Sustainability Citizenship in Cities 2016

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“This edited collection is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the

relation between citizenship and environmental sustainability. The authors
approach sustainability citizenship as a work-in-progress, but the focus on its
practical articulations — emphasising collective responsibilities, participatory
democracy and ‘being’ rather than ‘having’ — provides conceptual coherence
to the volume.”
—Benito Cao, Lecturer in Politics at the University of Adelaide,
Australia and author of Environment and Citizenship (2015)
“Finally, a bid for the future that is different, imaginative and realistic: a vision
which every reader can (perhaps should) help bring to life; a work that is not
only against neo-liberalism, but is for an achievable humane alternative that is
good for the world – its biodiversity, its sustainability and the wellbeing of its
stewards. A must-read within and beyond urban studies.”
—Susan J Smith, Honorary Professor of Social and Economic
Geography and The Mistress of Girton College, University of
Cambridge, UK
“Achieving voluntary behaviour change to sustainable forms of living and

consumption practices represents one of the grand challenges of the 21st
century. The model of sustainability citizenship advanced in this book represents
a critical and under-researched pathway to this transformation — beyond that
more commonly focused on individual attitudes and behaviours.”
—Peter W. Newton, Research Professor in Sustainable Urbanism,
Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
“This timely, comprehensive volume firmly ties the epic statement ‘global
environmental crisis’ to human experience in the urban age. In stories charged
as much with hope as danger, its contributors make clear that the serious species
threat posed by the ecological crisis is just as much an opportunity for myriad
forms of sustainability citizenship to evolve and flourish.”
—Brendan Gleeson, Director at the Melbourne Sustainable Society
Institute, The University of Melbourne, Australia
“Sustainability citizenship is a concept which can constructively move

discussion of social change for sustainability well beyond the limited framings
of neoliberal discourse. This unique collection takes a major step in advancing
understandings of sustainability citizenship by making clear that it is not only
an abstracted idealist concept but something happening, and shaping the future,
now.”
—Matt Watson, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, University of
Sheffield, UK
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Sustainability Citizenship
in Cities
Urban sustainability citizenship situates citizens as social change agents with

an ethical and self-interested stake in living sustainably with the rest of Earth.
Such citizens not only engage in sustainable household practices but respect the
importance of awareness raising, discussion and debates on sustainability policies
for the common good and maintenance of Earth’s ecosystems.
Sustainability Citizenship in Cities seeks to explain how sustainability citizenship
can manifest in urban built environments as both responsibilities and rights.
Contributors elaborate on the concept of urban sustainability citizenship as
a participatory work-in-progress with the aim of setting its practice firmly
on the agenda. This collection will prompt practitioners and researchers to
rethink contemporary mobilisations of urban citizens challenged by various
environmental crises, such as climate change, in various socio-economic settings.
This book is a valuable resource for students, academics and professionals
working in various disciplines and across a range of interdisciplinary fields, such
as: urban environment and planning, citizenship as practice, environmental
sociology, contemporary politics and governance, environmental philosophy,
media and communications, and human geography.
Ralph Horne is Professor of Geography, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT

University, Melbourne, Australia, and Director of the Cities Programme (United
Nations Global Compact).
John Fien, formerly Professor of Sustainability in RMIT University’s Innovation

Leadership Program (2005–2013), was appointed Executive Director of the
Swinburne University Leadership Institute, Hawthorn, Australia in late 2013.
Beau B. Beza is Senior Lecturer in the Planning and Landscape Architecture

Program, School of Architecture and Built Environment, Deakin University,
Geelong, Australia.
Anitra Nelson is Associate Professor in the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT
University, Melbourne, Australia.
Advances in Urban Sustainability
Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice

Circles of sustainability
Paul James
Sustainability Citizenship in Cities

Theory and practice
Edited by Ralph Horne, John Fien, Beau B. Beza and Anitra Nelson
Sustainability
Citizenship
in Cities
Theory and practice
Edited by Ralph Horne, John Fien, Beau B. Beza

and Anitra Nelson
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 selection and editorial matter, Ralph Horne, John Fien,

Beau B. Beza, Anitra Nelson; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the

editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks

or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Horne, Ralph, 1966– editor.
Title: Sustainability, citizenship and cities: theory and practice /
edited by Ralph Horne, John Fien, Beau B. Beza, Anitra Nelson.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016.
| Series: Advances in urban sustainability
Identifiers: LCCN 2015046310| ISBN 9781138933620 (hbk) |
ISBN 9781138933637 (pbk) | ISBN 9781315678405 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Environmental responsibility. |
Environmentalism. | Environmental policy–Citizen participation.
| Urban ecology (Sociology)–Citizen participation. | Sustainable
urban development–Citizen participation. | Urban policy–
Environmental aspects–Citizen participation.
Classification: LCC GE195.7 .S87 2016 | DDC 304.209173/2–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046310
ISBN: 978-1-138-93362-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-93363-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67840-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by HWA Text and Data Management, London
Contents
List of illustrations x
List of contributors xi
Acknowledgements xvi
List of abbreviations and acronyms xviii
1 Sustainability citizenship in cities 1

Ralph Horne, John Fien, Beau B. Beza and Anitra Nelson
Part I
Framing sustainability citizenship 15
2 The praxis of sustainability citizenship 17

Anitra Nelson
3 Urban resilience for sustainability 29

Alexei Trundle, Ralph Horne, John Fien and Ellis Judson
4 Urban food security and alternative economic practices 40

Ferne Edwards
5 Sustainability citizens: collaborative and disruptive social

learning 52
Arjen E.J. Wals and Frans Lenglet
viii Contents
Part II
Housing and social innovation 67
6 Green housing developments: sustainability pathway or

cul-de-sac? 69
Ralph Horne
7 Structuring housing provision for urban sustainability 80

Trivess Moore and Tony Dalton
8 Co-working communities: sustainability citizenship at work 93

Tim Butcher
9 Urban social innovation: mobilising sustainability citizenship 104

Ian McShane
Part III
Place, access and equity 115
10 The gendered city 117

Annette Gough
11 Informal settlements: sustainability citizenship in action 129

Jaime Hernández-García
12 Places for sustainability citizenship 139

Beau B. Beza
13 An Indigenous perspective on sustainability citizenship 150

David Jones and Beau B. Beza
Part IV
Citizen participation 163
14 Communicating sustainability in the city 165

Cathy Greenfield
15 The learning city for sustainability 176

Bruce Wilson
16 Curating the city: encouraging sustainability 187

Tammy Wong Hulbert
Contents ix
17 Ethical consumers and sustainability citizenship 199

Tania Lewis
18 Futures for sustainability citizenship 209

Anitra Nelson, Ralph Horne, Beau B. Beza and John Fien
Index 216
Illustrations
Figures
2.1 ‘Earth citizenship’ as ways of being, to achieve sustainability
citizenship 19
5.1 A multi-stakeholder learning cycle 62
16.1 Mobile Edible Gardens developed for the Flavours of Glenroy
project 188
16.2 Tammy Wong Hulbert setting up gardens for the event 190
16.3 Project team at Glenroy Post Office Place speaking to locals 191
16.4 After discussions with the FoG team, two participants leave with
edible plants 192
Tables
5.1 A typology of (in)determinacy, sustainability and associated action
possibilities 54
5.2 Dimensions of sustainability competence and associated
sustain‘abilities’ 55
5.3 The Fox–Gibson problem typology 58
7.1 Energy efficiency measures and tenures 87
10.1 Factors identified as limiting the ability to achieve greater levels
of equity 120
12.1 Think–Plan–Do framework for sustainability citizenship in action 147
Contributors
Beau B. Beza is Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Built

Environment at Deakin University (Geelong, Australia). He co-edited, and co-
authored three chapters in The Public City (Melbourne University Press, 2014).
He uses a place-making approach, and asset-based and co-production model,
to realise ‘places’ in urban and rural settings. He has worked on academic and
consultancy projects in Australia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Nepal,
Norway, Mexico, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the US. He manages
finances and researches for a $1.4 million research project improving the methods
and impacts of agricultural extension in conflict areas of Mindanao (Philippines).
Tim Butcher is Senior Lecturer in the School of Management, RMIT University

(Melbourne, Australia). Research interests focus on identity, belonging and place
at the intersections between community and organisation. An organisational
ethnographer, his published work covers a diversity of actors in organisational
contexts including: remote Indigenous communities, skilled machinists in
aerospace manufacturing, European supply chain managers and co-workers. Tim
is a member of the European Group of Organisation Studies and the Australia and
New Zealand Academy of Management, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of
Engineering Panasonic Trust (in recognition of his studies in sustainability).
Tony Dalton is Professor at the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University
(Melbourne, Australia). His research focus has been on changing housing markets
and distributional outcomes in a period of social and economic restructuring.
Throughout his research he has maintained a focus on the institutional context
of policy so that we can better understand both policy outcomes and the way that
different interests shape housing policy. More recently he has developed a research
xii List of contributors
interest in the challenge that climate change poses for urban housing provision.
Tony’s research interests connect to his involvement in non-government sector
policy work and advocacy through non-government organisations.
Ferne Edwards is a cultural anthropologist specialising in sustainable cities,

urban food systems and social movements. She has much international research
and university teaching experience on food security for sustainable global cities,
alternative food production and social change – themes of her doctoral thesis
completed at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health,
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Ferne’s publications span:
food waste, freeganism, food mapping, alternative food networks, climate change
and urban beekeeping. In 2013, she was appointed a World Social Science Fellow,
selected by the International Social Science Council (founded by UNESCO in
1952) to research urbanisation issues of the Global South.
John Fien is Executive Director of the Swinburne University Leadership

