Structural Functionalism, Social Sustainability and the Historic Environment: A Role for Theory in Urban Regeneration

Abstract

Sustainable regeneration is an approach whose objective is to improve the economic, social and physical state of the historic environment. Social systems theory proposed by Talcott Parsons is similar to sustainable regeneration in that it approaches society as a functioning whole and seeks to understand the interrelatedness of its constituent parts. The aim of the present paper is to present a social sustainability model in the context of historic regeneration based on Parsons’ Systems Theory (AGIL). The statistical population of the research includes documents related to conservation released by Organization of World Heritage Cities, UNESCO and ICOMOS from 1990s onwards. The content validity of the research has been confirmed with an agreement coefficient of 87.6% in a Scott test and the research shows that, where cited, social capital has the function of adaptation, the component of equity has the function of goal attainment, social cohesion has the function of integration, and the component of identity has the function of latent pattern maintenance in the social sustainability of the historic environment. According to Parsons’ theory, each of the above components is considered as a system and the function of their indices was determined in a second analysis level. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.