Research project HL/DD/10 (Research action HL)
The Borinage region is without a doubt the most striking example in Belgium of spectacular but eventually futureless economic growth based on the intensive use of a non-renewable resource, coal. This activity, which paid little attention to the environmental and human costs that it would entail, influenced or determined all other economic activities in the area, and has now left the Borinage an economic, sociological, ecological, and town-planning disaster area.
Conducting an interdisciplinary, systemic analysis of this region over a more than 150-year period from the perspective of the current concept and models of sustainable development should reveal the decision-making, institutional, and cultural mechanisms that made this clearly ephemeral growth possible and thus give us the means to act more effectively today to prevent similar mistakes’ being made in developing and developed countries alike.
To achieve these goals the research will develop a simulation model that will reproduce the developments that occurred in the Borinage over the past century and explore the outcomes that other choices might have had (analysis of the documents will enable us to detect what might have made it possible to propose such choices).
The research will be more than a specific case study, although that is pertinent in itself. It aims more generally to develop methods for the early diagnosis of the lasting social, economic and environmental consequences of regional development and to explore the interrelationships amongst the demographic, economic, environmental, and cultural aspects of local development. At this stage in the research, diversity appears to be a key concept in the notion of sustainable local development. Economic, sociological, and land-use diversity appear to be indicators of and conditions for the sustainability (that is to say, adaptability) of development, at least in a context of open systems that are sensitive to technological change. Analysis of the exact role of such diversity and the way to preserve it should lead to proposals of the directions that investment and regional development policies should take.
Methods
The methods are rooted in systems theory, according to which the dynamics of a system is explained by its structure, that is to say, the positive and negative feedback that circulates amongst its elements. At the outset the project aimed to develop a digital simulation model that would allow us to test the validity of possibly crucial relationships from the standpoint of sustainable development. The lack of historical statistical data still available has made this modelling unfeasible but has not rendered the methodological and conceptual framework provided by the systems approach useless. We are also exploring the possibilities of ‘multi-agent’ modelling to study the role of and conditions for preserving the socio-economic diversity that appears to be as essential for the resiliency of our societies’ economies as biodiversity is for the resiliency of natural ecosystems.
working paper n° 7: L'éphémère croissance du Borinage: premières impressions, premières pistes
Paul-Marie Boulanger (ADRASS)
Working Paper n° 23 (août ‘98) :L’évolution de la population totale des anciennes communes de l’arrondissement de Mons au cours de la période 1831-1970
André Lambert (ADRASS)
La dynamique d'un développement non-durable: le Borinage de 1750 à 1990: rapport final
Boulanger, Paul-Marie - Lambert, André Bruxelles: SSTC, 2001 (SP0757)
[To download]
[Exhausted]
La dynamique d'un développement non-durable: le Borinage de 1750 à 1990: synthèse
Bruxelles: SSTC, 2001 (SP0758)
[To download]
The dynamics of a non-sustainable development: Borinage from 1750 to 1990: executive summary
Brussels: OSTC, 2001 (SP0759)
[To download]