Institute (Hawthorn, Australia) and was Professor of Sustainability in RMIT
University’s Innovation Leadership Program (2005–2013). His five books include
Environmental Education: A Pathway to Sustainability (1993, Deakin University Press)
and the jointly edited Work, Learning and Sustainable Development (2008, Springer).
Extensively involved as a policy facilitator in establishing the United Nations
Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014), his recent
research has focused on governance, policymaking and capacity development in
addressing ‘wicked problems’.
Annette Gough is Research Professor Emerita in the School of Education

at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia). She previously held senior
appointments at RMIT University and Deakin University and has been a visiting
professor at universities in Canada, South Africa and Hong Kong. Her research
interests span environmental, sustainability and science education, research
methodologies, post-human and gender studies. She has completed research
projects for national and state governments as well as working with UNESCO,
UNEP and UNESCO-UNEVOC on several research and development projects.
Cathy Greenfield is Associate Professor of Communication at RMIT

University (Melbourne, Australia). Her scholarship focuses on the role of media
in the governance and the intersection of populism and democracy. Recent work
includes: an edited collection How We Are Governed (2014, Cambridge Scholars);
articles on the political-economic literacy of communication students ( Journal
of Cultural Economy), (with Peter Williams) media rhetoric and neoliberalism
(Australian Journal of Political Science) and the role of media in financialisation (Media,
Culture & Society; Australian Journal of Communication); and another Routledge
chapter, on ethical investment. She was General Editor of Communication, Politics
and Culture (1993–2011).
List of contributors xiii
Jaime Hernández-García is Associate Professor of the School of Architecture

and Design at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia) and Director
of the Aesthetics Department. He holds a PhD in Architecture, Planning and
Landscape from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne (UK). His doctoral
thesis, ‘El Parque de mi Barrio: Production and Consumption of Open Spaces in
Popular Settlements in Bogotá’, won an Iberoamerican Award for research theses
(INFONAVIT-Redalyc), México (2011). His research interests include: informal
settlements, low income housing, public space, people–place studies, community

participation, local knowledge and local expression.
Ralph Horne is Professor of Geography and Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor,

Research and Innovation for the College of Design and Social Context at RMIT
University (Melbourne, Australia). As Director of the Cities Programme,
the urban arm of the United Nations Global Compact, he combines research
leadership with collaboration in research concerning the environmental, social
and policy contexts of production and consumption in the urban environment.
His research interests centre on social and policy change in environmentally
sustainable design and development, relations between housing and households,
and he has extensive experience of environmental techniques and sustainability
appraisal.
Tammy Wong Hulbert is an artist, curator and academic. Her PhD thesis,
‘The City as a Curated Space’, completed at the School of Art, RMIT University
(Melbourne, Australia) re-imagined urban spaces as an alternative model of
exhibition practices and investigated the relationship between urban public art
planning and policy, public art activity and the urban art community. She has
worked as an artist, curator and arts manager in Sydney, Beijing and Melbourne.
Lecturer in arts management and art history, she researches in RMIT’s Centre for
Art, Society and Transformation and works with urban communities on public
art-based projects.
David Jones is Director of Planning and Landscape Architecture Programs in the

School of Architecture and Built Environment at Deakin University (Geelong,
Australia). Experienced in cultural landscape and Indigenous landscape practice
and research, he authored the primary evidence for the successful ‘Adelaide Park
Lands and City Layout’ National Heritage nomination, and numerous works
on Australia’s Indigenous culture and urban and rural development. Currently,
he researches on a range of Indigenous-related Australian projects, including:
educational strategies, Country meanings and associations, Country and climate
change relationships.
Ellis Judson is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Global Cities Research Institute

at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia). An applied social scientist with
a specific research interest in urban sustainability, her research centres on
xiv List of contributors
interactions between people, technology and the environment. She has conducted

and managed interdisciplinary research on sustainability and resilience in the built
environment, including collaborative government-industry projects to inform
programs, policy and practice. Ellis specialises in adaptation of existing building
stock and wider socio-technical systems to achieve environmental, amongst
other, objectives. She is interested in the role of actors, networks, and practices in
reshaping the urban environment.
Frans Lenglet received his doctorate in International Development Education

from Stanford University. Past Director of the Swedish International Centre of
Education for Sustainable Development (SWEDESD) at Uppsala University
(Visby, Sweden), Lenglet continues to be engaged in identifying, designing, testing,
researching and disseminating appropriate and effective content, approaches and
methods of ‘learning for sustainable change’ in formal, non-formal and informal
educational settings. Such learning aims at empowering individuals, communities
and organisations to make sustainable choices about the cultural, social, economic
and bio-physical conditions affecting the livelihood and well-being of current and
future generations, i.e. meeting human needs within planetary boundaries.
Tania Lewis – School of Media and Communication, RMIT University

(Melbourne, Australia) – researches lifestyle and consumption, with a particular
emphasis on community-based sustainability. She has published over 40 journal
articles and book chapters, wrote Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise
(2008, Peter Lang), co-wrote Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia
(2016, Duke University Press) and Digital Ethnography (2015, Sage), and has edited
or co-edited for Routledge: TV Transformations: Revealing the Makeover Show (2008),
Ethical Consumption: An Introduction (2010), Green Asia: Ecocultures, Sustainable
Lifestyles and Ethical Consumption (2016) and Lifestyle Media in Asia: Consumption,
Aspiration and Identity (2016).
Ian McShane is a Senior Research Fellow, leading the Urban Cultures and
Technologies program, at the Centre for Urban Research RMIT University
(Melbourne, Australia). His research interests include cultural institutions and
cultural policy, educational systems, digital technologies and local governance. In
his long involvement in museums and culture, Ian was a senior curator at the
National Museum of Australia and was appointed to UNESCO’s Creative Cities
Network external evaluation panel (2013).
Trivess Moore is a Research Fellow in the Beyond Behaviour Change group

in the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia).
He has a strong research interest in socio-technical transitions to a low-carbon
urban future, with a focus on low-carbon and low-energy housing and household
practices, through to life affordability, energy efficiency and renewable energy
technologies. Moore’s doctorate, ‘Facilitating a transition to zero emission new
List of contributors xv
housing in Australia: Costs, benefits and direction for policy’, was completed in
2012.
Anitra Nelson is Associate Professor at the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT
University (Melbourne, Australia). Her research focuses on community-based
sustainability and natural resource management, housing affordability, and the
case for non-monetary futures. Sole editor of Steering Sustainability in an Urbanizing
World: Policy, Practice and Performance (2007, Ashgate) and co-editor of Life Without
Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (2011, Pluto Press) and Planning After
Petroleum:Preparing Cities for the Age beyond Oil (2016, Routledge), she has published
more than 100 works, of various kinds, and is currently writing Small is Necessary:
The Efficiencies of Shared Living (forthcoming, Pluto Press).
Alexei Trundle is a Research Associate in the Global Cities Research Institute’s

Climate Change Adaptation Programme at RMIT University (Melbourne,
Australia). His work is focused around climate change adaptation, impacts and
resilience in cities of the Global South, particularly in South-East Asia and the
South Pacific. His approach integrates climate science and policy with bottom-up,
participatory action research methodologies. His other research interests include
precinct-scale adaptation across the private–public spatial interface in cities of
the Global North. In 2015 he developed a climate adaptation plan for RMIT
University’s main campus in Melbourne.
Arjen E. J. Wals is a UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable

Development, Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological
Sustainability at Wageningen University (the Netherlands), part-time Professor at
Gothenburg University (Sweden) and an Adjunct Faculty member of the Civic-
Ecology Lab at Cornell’s Department of Natural Resources. His work centres on
how to create conditions that support forms of learning that take full advantage
of the diversity, creativity and resourcefulness around us, resources that remain
largely untapped in our search for a world that is more sustainable than the one
currently in prospect. See his blog: http://transformativelearning.nl/
Bruce Wilson is Professor and Director of the EU-funded European Union

Centre at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia) and a specialist in learning
and knowledge for economic, social and public innovation in city-regions. He
leads a major project on comparative regional policy, looking at interventions to
improve the living and working conditions of people in metropolitan and rural
city-regions, and led RMIT’s contribution to the major European City-Regions
as Intelligent Territories: Inclusion, Competitiveness and Learning project (2003–
2007). He was co-author of The New Imperative: Regions and Higher Education in
Difficult Times (2013, Manchester University Press).
Acknowledgements
The editors of this collection thank all the contributors, many of whom have
collaborated on sustainability projects at RMIT University (Melbourne)
through an association with the Global Cities Research Institute (GCRI). We
especially thank the GCRI for sponsoring this book project, which included
peer review processes, two workshops with contributors and extensive editing.
The book project aligned well with the GCRI’s programs of international
research – climate change adaptation, sustainable urban and regional futures
and urban decision-making and complex systems – and with the UN Global
Compact-Cities Program, the international secretariat for which is hosted at
RMIT University.
Indeed, the inspiration for the book came, in part, from the central role of
one of our editors (John Fien) as the Themes Editor in compiling the GCRI’s
Annual Review 2102: Global Cities (2013) – (eds) P. James and N. Soguk – which
included short briefs of current research by the institute’s various staff researchers
and research associates. Thus, we gratefully acknowledge connections between
certain works in that annual review and chapters in this collection. The latter
either draw a few paragraphs from that earlier work or are expanded and
updated versions, benefitting from reflection and reporting on recent work.
This acknowledgement refers in particular to the following contributions and
contributors: Chapter 8 (Co-working communities: Sustainability citizenship at
work) by Tim Butcher develops on his ‘Co-working in the city’ (58–61); Chapter
15 (The learning city for sustainability) by Bruce Wilson has some similarities
with his ‘Learning-City regions, city-regional learning’ (87–89); new themes are
explored by Cathy Greenfield in Chapter 14 (Communicating sustainability in
the city) to her contribution of the same name in the annual review (90–93); and,
Chapter 17 by Tania Lewis (Ethical consumers and sustainability citizenship) is
an expanded and updated version of ‘Ethical consumption’ (67–71).
Acknowledgements xvii
The editors also thank Deakin University for the use of the Melbourne
City Centre meeting facilities for the two book project workshops, enabling
contributors to come together to discuss their drafts and debate their concepts
of sustainability citizenship.
Ralph Horne acknowledges that cases in his Chapter 6 draw from a study
funded by the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research –
Resilient Urban Systems. Horne, the lead investigator in this collaborative project
between RMIT University, University of Melbourne and the Government of

