Hypotheses of a Heterodox Evolutionary Assessment Approach for the Sustainable City

This contribution outlines a path of analysis, evaluation, and interpretation of the concept of sustainability in its most challenging context, the city. It proposes a twofold approach that looks behind the concept of value as utility or efficiency in view of the potential arising from the constitutive ambiguity of urban signs: objects, circumstances, phenomena, processes. The first part of this experiment presents an orthodox approach mostly based on the description functions; the second one proposes a heterodox approach based on wider assessment functions according to an evolutionary approach articulated in the capacities of inertia, adaptation and ex-aptation that redefine the value functions defined to represent the main aspects of urban sustainability.