (socio-cultural and nature-human) through Ecumene and Sustainability Studies.

Therefore, conviviality needs to be highlighted as the central social production and as such, the main economic value: it is the core element that aggregates humans and human animals and non-human animals.

A PhD project is being carried out since 2021, applying the Ecumene as a core concept: a beyond border space of strong cultural exchange, flow and encounters. By using a descriptive, critical and normative gaze, this project explores the triggers, hubs and types of conviviality within the context of two international regions (EU and ASEAN), using several scales of analyses and designing new common senses.

Furthermore, the authors within a larger team, have been involved in applied anthropological projects in local governments (specifically Cascais municipality) in which conviviality has been addressed. ‘Transit Corridor Livability’ (in a municipal scale) (Seixas, Dias, Baptista & Lobner, 2021) and ‘A Rua é Nossa’ (The Street is Ours) in a neighbourhood scale are examples of that engagement. ‘CRiCity – Children and their right to the city’ was another project enhancing urban transformation for more conviviality, based on children’s perspectives on – and engagements with – the public space.

Within this scale, the paper at hand is a first attempt to explore the avenue of a welfare society through a meta-territorial gaze.

3. Social policy as territorial planning at large

Social policy in the 20th century was, for a long time, indebted to the critical and reformist legacy of the 19th century between Marxists, social reformists and hygienists. Indeed, Marx identified ‘the labour question’ and ‘the housing question’ as the great social issues. The struggle for rights of social dignity in these two spheres was developed either by trade unions, by employers seeking more productivity, or by social physicists in the pursuit of public health.

The metropolitan growth of cities in the second half of the twentieth century often resulted in both a polycentrism of everyday life, and of vulnerabilities, associated with a polycentrism of social protection. On the one hand, people’s lives became completely fragmented, a daily rush, often by car, between work, home, children’s school, supplementary activities, leisure, provisioning, and health care needs. This was to an extend that in the child rearing phase of the life cycle the most important social role of parents was the one of ‘transporters’. On the other hand, social policy has not countered this trend, may this be in schools and health centres, or in specific social protection institutions for the elderly, the disabled, the sick, etc. The splintered sprawl was the trend, and the result was in many cases the unplanned fragmented polycentrism. Finally, the specialization of social policy in various strands of focused social service did not help, and raised even more the concerns for a unified context of urban life.

In fact, it is no longer the labour or the housing issue that should be the basis of a social policy of today, but more than that, the city, following Lefebvre (1996, c1968): it is the city and its organization that is at the root of inequalities, and therefore, a sustainable social policy must focus on the city as a whole. It is the ‘Right to the City’ that needs to be core, articulated with the ‘Right to Nature’ and, more recently even, ‘the Right of Nature’. Hence, the paper at hand claims that the compact city, the intermodal city and the new public places city constitute a potential formula to recreate a meaning for territorial life in its several scales, from neighbourhood units to world networks (ecumenopolis).

A new territorial social policy should combine a welfare state and a welfare society for the wellbeing and sustainability of communities, within multilevel, multigovernance and meta-territorial arrangements.

4. The Formula

4.1. Compact Cities

The compact city (Lobner, Seixas, Dias & Vidal, 2021), a model originated in the 60s of the 20th century, has emerged lately as a kind of miraculous solution to solve urban problems in their complexity. The compactness of the city has several models as reference: a long tradition of utopias that go back as far as to Plato’s Atlantis. This trend continued with sociologists and anthropologists, conceptualizing it as ‘neighbourhood unit’ or ‘neighbourhood’; the hippie, new age and more recent intentional community eco-villages; the transitional community model as a “rurban” solution in response to the need of fossil fuel reduction and climate change; the micromobility city model as a reaction to the car-centric city; sustainable cities and communities as an aggregative solution such as proposed by the SDG 11; among others. Moreno’s ’15-minute city’ firstly applied in Paris, or the ‘Superislands’ by Ton Salvadó to be found in Barcelona, are only very recent urbanistic reference models that add to that a vast and multiform tradition. Nevertheless, these proposals should by no means be considered as a magic formula for any, or even all, cities. It is relevant that different urban functions are close to one another; the transformation of the mobility hierarchy that puts the individual car first; creating and placing micro-mobilities to the effectiveness of the intermodal city; and producing a public transportation system that responds effectively to the citizens’ needs. It needs to be taken into account that this is a new social model for organizing human life, and not a mere urban reorganization of transportation and land use. In other words, it is about changing lifestyles and requires, besides ‘physical planning’, a strong ‘cultural planning’.