Victoria, gratefully acknowledges the work of the rest of the research team:
Paula Arcari, Che Biggs, Cecily Maller, Yolande Strengers and Chris Ryan.
In writing Chapter 13, David Jones and Beau B. Beza kindly acknowledge
support provided by Caroline Reisacher, Greg Grabasch, Jim Sinatra, Darryl
Low Choy and the editors.
Figure 2.1 (‘Earth citizenship’ as ways of being, to achieve sustainability
citizenship) is a slightly adapted version of a figure originally printed in State
of NSW (2009) Earth Citizenship: A Conceptual Framework for Learning for
Sustainability, Draft Working Paper, 30 October, Sydney (New South Wales),
Department of Education and Training: 7.
Table 5.3 (The Fox–Gibson problem typology) is a reformatted version
of a 2013 table by Mo Fox and Rob Gibson (http://mofox.com/pdf/
simple,complex,wicked.pdf).
The source of Table 10.1 (Factors identified as limiting the ability to achieve
greater levels of equity) is UN-Habitat (2013) State of Women in Cities 2012–
2013: Gender and the Prosperity of Cities, United Nations Human Settlements
Programme, Nairobi: 61.
The editors especially thank the sources of the book’s front cover – the image
of a mural created by Beth Ferguson, Founding Director of Sol Design Lab (San
Francisco, California) for the squatted social centre, residence and community
garden Can Masdeu, Collserola Park, Canyelles, Barcelona (photograph taken
mid-2012 by Anitra Nelson).
Abbreviations and acronyms
ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics

ACA Aurora Community Association
AFN Alternative Food Network
AHURI Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute
ARM Ashton Raggatt McDougall (Melbourne)
BLLC Boletín Las Lomas Chapultepec
BPIE Buildings Performance Institute Europe
CAMEBA Carácas Slum Upgrading Project
CBD central business district
CO2 carbon dioxide
DANE Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística
(Colombia)
DC District of Columbia
DCLG Department for Communities and Local Government (London)
DECC Department of Energy and Climate Change (London)
DIY do it yourself
EC European Commission
ECRC Environment and Communications References Committee
EDUIMHE OECD Higher Education Programme: Institutional Management
in Higher Education
EIU Economist Intelligence Unit
EJOLT Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade
EPIA European Photovoltaic Industry Association
EU European Union
EVAW Ending Violence Against Women Coalition
FBI Federal Bureaux of Investigation
FoG Flavours of Glenroy (project)
List of abbreviations and acronyms xix
GCRI Global Cities Research Institute

GDP gross domestic product
GFN Global Footprint Network
GJ gigajoule/s
GW gigawatt/s
IANWGE Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality
ICT information and communication technology
IEA International Energy Agency

IPA Indigenous Protected Area (Australia)
JAC Junta de Acción Comunal (Community Action Group)
JCHS Joint Center for Housing Studies (Harvard University)
km kilometre/s
L litre/s
LILARA Learning in Local and Regional Authorities
MCC Moreland City Council
MDG Millennium Development Goal
MEG Mobile Edible Garden (installation)
NGO non-government organisation
NSW New South Wales
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
PALLACE Promoting Active Lifelong Learning Links between Australia,
Canada, China and Europe
PIA Planning Institute of Australia
POMEPS Project on Middle East Political Science
ppm parts per million
PV photovoltaic/s (solar)
RECs Renewable Energy Certificates (Australia)
SI social innovation
SLIM Social Learning for Integrated Management
SUS Supporting Urban Sustainability
TAI The Australia Institute
TELS Towards a European Learning Society
UIL UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning
UK United Kingdom
UNCHS United Nations Centre for Human Settlements
UNEP United Nations Environment Programme
UNESCO United Nations Organisation for Education, Science and Culture
UNEVOC UNESCO International Centre for Technical and Vocational
Education and Training
US United States (of America)
WHO World Health Organisation
WOC Westwyck Owners Corporation
YBCP Yawuru Birragun Conservation Park
YRNTBC Yawuru Registered Native Title Body Corporate

1
Sustainability citizenship
in cities
Ralph Horne, John Fien, Beau B. Beza and

Anitra Nelson
As the twenty-first century gathers pace, these words of Derek Osborn’s (2002:
xvi) have only gained greater credence:
The environment is deteriorating. The pressures of population and

unsustainable consumption are increasing. The natural world and
biodiversity are suffering. Poverty is endemic. Inequalities between and
within countries are growing more acute. Globalisation is opening up the
whole world to the free market. But proper guidance or regulation of this
market to protect the environment and social goods is lagging behind.
Then Chair of the United Nations Environment and Development UK

Committee, Osborn pointed to ‘citizenship’ and the 2002 World Summit on
Sustainable Development in Johannesburg as ‘a prime opportunity for a new
generation of active champions to seize hold of the sustainable development
agenda and push it forward vigorously’.
In this urban century, notions of ‘sustainability citizenship’ encompass
collective responsibility and action in the socio-environmental transformation
of cities adversely influenced by neoliberalism. Right around the world the
neoliberal current has given politicians and bureaucrats a reason to spread the
ethos of individual rights over collective responsibility and to reify monetary
‘free market’ mechanisms as a primary means to achieve desired outcomes in
social and environmental – as well as economic – areas, often at the expense of
social justice, public deliberation and environmental sustainability.
Neoliberalism lies beyond a single political or economic theory as a dualist
paradigm that positions nature and society as separate realms and with society
superior to nature, which has value only insofar as it serves the utilitarian
2 Ralph Horne, John Fien, Beau B. Beza and Anitra Nelson
monetary goals of society. Countering this dualism, the concept of sustainability

citizenship posits reality as a product of both ecological (biophysical) and social
relations and processes. Climate change illustrates how relations between the
biophysical and social worlds interact, how these processes impact on one
another, and how our understanding of both can never be entirely neutral or
objective. Specifically, many purely market-based solutions to climate change
are simplistic, have proved unsuccessful and are likely to exaggerate the power
of drivers and processes that have led to run-away carbon emissions, rather than
unifying stakeholders holistically in the practice of multiple strategies.
The question of how emerging manifestations of urban sustainability
citizenship shape and, in turn ,are shaped by social and environmental relations
in the sustainable city is the focus of this collection Sustainability Citizenship in
Cities: Theory and Practice. In developing this collection, the editors have drawn on
their extensive research on sustainability, policy and community-based action.
Altogether, the contributors provide both a diverse set of critical perspectives
and a coherent commentary on the prospects for change through the practice
of ‘sustainability citizenship’ in our increasingly densely populated global cities.
From self-interested individuals to responsible citizens

Despite outbursts of Keynsianesque policy activity in the years following the
Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the radical props provided by states to financial
markets exemplify an era of ineffectively challenged hegemonic neoliberalism.
In practical terms, the contemporary ‘world recession has unleashed a potent
newer variant of neo-liberalism, “austerity governance”, which has sought to
socialise the losses incurred in the great economic default’ (Gleeson and Beza
2014: 2). The kinds of pressure and resistance that attend austerity have been
exemplified in the case of Greece defaulting on its IMF debt mid-2015. The
state is in retreat from notions of the welfare state, universal healthcare and
education, and from extending equality and respect from countries of the Global
North to the Global South.
As the market encroaches more on our lives, ‘sustainability citizenship’ is
marginalised by those who support the central neoliberal idea that citizens are
utility-maximising beings whose individual self-interest serves and drives profit
and growth. Action for the common good and for the good of ‘the commons’
tends to lie at the margins of discourse of contemporary city leadership. At the
same time, the political will to tackle dangerous climate change has not yet
materialised. Despite diplomatic efforts and those of a myriad non-government
organisations, the world drifts further and further from the goal of a 2°C cap on
increasing greenhouse gases, even as this goal increasingly appears less ambitious
than necessary (IEA 2013: 2; Spratt 2015).
Given these trends, what roles might citizens have to provide leadership
and action on future environmental sustainability? Post-austerity governance
is coinciding with rapid growth in the number and spread of environmental
Sustainability citizenship in cities 3
sustainability initiatives that demonstrate self-reliance and ethical concerns.

