Urban Solidarity, A Key Issue to Sustainable Human Settlements

It is now quite clear that developing sustainable human settlements calls for a more holistic and collective approach. An approach that apprehend the city not only as an agglomeration of buildings, spaces and landscapes but also as that of many institutions, people and activities forming a collective whole.This paper focuses on the governing challenges faced by today's urban communities to achieve sustainable developments. It examines some “governance strategies” that most traditional cities have succeeded to implement over centuries with sustenance of social, economic and environmental order.Indeed, governance should not be one more imported concept, that we will have to automatically introduce to our environments without trying to learn from our traditional cities, as they even today continue to work as major places for employment, recreation and residence of the urban poor.