Composing Indicators In A Multi-layered Perspective: Toward A Hermeneutics Of Local Sustainability

From a thermodynamic point of view, sustainability roots itself within a global balance. Shifting our sights from global to local contexts, we always risk to loose contact with such a balance. In nowadays multi-connected, dematerialized economy is quite impossible to trace the real effects of local dynamics: the urban region is crumbled over the earth’s face. We have to deal with the role of urban or local systems, and to do this we need a multi-layered perspective. Every interpretative act is built showing up an object over a background of shared knowledge. We first need to build such a background, nesting then our statements about \“local” sustainability in a series, or a hierarchy of scenarios, always reconnecting ourselves to largest contexts. We know that the global balance is in the red, using indicators like natural capital accounting, greenhouse gas inventory and so on, but we have to be aware that the only closed system, the only boundary, is the biosphere. So every city, every local economic system, produces services, goods and culture, playing a complex role in the general dynamic of global sustainability, witch cannot be described as a simple numeric balance. The same energy or emergy unit has very different \“meanings” in Mumbay or in Detroit. What we need is a new geography, built with physical, thermodynamic and economic indicators: we would like to consider this kind of description as the geographical side of Ecological Economics.