From farmers’ markets to self-provisioning, from anti-consumption movements
to social media activism, we are witnessing shifts in citizen action. People join
together, often virtually, not only to exchange labour, goods and services in
non-monetary ways locally but also to embark on various social, cooperative
and collaborative enterprises in networks that are distinct from the mainstream
economy. Through social and solidarity economy initiatives, people form
cooperatives and alternative trading systems, and make consumption choices

reflecting altruism and empathy with fellow citizens and concerns for the
sustainability of the planet, rather than solely reproducing selfish behaviour
encouraged by neoliberal ideas (Utting 2015).
The idea of citizens participating in designing and co-creating sustainable,
human-scale, locale-centred and community-centred urban environments is
not new. In her landmark publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
Jane Jacobs (1961) changed the face of contemporary planning by articulating
the ‘idealist’ vision of walkable suburbs with residential populations that
support rich local services and communities. New Urbanism, mainly in the
US, spawned trends that are still gaining traction, definition and direction across
the Global North. In certain respects, the idea of sustainability citizenship is
aligned to such visions of just, diverse, rich and walkable urban settings. Given
entrenched socio-economic and governance structures, how realistic is the
potential for such initiatives to direct civic development and foster a (re)turn
to environmental sustainability and Lefebvre’s notion of ‘the right to the city’
(Kofman and Lebas 1996)? Are post-austerity elections of radical mayors – as
in Barcelona and Madrid mid-2015 – a short-lived reaction or the start of such
a turn, perhaps to cooperative co-management of local resources and genuine
environmental stewardship?
Urban sustainability citizenship

In a single generation, ‘sustainability’ has become a ubiquitous term, entering
everyday language and practices. It has entered educational curricula at all
levels. Communities regularly include sustainability among their core values.
In owner-occupier based societies housing is being retrofitted for sustainability.
One of the more dramatic shifts has been the significant uptake of domestic
solar photovoltaic (PV) electric and hot water systems in the UK, the US,
Australia and Europe. Australia had just 8,000 rooftop solar PV systems in 2007,
ballooning to more than one million by 2013 (Flannery and Sahajwalla 2013: 4).
Such broad scale change is being driven in bottom-up and top-down ways.
The global domestic solar transition has been driven by millions of decisions
by householders to make their dwellings less reliant on non-renewable energy.
Furthermore, many community-based solar installation schemes have propelled
these individual decisions. Urban sustainability citizenship is a social movement.
The social practices of retrofitting imbricate with new more sustainable home
energy use and consumption more generally. As sustainability citizens, we make

changes and, at the same time, everything and everyone changes us.
While governments have been a player, offering rebates and other market-
based incentives, the transition to solar is essentially a story of socio-technical
change (Horne and Dalton 2014). By mid-2014, The Australia Institute (TAI
2014: 1) could report that some ‘2.6 million people, or 11 percent of the
Australian population, now get some of their electricity from solar power’.
Householders have gone into co-management arrangements as both producers

and consumers of domestic energy. An unintended consequence has been a
fundamental shift in the profile and number of energy generators. The few large
corporate, fossil-based plant owners are challenged by millions of small-scale
householder generators, leaving a neoliberal government searching to protect
corporate interests and stranded assets.
In this example, the electric grid infrastructure is predicated upon
continuation of a supply–demand divide. However, in the immediate future,
millions of customers will be able to access cheap storage technology, such as
batteries, to manage ‘their’ new resource by harvesting it locally, and businesses
are emerging to take advantage of opportunities to offer off-grid services.
Have privatised utilities missed the boat? Parkinson (2015) explains how a real
alternative exists to ever-rising bills as sustainability citizens take matters into
their own hands using a combination of accessible technologies.
This simple example shows how, in an era of globalising neoliberal
ascendancy coupled with climate change, there is growing tension between
the individualised profit-seeking self-interest promoted by contemporary
political-economic hegemonies, and the challenge to cooperate to save the
global commons and maintain a habitable planet. This tension is playing out in
cities with the rise of new forms of media and community, local organisations
and community-based action. The starting point and central thesis of this
collection is that, taken together, participatory and collective interventions can
be recognised as forms of urban sustainability citizenship. To understand this
phenomenon better, we need to examine social and cultural processes in the city
as part of living, breathing socio-material infrastructures.
Significantly, in this collection (as detailed in Chapter 2), the sustainability
citizenship concept implies responsibilities as well as rights for active participatory
engagement in governance. Urban sustainability citizenship situates citizens as
social change agents with an ethical and self-interested stake in living sustainably
with the rest of Earth, both with a diversity of other people and in tune with
the ecological systems that comprise nature. Sustainability citizens engage
in, or at least accept the desirability and importance of, awareness raising,
discussion and debates on sustainability policies for ‘glocal’ (global and local)
common good, and their responsibility for maintaining Earth’s ecosystems as
custodians of the biosphere. Urban sustainability citizens drive to create urban
settings, living environments and living styles that are community-centred and
environmentally sustainable.
Dimensions explored in this collection

In contrast to more abstract starting points, we view sustainability citizenship
as a work-in-progress definition referring to both the goals and results
of an immediately necessary structural and cultural socio-environmental
transformation taking place in cities. Following Giddens (1984), we recognise
that spaces of potential have both physical and cultural dimensions that shape
the emergence of possibilities just as, once realised, social institutions and
urban infrastructure re-shape our co-constructed physical and cultural realities.
The phenomenon of urban sustainability citizenship is neither divorced from
social structures nor is it an excuse for governments and leaders to absolve
their responsibilities for the transition to sustainability and simply leave it in
the hands of citizens. On the contrary, just as governance is in part constrained
and constituted by social and cultural practices, so the opposite is also true; the
sustainability citizenship project is as much about structuring forces and control
of power and resources as it is about turning off lights or urban gardening.
Our emphasis in this collection is on questions surrounding practical and
collective transformation rather than discourses based on legal, prescriptive,
ideal and philosophical rights and duties. We expect that sustainability citizenship
will lie at the core of the urban experience if people are to achieve liveable and
sustainable cities. The emphasis is beyond efforts that present stark alternatives
to neoliberal urbanism, such as Fainstein (2010) and Harvey (2012), to focus on
and debate issues surrounding the processes and circumstances pertaining to
the emergence and dynamics of sustainability citizenship in practice right now.
In taking a pluralistic and pragmatic approach to urban sustainability
citizenship, it is important to acknowledge a vast breadth of existing interest,
relevant literature and related fields across the social sciences and humanities
in disciplines such as sociology, design, politics, planning and urban economics
as well as fields of study centring on policy, governance, development, the
environment and sustainability. The contributions for this collection offer
a range of cases and perspectives treated in interdisciplinary ways but the
centrality of policy remains as a core theme. Given that, to date, the idea of
‘sustainability citizenship’ has been neither widely theorised nor gained
currency, all contributors seek to show how it is evolving in their discipline and
field of practice.
The contributors have aimed to elaborate on and advance the concept of
urban sustainability citizenship and to set its practice firmly on the policy agenda
of state politicians and bureaucrats in a post-neoliberal future. Each contributor
forms intellectual bridges between diverse literatures to give body to the core
idea of sustainability citizenship. Each charts how the dynamics of sustainability
citizenship are playing out in contemporary debates. They identify recent,
emerging and prospective shifts in theory, approaches and practical examples
that are prompting practitioners and researchers to rethink contemporary
understandings of urban citizens in a world of climate change; address challenges
and prospects by defining appropriate policy settings; and speculate on future

relations, roles and understandings of people and the city.
We define urban sustainability citizenship in a simple and straightforward
way to show its practical application as both a goal and a result of political,
economic and built environmental initiatives by states and communities that
are seeking to incorporate socio-environmental transformation. Our emphasis
is not on legal, prescriptive, ideal and philosophical rights and duties – as
many of the contributions in this field are – but rather on practical questions
surrounding collective transformation. As such, the contributions focus on and
debate issues such as process and policy, circumstance and context, activity and
change enablers. Therefore, we present an intentionally pragmatic approach
to urban sustainability citizenship for social science and humanities scholars
and students in areas such as governance, design, planning, development,
environmental, sustainability, sociology, politics, policy, and urban economics.
Equally, its practical approach makes our book a handy briefing manual on
critical socio-economic contexts for technical and scientific practitioners,
scholars and students, such as sustainability inventors, innovators and process
designers.
The four co-editors and all the contributors represent a breadth of
international and interdisciplinary experience in sustainability. Although our
primary emphasis in case studies and analyses is on cities of the Global North,
Latin American cases dominate in terms of the Global South. Ferne Edwards
(Chapter 4) considers food security and self-provisioning in three cities
of Venezeula, including the capital Caracas, as well as in Sydney (Australia).
Jaime Hernández-García (Chapter 11) and Beau B. Beza (Chapter 12) draw on
research in Colombia for their insights on sustainability citizenship in informal
settlements so common in the Global South.
The book is structured into four parts; and summaries of each part, and then
each chapter, follow. Each editor took particular responsibility for one part: John
Fien for ‘Framing sustainability citizenship’ (Part I); Ralph Horne for ‘Housing
and social innovation’ (Part II); Beau B. Beza for ‘Place, access and equity’ (Part
III); and Anitra Nelson for ‘Citizen participation’ (Part IV).
Part I: Framing sustainability citizenship

