‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’

The brief history of the concept of sustainable development is well known. It gained its ‘right to the city’ with the definition quoted above. It was used in the famous 1987 Brundtland Report for the United Nations about the environment and development. Sustainable development made a timid appearance in the 1980 World Conservation Strategy prepared by the IUCN, the largest and most respected biodiversity and nature conservation organisation in the world. Its roots go back much further, however, demonstrating the so-far irreconcilable tension between its two concepts: the dynamic of growth and intensification associated with ‘development’ stands in contrast to the idea of balance and durability associated with the adjective ‘sustainable’.

The US author, professor and critic Svetlana Alpers, whose ground-breaking work redefined the field of art history in the last decades, has recently been awarded the 2023 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art by the College Art Association of America. In this conversation with Electra, Svetlana Alpers reflects on a lifetime spent thinking and writing about looking, revisiting the journey that has taken her from her early studies on Tiepolo, Rembrandt, and Rubens, to her most recent interest in both photographic images and autobiographical writing.

The central theme of this issue of Electra is Taste. To open this discussion, we might say that it is difficult to recognise a value of universal truth in the Latin maxim De gustibus non est disputandum – in matters of taste there can be no disputes – from the moment (that moment being the 18th century) when the world of taste replaced the world of beauty that had prevailed since Antiquity.

This article by Filomena Silvano, professor at NOVA University of Lisbon and author of the book Antropologia da Moda [Anthropology of Fashion], is about the relationship between taste and fashion and the construction of ourselves through the way we dress, extending into a reflection on the epochal transformations in the way fashion functions.

‘Adolescence’ is a psycho-sociological category that appeared in the early 20th century and provided America and Europe with projections of wellbeing, education and progress. As a result, young people gained an important status. They became the subject of a new culture whose history is recounted in this article by Jon Savage, a British journalist and music critic. He is also the author of Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875–1945 and Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, as well as other books about pop and punk-rock music and culture, including a history of the Sex Pistols.

The writer, literary critic and literature professor Éric Marty – author of Bref séjour à    Jérusalem – recounts his wanderings around Tel Aviv. He focuses on the city’s modernity and cosmopolitanism, which endow Israel with a different face than the one revealed by Jerusalem.

Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates. In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their  established boundaries.

The effects of May 1968 can be found in many current forms of struggle and revolt, where a new political awareness is being manifested — proof that the movement which erupted in Paris precisely 50 years ago had a highly mobilizing effect and cannot be reduced to a meaningless event: this is what American historian Kristin Ross shows us.

We look back at the 1920s from the 2020s and ask what happened then and what is happening now. Despite major changes, there are similarities that are not analogous but homologous (crises, pandemics, etc.). The American historian Bradley W. Hart, who received the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize in 2019, is a professor at California State University and an expert on this historical period, on which he has published several books. In this essay, he portrays an unstable, contradictory, perilous and fascinating decade when ‘there was no return to normality’ and anything seemed possible.

Our cities are increasingly acoustic cities. The most immense or most intimate public spaces are stages on which sound is one of the actors. John Bingham-Hall is the director of Theatrum Mundi, which was founded by the great sociologist and urbanist Richard Sennett. He works with Gascia Ouzounian, co-director of Recomposing the City, on the Acoustic Cities project. In this Metropolitan section, they talk about their work and the basic topics of sonic urbanism, including sonic citizenship, sonic archaeology and ‘sonic justice as a right to access to quiet or indeed to make noise’. A new way of hearing the city that underlies a new way of seeing the city.