The Mission Statement Authentic City between Mitigation and Adaptation of Climate Change

The mission statement of the Authentic City stands for a historical, argumentative and narrative urban development of social construction.

That means for…

… mitigation of Climate Change

• Evolve existing architectures instead of building new ones in the sense of cultural sustainability.

• Developing cultural heritage (this includes everything that has come to our present) or turning it into circular processes.

• Consequence of mitigation: Minimize embodied energy from buildings to prevent CO₂-emissions.

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… adaptation of Climate Change

Economic value creation processes through history towards urban resilience:

• The act of preserving historical building stock promotes historical values ​​and stands for cultural sustainability.

• Historical values, on the other hand, are economic capital.

• Historical values enable urban value creation processes in the real estate sector as well as in tourism and in the unique identity formation of urban spaces.

The question is: Why are old towns as well as historical building stocks so popular?

Because it is something special, extraordinary, something that may have existed in time for centuries or only formerly in a past and lost function of which only narrations testify. Cultural heritage enables the lived utopian heterotopia. The social construction of cities is a realm of urban planning and development. It must be considered in future urban planning from the point of view of cultural sustainability and climate protection.

What can the mission statement of the Authentic City contribute to this?

• Discover the urban narratives associated with the historical building stock in archives and make them visible using the further developed material.

• This intentionalization of the historical phenomenons in urban space increases the sense of well-being through the positioning in a space-time structure.

• Culturally sustainable action, on which identity and uniqueness rest, make a city something special. They constitute the good life.

• Consequence of adaptation: Good life, wellbeing is an adaptive factor of climate resilience. It makes urban life more resilient based on history and identity.

About the use of regional history for mitigation an adaptation of Climate Change