Part I covers theoretical frameworks informing the emerging concept of
sustainability citizenship as a veritable work-in-progress. In Chapter 2, Anitra
Nelson outlines the ‘praxis’ of sustainability citizenship, a form of citizenship
that has come of age in urban areas as Earth strains under the pressures of
population, consumerism and decision-making by a minority under the guiding
star of profit. Alexei Trundle et al. explore, in Chapter 3, the background and
centrality of urban resilience for sustainability citizenship from the frame of city
planners’ perspectives of infrastructure. In Chapter 4, Ferne Edwards shows
sustainability citizenship arising in the frame of basic needs in voluntary and
state-led food programs in cities across the Global North and the Global South.
Arjen Wals and Frans Lenglet frame sustainability citizenship for teachers and
trainers, in Chapter 5, in terms of collaborative and disruptive socio-ecological
learning and agency.
In ‘The praxis of sustainability citizenship’ (Chapter 2) Anitra Nelson
asks: How might we most usefully theorise current activities identified as
sustainability citizenship in action? Discussions of both what ‘sustainability’
means and implies, and previous theorisations of ‘environmental’, ‘ecological’

and ‘sustainability’ citizenships introduce an analysis showing five characteristics
of existing sustainability citizenship that distinguish it from other forms of
citizenship. These characteristics are identified as the centrality of the ecological;
its ‘glocal’ (rather than national) nature; the emphasis on duties rather than
rights; participatory democracy and shared governance; and the agency of
‘being’ rather than the passivity of ‘having’.
Using resilience concepts and case studies of cities, Trundle et al. (Chapter 3)
elaborate on complementarities between the dual ideals of ‘sustainability
citizenship’ and ‘resilient cities’. Despite their separate histories and trajectories,
and the lack of an operable methodological interface between ‘sustainability’
and ‘resilience’, interrelations include the potential to improve livelihoods and
liveability of citizens. Although these concepts are often misused – exacerbating
techno-centrism, exclusivity, vulnerability and inequality – Trundle et al. argue
that sustainability-minded citizens will embrace the transformative aspects of
urban resilience, such as safe failure, redundancy and building back better.
In ‘Urban food security and alternative economic practices’ (Chapter 4),
Ferne Edwards shows how alternative food economies have different
configurations in cities of the Global North and Global South. In the former
cities, people ‘glean’, ‘grow’ and ‘gift’ food, whereas in the latter, urbanites have
experienced the emergence of the ‘food sovereignty’ movement. In the Global
North, alternative food economies represent disparate pathways insufficient to
guarantee nutrition security and simply add fresh, new flavours, textures and
nutritional elements to diets. In the Global South, alternative food systems
provide significant food security improvements hampered, in the case studied
by Edwards, by associated political unrest. Both initiate forms of autonomy for
citizens to embrace greater control over food procurement, addressing aspects
of food security and urban sustainability concerns – the bases of sustainability
citizenship.
In ‘Sustainability citizens: Collaborative and disruptive social learning’
(Chapter 5) Arjen E.J. Wals and Frans Lenglet argue for new forms of learning
and competencies to address the indeterminacy of sustainability and moral
responsibilities of taking care of Earth and its people. Sustainability needs
continuous recalibration and active citizenship. Furthermore, the capacity to
disrupt and transform prevailing, dominant and unquestioned frameworks
and systems that predetermine and structure social and economic behaviour
is characteristic of the sustainability citizen. Two successful social learning
approaches are described that encourage citizens to practise sustain‘ability’

by engaging in public debates in urban (and rural) contexts. They show how
deliberative, disruptive and transgressive collaborative learning enables self-
empowerment in the quest for ethical and meaningful lives.
Part II: Housing and social innovation

Part II deals with the intersection of ‘materialities’ – such as housing, workplaces

and digital devices – with social processes, such as habitation, work and
innovation. In different ways, each chapter charts intersections of activities
by governments, private sector firms and civil society. They situate urban
sustainability citizenship, sharing the common threads of interplay between
structure and agency, showing how social and material structures constrain,
limit and shape action, and how notions and actions of citizenship in turn shape
structure. By way of an example, in a digital world, not only are communities
often virtual, but also the means of urban communications and change can be
transformational.
To illustrate how a householder navigates sustainability citizenship in
real situations, in Chapter 6 ‘Green housing developments: Sustainability
pathway or cul-de-sac?’, Ralph Horne couples the materiality of housing and
technologies with considerations of motivation, aspiration and life stage, skills
and knowledge, social rules, common understandings of sustainability and
governance arrangements. The observance of sustainability citizenship in two
contrasting ‘green housing’ developments reveals rich evidence of innovation
sprinkled throughout their habitations. Just as daily lives are characterised by
what may appear to be repetitive domestic duties, so they are also in dynamic
flux. As new technologies arise or ‘normal’ standards of home management
evolve, new avenues are opened up and domestic duties shift. The key
differences between the two communities discussed do not lie in aspirations,
skills and knowledge, or behaviour, but in governance, structuring and social
practices – showing significant implications for the structuring of sustainability
citizenship.
In Chapter 7, ‘Structuring housing provision for urban sustainability’, Trivess
Moore and Tony Dalton emphasise materiality and governance as mechanisms
of control and constraint. Tenure and typology are key factors in the extent to
which housing tenants or owners harness different sustainability options, options
that vary according to whether the dwelling is detached, duplex or dormitory
accommodation. The authors emphasise that tenants are constrained, by legal
options and financial incentives, to retrofit for sustainability in fewer ways than
owner occupiers. Temporal factors are also at play. Older houses were invariably
built in times when internal temperature control was not envisaged as it is today
– they often contain no insulation but plentiful gaps and cracks to let inclement
weather into the living room uninvited. In this way, the climate and weather is
an essential element in the materiality of sustainability citizenship.
In ‘Co-working communities: Sustainability citizenship at work’, Tim

Butcher (Chapter 8) shows how co-workers attempt to escape capitalist
organisation and identify as freelancers or social entrepreneurs rather than
as part of a global workforce. His ethnographic observations of co-working
communities in Austin (Texas, US), London (UK), Sydney and Melbourne
(Australia) reveal a sense of belonging to lived alternatives towards change.
Intimate accounts illuminate the bundling of effort and tensions between having
to make money to survive yet trying to live by alternative principles. Beyond a

basic need for stability and security, many co-working projects experience a fluid
and temporary existence. As tensions play out, the co-worker movement has
inevitably stratified, some segments gravitating towards capitalist models, others
taking emancipatory journeys but still constrained by the world around.
In Chapter 9 ‘Urban social innovation: Mobilising sustainability citizenship’,
Ian McShane presents the idea of innovation from two, in many ways
oppositional, starting points. First, Schumpeter’s enduring material idea of
capitalist entrepreneurship, where products, processes and technologies are
clustered into constellations within which the acceleration of ideas is self-
supporting, resulting in rapid change. Second, the idea of territorial social
innovation, where a post-industrial setting combined with an ethical/social/
sustainability imperative amongst participants leads to the formation of novel
solutions to social problems that are more efficient than simple individual
profit-based models of service delivery. Wikipedia and Uber barely touch the
surface of potential as a huge array of social innovations emerges at the urban
scale and beyond.
Part III: Place, access and equity

Contributors to Part III examine place, access and equity characteristics of urban
sustainability citizenship. The gendered situation of women (Chapter 10), for
instance, poses questions about generalising basic rights of citizenship at the
same time as advancing responsibilities for sustainability. The contributors to
questions of ‘place’ (Chapters 11 and Chapter 12) ask: How is sustainability
citizenship operationalised and more generally practised in urban precincts
with distinct cultural and demographic characteristics? How can health, safety
and liveability be preserved and enhanced in cities? As cities are melting pots
of people from a variety of contrasting, even conflicting, backgrounds, the
intertwined role of the citizen and collective within social change is posed in
acute ways in Chapter 13, which focuses on Indigenous perspectives. In other
words, this part charts the challenges of fulfilling sustainability citizenship in the
face of inequity and the implications of changing notions of ‘community’ for
urban sustainability citizenship.
In ‘The gendered city’ (Chapter 10), Annette Gough shows that strategies
for accomplishing gender equality parallel sustainability citizenship concerns
with achieving an economically viable, socially fair and environmentally
sustainable society. Gough focuses on issues of gender equality, such as urban

demographics; divisions of labour (paid and unpaid employment); physical
capital (land, housing, urban services, violence, health services); space; mobility
and connectivity; power and rights; and barriers to women’s empowerment.
Her discussions include examples of empowerment projects in India, The
Gambia, Liberia and Venezuela.
In Chapter 11, ‘Informal settlements: Sustainability citizenship in action’,
Jaime Hernández-García focuses on the individual and collective initiatives

of informal settlers to produce space and transform their living environment
(barrios) to accommodate the social and economic needs of residents. Here
‘to be’ is more important than ‘to have’, yet the settlers take responsibility for
their locale as owners do. Using several cases of informal settlements in Bogotá
(Colombia), Hernández-García discusses how socio-spatial production of
barrios can constitute alternative, positive examples of sustainability citizenship
in practice.
In ‘Places for sustainability citizenship’ (Chapter 12), Beau B. Beza
emphasises that dynamic cities are socio-political processes for embedding and
maintaining values and meanings expressing ‘place’ and reflecting residents’
desires for urban outcomes. Exploring the principles and interdisciplinary
implementation of place-making, Beza argues that two complementary courses
of action are needed to enact sustainability citizenship and effect a transformation
of the urban environment: first, a social and behavioural evolution towards
collective responsibility that actively contests and reverses the effects of
neoliberal urbanism and, second, a physical transformation of the urban setting
by vigorously applying a range of targeted approaches purposely developed to
realise environmental sustainability.
In ‘An Indigenous perspective on sustainability citizenship’ (Chapter 13),
David Jones and Beau B. Beza consider sustainability citizenship through the
lens of Australian Aboriginal culture by focusing on Indigenous concepts of land
and their belief in and relationship with ‘Country’ as an interconnected system.
In contrast to non-Aboriginal Australian understandings of and relationships
with land, Indigenous perceptions offer insights and content for the emerging
concept and practice of sustainability citizenship in cities. This point is shown
in an example of cultural appropriation and (mis)representation of a leading
Aboriginal figure in the design of a new landmark building in Melbourne’s
central business district and by discussing the need for more community
engagement in local government planning activities.
Part IV: Citizen participation

