Cross over now! Time and urban relational sustainability

Abstract

In this paper, we carried out a review of the different notions of sustainability and urban sustainable relationships in recent scientific papers. We related some of those notions to a specific event: crossing the road in places managed by traffic lights. We used an idiosyncratic approach to temporality in the sphere of the above-mentioned relationships. Accordingly, we presented the concept of vertical time opposing the traditional view, which we called horizontal time. Lastly, we offered a pair of instances taken from a field diary constructed on the basis of Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005, 2002, 2001) and certain interpretation of thick description as suggested by Clifford Geertz (2003). We concluded that urban sustainable relationships are complex, and in order to understand them it is necessary to take into account human and non-human mediators; i.e., intersubjectivity and interobjectivity (Latour, 2005)