Author(s)

M. Rosini, N. Marchettini, V. Niccolucci & F. Mapelli

Abstract

It’s quite interesting to see how the debate on the limits of growth has vanished from Italian planners real agendas. The more \“sustainability” is recurring in local planning rhetoric, the more attention is focused just on the local conditions of environmental health. In order to de-link the ideas of welfare and growth, and to assess the actual influence of plans in resource management, it is useful to adopt a thermodynamic point of view: exergy and emergy are presented as two analogous, necessary and not-sufficient instruments to investigate such themes. From the perspective of global sustainability, plans are not able to deeply influence present consumption rates, determined from different scales of technological, socio-economic and historical premises, but ha

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