Part IV recognises the central theme of participation in responses to the
question: How are practices and ideas of sustainability citizenship propagated
and diffused? As such, Chapter 14 argues how theories of communication can be
employed to advance participation in sustainability, just as Chapter 15 discusses
how the global movement for a learning city has incorporated sustainability and
is participatory in principle and method. The ways in which citizens learn and
cities can be ‘curated’ is the theme of Chapter 16, which analyses a program
using the primary need for, and interest in, food to encourage participation in
talks on sustainability. Participation in the market, specifically the emergence
and propagation of ethical consumption, is central to Chapter 17, which offers
a critique of consumer and corporate citizenship that throws the praxis of
sustainability citizenship into sharp relief.

In ‘Communicating sustainability in the city’ (Chapter 14), Cathy Greenfield
argues that pursuing environmental sustainability demands that communication
is viewed as more than an instrumental tool and that communicating
sustainability must be more than a functional challenge of getting a message
through to rational citizens. Taking seriously the discursive means available to
populations tells us how actors come to formulate their interests and decide
and act in accordance with sustainability citizenship (or otherwise). Both Bruno
Latour’s ‘talking politically’ and examples of communicative practices – from
Australian media coverage of elections to recent interactive websites exploring
decarbonisation – are considered in her analysis of the formation of citizens and
publics for sustainability.
The relevance of collaborative learning in urban contexts and its importance
in developing citizens’ individual and shared engagement in place-based
development are explored in Bruce Wilson’s ‘The learning city for sustainability’
(Chapter 15). Specifically, he explores the potential contribution of the ‘learning
city’ to the practices and ideas of sustainability citizenship, asking: What do the
‘methodologies’ of learning cities add to approaches for enabling sustainability
citizenship? What various outcomes can be identified? How do learning cities
facilitate and encourage citizens to participate in urban sustainability, as an
integral part of wider economic, cultural and political processes?
In ‘Curating the city: Encouraging sustainability’ (Chapter 16), Tammy
Wong Hulbert focuses on a suburban public art project, which offered a
platform to explore the notion of sustainability citizenship in the context of
some Melbournian suburbs (Australia). The project used an action-research-
based methodology to create a public, participatory, installation artwork, themed
around mobile edible gardens. Hulbert argues that the associated public art
events reached a broader cross-section of a suburban community than normally
participates in artistic activities. Their expression and voice demonstrated
the potential contribution of such programs towards becoming sustainability
citizens.
In Chapter 17 ‘Ethical consumers and sustainability citizenship’, Tania
Lewis argues that ethical consumption – from consumer-based choices to anti-
consumerist practices – is becoming mainstream across the Global North. Ethical
modes of household consumption are presented as grassroots engagement with
environmental issues marked by forms of everyday civics or ‘lifestyle politics’.
This overview of key research on ethical consumer practices discusses a case
study of household ‘hard rubbish’ reuse as an example of the ways in which

suburban backyards and houses are becoming sites for experimentation in
sustainable living. However, Lewis points out that there are limits, as well as
potential, for consumption and lifestyle-driven politics in terms of sustainability
citizenship.
The final chapter ‘Futures for sustainability citizenship’ (Chapter 18), by the
four editors responsible for the collection, iterates the key themes and outlines
questions and avenues for future research.
Conclusion
Urban sustainability citizenship is a problematic yet critically useful concept.
Many emergent social movements, innovations and forms of sustainability
business (whether for profit or not) are defined, at least in part, by their
opposition to capitalism and relentless consumption, and pursuit of more
environmentally sustainable ways of living. For them to collectively become a
dominant economic mode, neoliberal capitalism would need to be debunked
and overcome. In the Great Recession following the Global Financial Crisis,
capitalism seems more unchallenged than ever. However, the idea of a collective,
more-or-less definable, set of practices that counter unsustainable development
and champion sustainable citizenship only grows. If nothing else, supporters
have carved out an albeit loose-knit and pragmatic space within which political,
economic, social, cultural and ethical dimensions of everyday life are critiqued
with regard to the environment, equity, individual and collective action, and the
future.
References
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Beza B.B. (eds) The Public City: Essays in Honour of Paul Mees, Melbourne University
Press, Melbourne.
Harvey D. (2012) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Verso,
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Part I
citizenship
Framing sustainability

2
The praxis of sustainability
citizenship
Anitra Nelson
Over the last few decades ‘sustainability citizenship’ has been developing as a
process of praxis – conscious, reflective practice – as concerned people have
co-created novel ways to deal with critical environmental, social and economic
challenges. These challenges demand that we live and work in ways that conform
to Earth’s biophysical limits and principles of inter- and intra-generational
equity. As such, sustainability citizenship is citizenship remade from the ground
up with a thoroughly material basis and emerging set of ethics appropriate to
our times. However, it remains a work-in-progress that will, ultimately, only be
defined by our future activities.
This chapter addresses key questions arising from an analysis of contemporary
environmental, social and political circumstances, and the dilemmas that
they involve. Exactly how might we most usefully theorise current activities
identified as sustainability citizenship in action? What is the ultimate potential of
such practices for a holistic and universal concept of sustainability citizenship?
How does – and how might – sustainability citizenship manifest in the complex
built infrastructure and cultural and political environments of our cities?
Even if, due to its emergent state, ‘sustainability citizenship’ is unclear and
controversial in terms of its definition, I argue that its key characteristics and
sources can be identified and summarised. Therefore – following brief and
select discussions of both what ‘sustainability’ means and implies, and previous
theorisations of ‘environmental’, ‘ecological’ and ‘sustainability’ citizenships –
this chapter elaborates on five characteristics of existing sustainability citizenship
that make it distinct from other forms of citizenship.
The first characteristic evolves from the evolution of this movement in
response to a plethora of sustainability challenges, making the ecological central
to what, in the past, has been seen primarily as a socio-political contract. Second,
18 Anitra Nelson
sustainability citizenship is ‘glocal’, upsetting the contractual state–individual

framework for much traditional citizenship discourse. Third, rather than being
individualistically rights-based and centred on division of power between
people, sustainability citizenship appears more clearly as a set of collective
responsibilities (or duties) associated with values of solidarity, security and
the sustainability of Earth. Fourth, with participatory democracy at its heart,
horizontal forms of shared governance (such as peer-to-peer relationships
and networking structures) characterise sustainability citizenship. Fifth,

sustainability citizenship emphasises ‘being’ rather than ‘having’, in satisfying
our basic biophysical needs in simple ways, and in sharing and caring for Earth
and one another, through action learning and by the procedural and experiential
emphasis on empowerment within collective engagement.
Sustainability
Today most people, especially those in the Global North, live unsustainably – so
much so that the Global Footprint Network (GFN 2015) calculates that we (as
an entire species) are depleting Earth’s resources at a rate more than 50 percent
above its capacity for replenishment. This state of ‘overshoot’ has existed and
gradually grown worse since 1970 and, under ‘business as usual’ trends, the
GFN (2015) estimates that the level of overshoot will increase to 100 percent
by 2030. By this measure, then, we are living unsustainably and we are growing
more unsustainable. Underlying the current wave of environmental concerns
are dire projections about climate change and resource scarcity (Spratt 2015;
McLellan et al. 2014). This environmental and political reality lies at the basis of
efforts to live and work in a state of ‘sustainability’.
At the heart of this sustainability crisis is that many people are not ‘living
simply’ so that others, including future generations, might ‘simply live’. In
response, there are two clear options for achieving sustainability: reconcile
capitalism’s drive for growth within such environmental limits or create post-
capitalist ways of living sustainably. These directions have attracted more
adherents as the drive for sustainability has grown more urgent. The wellsprings
of contemporary environmentalism can be traced back through publications
such as Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, first issued in 1962, and The Population
Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich (1968) and, even though not originally credited, Anne
H. Ehrlich.
Later, in the early 1990s, the United Nations’ Earth Summit in Brazil
instigated ‘Agenda 21’. This non-binding, voluntary, sustainability-focused
action plan – an enduring and transforming work-in-progress – envisioned
national and multilateral organisations implementing sustainability initiatives at
local, state and global levels. Subsequently, local actions have been so successful
that most references are to its local iterations, ‘Local Agenda 21’, where, typically,
communities, businesses and governments cooperate to create strategies and
supports for local sustainability. These kinds of ‘glocal’ efforts have snowballed
The praxis of sustainability citizenship 19
Learning for sustainability: components of Earth citizenship
Circle 1 Wellbeing
What do I need as
a foundation … tems and technol
l sys ogi
ocia es
S
Circle 2 Citizenship
What kind of citizen
should I be … Wo
ng rld
sti vi
te
ew
Circle 3 Practice
d
an
an
What do I new to Global
ems seeking
d va
citizen
be able to …
luing
Well- Change
Circle 4 Knowledge being agent
What do I need to
Syst
Biosphere
know …
custodian
if I am to contribute Fut g
to creating a sustainable u r e s t hi n ki n
society a n d d esi g ni n g
Ec
olo ses
g ic a c es
l syste ms a n d pro 1 2 3 4
Figure 2.1 ‘Earth citizenship’ as ways of being, to achieve sustainability citizenship
Source: State of NSW (2009: 7)
into educational, cultural and developmental goals, pointing to the rise of

concepts of citizenship based in the multidimensional and holistic enterprise of
achieving sustainability.
By way of an example, Figure 2.1 is a dynamic presentation of a concept of
‘Earth citizenship’, created by a state department of education for use in schools.
It closely fits the concept of sustainability citizenship sketched out in the rest of
this chapter, for instance, by making the individual citizen responsible in three
distinctive ways, as a ‘biosphere custodian’, a ‘change agent’ and a ‘global citizen’.
All three roles set the ‘individual’ in the collective and natural environment,
requiring attention focused on the ‘other’ to achieve their own well-being,
in stark contrast to the alienated or celebrated and self-absorbed individual of
liberal (and neoliberal) philosophies.
The movement towards sustainability citizenship

