ABSTRACTS BOOK (original) (raw)
143 | VULNERABILITY, INEQUALITIES, AND RESILIENCE: GREENING URBAN PLANNING QUEST IN MODERN TUNISIA Abdesselem Mahmoud1 1National School of Architecture and Town Planning-Carthage University abdesselemahmoud@yahoo.fr ABSTRACT: Tunisia, where sparked the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, is commonly called ‘Green Tunisia’. The country is a subsystem within a global ecological and socioeconomic system. As any other country, it is facing the climate changes extremes and their negative externalities on different intermingling levels: biophysics, economic, psychological, political, social, and cultural. The author highlights that addressing environmental hazards and stresses is a socio environmental matter, and then ecology sociology is worth for better understanding thoseoften allegedly preconceived natural hazards, as anthropogenic ones. The method adopted in this study is qualitative one based on some previous empirical studies findings led on the topic. Moreover, few researches were led on the issue of vulnerability and resilience in Tunisia. The author addresses vulnerability and resilience within a social system model starting from biophysical level, through psychological, sociologic, economic, political, until cultural symbolic level. He analyzed the phenomenon in adynamic interconnection between those subsystems. Territorial inequalities’ are social, ecological, psychological and politics. In his analyses of vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation in Tunisia, the author demonstrated that regional and social disparities in Tunisia are, in the same time, vulnerability and resilience inequalities towards environmental syndrome, which intensities and threats vary from social category to another and between regions. Finally, the author concluded that environmental disasters are not per se. They are, in fact, socially and culturally constructed. Assessing and mitigating those socio environmental facts require the understanding of the ex ante development policies, which had been focusing on economic growth only. Though, people well being needs also to pay more special attention to environmental dimension in order to achieve the sustainable development goals. KEYWORDS: Greening/Inequalities/ Resilience/ Vulnerability/Urban Planning