4.2. Intermodal Cities

Intermodal cities are urban centers strategically designed to optimize transportation efficiency and connectivity by seamlessly integrating various modes of transportation. These cities boast well-coordinated systems that seamlessly link together modes such as buses, trains, trams, bicycles, and pedestrian pathways, reducing reliance on personal vehicles and mitigating traffic congestion. In intermodal cities, transportation hubs serve as focal points, facilitating smooth transitions between different modes of transit, thereby enhancing convenience and accessibility for residents and visitors alike. By prioritizing interconnectivity and accessibility, these cities promote sustainable transportation practices and reduce environmental impacts associated with traditional car-centric urban layouts.

One hallmark of intermodal cities is their emphasis on multimodal infrastructure and innovative urban planning solutions. These cities often feature dedicated lanes for buses and bicycles, pedestrian-friendly streetscapes, and strategically located transportation hubs that encourage the use of public transit. Moreover, intermodal cities prioritize the development of mixed-use neighborhoods, where residential, commercial, and recreational spaces are seamlessly integrated with transportation nodes, fostering vibrant and livable urban environments. By fostering a culture of multimodal transportation and urban design, intermodal cities exemplify a forward-thinking approach to sustainable urban development, setting a precedent for other cities seeking to enhance transportation efficiency and reduce their carbon footprint.

4.3. New Public Places 

Cities represent an important step in the encounter of human differences, exponentiating conviviality. At the same time, cities were also a means to create a new human nature: the urban ecosystem and culture. The challenge now is to increase human and human-nature convivialities. New Bio-Cultural Public Places could be the answer for a global human and human-nature hospitality.

The public places in their differences were in fact in the genealogy of the city itself. Mumford (1968) refers that the city existed already when different people were coming together in fortresses and in storehouses, in festivities and local markets, as well as in temples and cemeteries. Cities were the joining of those public places within a specific context, and as cemeteries were the first sedentary settlements, cities were an emulation of necropolis. If life after life represented a solution for human differences, cities in their complexities were (and still are) a long learning process on conviviality. As such, the city is a translation device for the solving of a major anthropological problem: the human schism. From the local market, the big square and the civic centre, to the main avenue; they all represent models of conviviality of difference. With the emergence of the conurbation or the city-regions in a neotechnic context, new public places also emerged. Hotels and touristic resorts, cosmopolitan avenues and shopping centres, historical centres and heritage sites, thematic parks and touristic cities, stadiums and training centres, airports and ephemeral cities amongst other configurations open to wider differences; are all contexts which stage a new level of close broader strangeness and, as a consequence, glocal hospitality.

Continuing to follow Mumford (1968), the cities represent both a continuity and a clash regarding other species ecosystems. Hunts, bees and other colonies are eventually a mirror for our cities and, similar to those species, humans created its own colony, distancing themselves from other ecologies and over time, culturally selecting very specific wild-human interrelations, basically through what is being called ‘gardens’. These are also new public places to be reinvented as a network of overlapping and intermingled ecologies. The ‘sustainable neighbourhoods’, the ‘urban farms’, the new ‘urban parks’ are part of an emergent ‘transition city’ or an ‘eco-village’ model.

5. Conclusions: bioregional conviviality as a territorial social policy

The envisioning of a new territorial welfare may be expressed as follows: children to enjoying their freedom on the streets, such as through walking or cycling without fear, going independently to school, play, and other complementary activities; biodiversity and forest lanes merging with the urban; people with reduced mobility and elderly people being able to moving barrier free and by this to live inclusive lives; individuals commuting from and to work by bike or on foot; complete accessibility to schools, health care centres, public green and leisure spaces, as well as zones of consumption; zero deaths from traffic induced accidents; reduction of stress; reduction of air pollution and strong improvement of air quality; reduction of respiratory and cardiac morbidity…

These lively neighbourhood units are served by good public transports with high frequency to modal interfaces, which connects us to other centres, either regional, national or abroad. The connections amongst cities reveal a network of vertically and horizontally integrated compact cities of several scales. Therefore, if a neighbourhood unit can be a compact city, a bigger unit (e.g. a parish) may also be one: the former advocating for active mobility; the latter emphasizing public transports as main mobility mode. Although in different modes, 15 minutes may be applied as a distance parameter.

This hierarchy of compact cities is connected by new public places which enable a diversity of places in an open space, a kind of heterotopia by which all the difference may be in the same space without necessarily creating clashing encounters. The ‘eyes on the street’ (Newman, 1972; Jacobs, 1993; Wekerle, 2000) should enhance a civitas socialization, a conviviality of differences.

This is, certainly, a vision of a territorial welfare, a sustainable social policy, a good practice to be recognized and a transformation that should be enhanced in our cities.

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