Leydet (2014) offers a standard definition of citizenship in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy: ‘A citizen is a member of a political community who
enjoys the rights and assumes the duties of membership’. Her entry highlights
distinctive republican and liberal versions of citizenship, with Aristotelian and
Roman law origins respectively, and feminist critiques of them. The major
dimensions of citizenship are identified as legal (egalitarian civil, political and
20 Anitra Nelson
social rights), political (agency) and identity (pertaining to membership). These

categories, characteristics and the work that informs their conceptualisation
has been developed by Benito Cao (2015) specifically in terms of the variety of
environmental citizenships.
Most significantly, Leydet (2014) concludes that the ‘stubborn blind-spot of
theories of citizenship leads us to some of the most difficult issues pertaining
to the very possibility of democracy in the contemporary world’. This neglect
relates to the simple formality of citizenship in theory and practice, a lack of

content. The proposal here is that an environmental, ecological or sustainability
focus is the obvious and necessary content to fill that void, placing citizenship
on an appropriately contemporary and well-grounded footing. In this framing,
agency, duty and ethics constructively cluster around sustainability not simply
as an outward focus but, as indicated in Figure 2.1, as a way to secure personal
wellbeing.
Established works on ecological or environmental citizenship range in
approach from ethical to legal, from rights-based to justice-oriented, from
philosophical to conceptual. From Patrick Curry (2011) on ecological ethics to
the virtue focus of Connelly (2015), from the public good approach in Dobson
and Bell (2006) to the primacy of the economic in Dobson and Sáiz (2005),
from the political focus of Scerri (2012) to the functional concept of ‘just
sustainabilities’ that Julian Agyeman (2013) has developed by concentrating on a
re-structuring of the relations based on class, race and inequality. In the context
of such wider literature, a practical, grassroots and policy-oriented approach is
the strength and distinguishing feature of the conceptualisation of sustainability
citizenship here.
Sustainability citizenship has been theorised by republican-oriented scholars.
In his conceptualisation, John Barry (2006) emphasises the state (rather than
markets) and duties and responsibilities (rather than choice and rights). Andrew
Dobson (2006), writing initially in terms of ‘ecological citizenship’, grounded
the concept in the arguably self-interested conduct of care and compassion and
a tertiary concept and pursuit of justice to correct wrongs of unfair trade and
burdens to future generations. Dobson (2011: 6, 10) went on to focus specifically
on the goal of ‘a democratic, egalitarian, low-throughput sustainability’, adopting
the term ‘sustainability citizenship’ as ‘pro-sustainability behaviour, in public
and in private, driven by a belief in fairness of the distribution of environmental
goods, in participation, and in the co-creation of sustainability policy’.
Following Barry (2006: 24), my concept of sustainability citizenship ‘includes,
but goes beyond, environmental citizenship’. Similarly, in Barry’s (2006: 25)
‘continuum from minimalist, liberal notions of passive citizenship’, I place
sustainability citizenship in the camp of ‘fully fledged civic republican ones of
active and participative citizenship’. In other words, sustainability citizenship is
expressed through direct active engagement and diverse participatory programs
and duties, rather than wholly top-down, say state-directed, approaches
(Newman and Jennings 2008).
Sustainability citizenship entitlements, such as rights to a safe and healthy

environment to live in, imply responsibilities of such citizenship. This, in turn,
implies a strong role for collective and community-based activities, either acting
autonomously or supported by the state and market. Consequently, the focus
of the contributors to this book is neither on behaviour change, awareness
raising, nor change agent theories (Soderholm 2010; Flint 2012; Crocker and
Lehmann 2013). Furthermore, we do not venture into discourses on rights of
other species beyond the humanist recognition that ecological integrity protects
the anthropogenic interests of the human species (Dobson 2003). Instead, the
work-in-progress concept of sustainability citizenship elaborated on here is
compatible with everyday practices and actions of sustainability envisioned and
enacted as collective efforts. Our vision of sustainability is far from utopian,
indeed quite pragmatic, illustrating practical everyday dilemmas and solutions
to changing urban socio-political structures and materialities to make our lives,
and the environments we collectively build, more sustainable.
The current struggle for sustainability has come to overshadow, or complicate,
class struggles that attended the rise of industry, modernisation and managerialism
and the spread and intensification of capitalism. An anthropocentric approach
endures, especially in ecomodernist foci on ‘smart’, technological and market-
based innovation (Rossi 2015) – an approach critiqued by York and Rosa (2003)
and Gibbs (2006). Yet, community-based local and appropriate technologies,
a turn to community sufficiency, and non-mainstream forms of exchange are
certainly gaining in prominence in efforts to determine a sustainable future.
The ecological or social ecology approach indicated in Figure 2.1 recognises
complexity, integration, experiential knowledge and interdisciplinary and
transdisciplinary approaches in problem solving. Writing on University of
California’s School of Social Ecology, Valerie Jenness (2013) emphasises that
‘we live and breathe community engagement’. Here, ethics and principles, such
as environmental justice, are central (Cao 2015: 15–16).
Indeed, ethics and principles are fundamental to the struggle for sustainability.
Against a weary, anxious, humdrum and apathetic worker–consumer ‘business
as usual’ lifestyle, urban sustainability citizenship situates citizens as social
change agents with a moral and self-interested stake in living sustainably with
the rest of Earth – both human and nonhuman nature. Sustainability citizens
engage in, or at least accept the desirability and importance of, awareness-raising,
discussion and debates on sustainability policies for society’s common good
and the maintenance of Earth’s ecosystems, i.e. as custodians of the biosphere.
Sustainability citizenship today is about a practical struggle.
Glocal versus national

Sustainability citizenship implies both responsibilities and rights to active
participatory engagement in governance so that states and individuals, local
communities, national and international agencies all act in synergy with
22 Anitra Nelson
glocal sustainability-related policies and practices. Water policies relying on

restrictions, for instance, focus on household behaviour but rely on holistic
encouragement and support to institute. The introduction of renewable energy
systems has shown how synergistic cooperation struggles within regimes of
capitalist consumption, disruptive shocks and the messiness of urban structures
and agencies. Temporally, even transiently, synergy and oppositional dislocation
can occur in rapid succession, either integrating new or simply involving the
same actors. As shown in many case studies throughout this book, the local node
has become an important site of collaboration. Most significantly, sustainability
citizenship breaks with traditional interpretations of citizenship in national
contexts to re-nest citizenship in its earliest iterations, in the transformative and
dynamic city-state.
Cosmopolitan citizenship was advocated by ancient Greeks, endured within
religions and certain philosophical schools, became a foundation for the
United Nations and associated ‘human rights’, and has underscored humanist
and political senses of internationalism (Cao 2015: 59–60). At the same time,
the recent rise of the ‘glocal’ has characteristics which resonate with other
movements, such as ‘the personal is the political’; the resurgence of the commons
as a structural ideal, say in the digital world; the city as a site of identity, a loyalty
to what is local in both social (community) and physical (neighbourhood)
environments (Norberg-Hodge 2014); and, active and vocal resistance against
public and private globalisation, with the strident universalism, immediacy,
localism and ownership that rings out in ‘Occupy’.
It would seem, then, that the prominent tension between ‘subject’ and
‘citizen’ in eighteenth-century European monarchies (Leydet 2014) – addressed,
if not resolved, in the revolutionary movements for citizenship, liberty, equality
and fraternity – has re-emerged in early twentieth-century democracies as a very
present contradiction. On the one hand, lived subjection in worker–consumer
realities of market authority and omnipotence creates division, inequity and
competition, while, on the other hand, ideals of substantive participatory
democracy frame the citizen as an agent, so fundamental for establishing
sustainability practices in both private and public spheres.
The Occupy movement has highlighted popular resistance to corporatism,
global capitalism and the associated trend to frame firms as citizens. This
framing is expressed legally and practically in the growth of corporate social
responsibility, a duty and right to work (re-invigorated by the de-prioritising of
social welfare), and consumer activism, rights and protection:
Neoliberal theorists shift the focus from the citizen to the consumer
and from the state to the corporation (as agents of citizenship), and from
politics to markets (as the sphere of citizenship). These shifts promote
consumer and corporate citizenship and transform the citizen from a
political being (zoon politikon) into an economic being (homo economicus).
(Cao 2015: 69)
Neoliberal environmental citizenship ensures that environmental

sustainability is dealt with by the market, assuming more control over resources
through, say, carbon and water trading markets, and by consumer choice and
environmental volunteers.
Against such neoliberal currents, environmental activists have developed
strong claims from the perspective of ‘environmental justice’, incorporating
concepts such as the right to a healthy environment, ‘ecological debt’ and
‘ecologically unequal trade’ both within and between nations, reframing

political discourse in terms of Global North and Global South, and highlighting
sustainability imperatives with strategies of ‘degrowth’, ‘fair trade’, ‘steady-
state’ economies and even ‘post-capitalism’. Ecuador (in 2008) and Bolivia (in
2009) have led a movement drawing on indigenous appreciations of nature and
human wellbeing to embed the concept of buen vivir (the good life) within their
constitutions, granting nature a legal entity with rights (Fatheuer 2011).
In this re-visioning of a sustainability ethics for the twenty-first century,
the glocal is central; wherever people are, in cities, with local councils, as
neighbourhoods – they can act in accordance with universal principles of modest
lifestyles, cognisant and respectful of nature’s limits. Here the ecological framing
of nested residents and layered networks is both practical and appropriate.
Sustainability responsibilities and values

If the global sustainability challenge is to be met by active ‘responsible’ citizenship,
what might this value-laden and ethically-loaded aim mean in practice?
Barry (2006) weighs up the pros and cons of a controversial proposal
of ‘compulsory sustainability service’. Beyond the kind of force implied,
concerns with this proposal include the partial, state-supervised and military
framing of duties and values. A less republican but nonetheless active model of
sustainability citizenship might rather suggest that sustainability duties ought
to infuse all aspects of life, all the time, as a positive morality within everyday
practice. Barry is correct to emphasise obligations as the obverse of rights, but
how sustainability perspectives, values and practices might be instituted – and
what the implications might be – is the big question challenging sustainability
activists, politicians, professionals and, indeed, all those concerned with creating
a sustainable world. The contributors to this book identify certain trends and
opportunities as well as opening and clarifying debates in these directions.
Although Leydet (2014) argues that ‘the scale and complexity of modern
states seem to preclude the kind of civic engagement required by the republican
model’, sustainability challenges would seem to require the kind of agency
that characterises a republican framing of citizenship, while eschewing liberal
emphases on the private sphere, as critiqued by feminists and the Left. If
we consider the key challenge of increasing use of Earth’s resources, then
citizenship must be about the limits and the constraints, as well as the benefits,
of membership.
24 Anitra Nelson
Permaculture principles to care for the planet and all people and to share
sowing and harvesting (Morrow 2006), and the perspective and philosophical
position behind ‘environmental justice’ are indicative of the ethics and activities
demanded by current unsustainability (Martinez-Alier et al. 2014). Cao (2015:
120) uses ecotourism involving conservation projects as an example of the
perverse outcomes of ‘green citizenship’, as ‘displaced locals become second-class
citizens in relation to the affluent tourists from the Global North’. In contrast,
food sovereignty/citizenship movements, exemplified by the international

grassroots peasant movement of some 200 million peasants, La Vía Campesina
– acting in solidarity to challenge corporations and the states that protect them –
work towards a vision of decommodification and commons (Cao 2015: 135–8).
The more radical social and solidarity economy movement, and the sharing
economy movement, both hold similar values and visions (Utting 2015).
Such movements indicate how production and exchange might be
transformed from the ground up, in contrast to liberal and neoliberal models
of sustainability citizenship as a bundle of duties and rights orchestrated by the
state. Grassroots movements infused with a sense of purpose and peer-pressure
to establish sound sustainability-based values in new structures, institutions and
relationships for everyday life and work, offer models for theorists and other
citizens. The activities of La Vía Campesina, as mentioned, show responsibilities
being taken on board in practice where commensurate rights are offered, assumed
or fought for. For this reason, the ideas that Barry (2006: 29–32) offers in the
direction of the state incentivising or negotiating a quasi-monetary exchange
for limited sustainability services seem less relevant than those surrounding
experimentation with sustainability practices as participative democracy.
Participatory democracy
It seems clear that the production, as it were, of sustainable futures must be
accompanied by transformations in governance from formal to accountable
and substantive democracy. Successful sustainability initiatives are characterised
by interaction, cooperation and collaboration rather than neoliberal structures
of delivery, division and delegation. Appropriate participatory models require
that citizens have – or take – decision-making power and responsibilities
(Checker 2012; Latta and Garside 2005; Smith and Pangsapa 2008), rather
than simply being informed and making choices, as they do in the market-like
electoral system functioning in current democracies. Indeed, Cao (2015: 164)
outlines how, using governmentality approaches, ‘environmental governance
has produced a form of post-ecologist citizenship that undermines notions of
ecological citizenship before citizens have had the opportunity to develop and
fully engage with them’.
Sustainability citizenship depends, ultimately, on ownership and control:
If we were able to collectively direct matters, how might we better satisfy the
needs both of all parties and of nonhuman nature? Environmental justice needs
to be promoted as a core principle, value and viewpoint in learning sustainability

citizenship, in contrast to the contemporary political context: ‘dominated by the
neoliberal discourse that currently shapes the global articulation of citizenship
in general, and of environmental citizenship in particular’ (Cao 2015: 248). In
this latter perspective, Earth is fractured millions of ways into private property,
and ownership becomes vested in a tiny minority. The ‘have-nots’ are not just
the economically poor but also all those worker–consumers who feel powerless
to influence ‘the system’ of an essentially formal democracy. The plight of

Greeks, in their 2015 debt crisis, has offered a fine instance of such formality
(Ovenden 2015).
The Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT)
project, an activist–scholar collaboration, illustrates new forms of peer-to-peer
and networked activities that exemplify participatory democracy, as well as the
glocal, in action (EJOLT 2015; Martinez-Alier 2014). An online atlas of more
than 1500 cases of environmental injustice detailed in terms of antagonists,
mobilisation parties and tactics, conflicts and conflict resolution, this massive
peer-reviewed database created by activists and scholars working together, and
replete with multi-media references, not only acts as a distributive information
clearing house but also produces the specific kind of knowledge that activists have
and need in order to generate more and better sustainability and environmental
justice-based actions. EJOLT is coordinated from Barcelona, which has been
fertile ground for the Podemos party evolving from the Occupy movement’s
well-spring, the M-15 Indignados, and where an anti-eviction activist was elected
as Mayor mid-2015 (Goodman 2015). Such instances are fleshing out in practice
to show that participative democracy is not only possible, but also organised and
organising.
Being versus having

There is a gaping contradiction between a life of ‘having’ and a life of ‘being’.
On the one hand, there is a life of having work, having money, and having those
commodities and assets that money buys – a system managed through monetary
relationships and flows, where growth is essential and, with it, overconsumption.
On the other hand, there is a life of ‘being’: practising the sustainability skills of
relative autonomy, collective sufficiency and collective decision-making, sharing
and caring, living in the present and modestly.
Living in the contemporary world creates many confusions and contradictions
surrounding philosophies and discourses of ‘having’ and ‘being’. Green(wash)
citizenships arise in the forms of corporate citizenship and consumer citizenship
based on a world of having (or not, as the case might be). Drawn into this
maelstrom, we find the corporatisation of once-radical environmental justice
organisations and competition for capital and influence based on what they
perceive to be their niche markets and constituencies (LeBaron and Dauvergne
2014). The market and the state, even though perceived as antagonistic in
26 Anitra Nelson
neoliberal discourses, often work as one in practice. To both, worker–consumers

are mere subjects. In contrast, sustainability citizenship offers new forms of
democracy, citizenry, values and practices, where relationships and institutions
are centred on being rather than having.
Conclusion
The notions of sustainability citizenship that underpin the contributions to this

book are pragmatic rather than utopian. They are born of practical everyday
dilemmas and responses to changing urban socio-political structures and built
environments. They are purposively-oriented, in that they anticipate and seek
alternative, more sustainable forms of social and material infrastructures. They
are not naïve but, rather, cognisant of the mechanisms of neoliberal governance
to constrain and shape our capacities and knowledge, and acknowledge the
inevitable contradictions of the struggle for sustainability. Action learning
and constant experimentation are key facets of these struggles. Social capacity
initially manifests as knowledge, skills, capabilities and confidence to enable the
emergence and propagation of practices of sustainability citizenship. As such, it
is not theory so much as the expression of sustainability citizenship that is – and
will remain – its definition, identity and realisation.
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3
Urban resilience for
sustainability
Alexei Trundle, Ralph Horne, John Fien and

Ellis Judson
Urban resilience – for the purposes of this chapter – relates to a city’s capacity
to cope with, adjust to, or bounce back from a series of possible, probable and
even unknowable external shocks and stressors (Wardekker et al. 2010: 991).
Policy aspirations for cities to be ‘resilient’ are both emergent and contested
(Seeliger and Turok 2013), as are ideas of citizen-led urban sustainability.
However, citizen-led urban sustainability is slightly more established and its
conceptualisations invariably involve combinations of at least three sets of urban
spatial dynamics: materiality; social, economic and political structures; and, as
agents, urban inhabitants, communities and their institutions.
In contemporary neoliberal urban settings, sustainability citizenship
critically depends on a widespread consciousness of impacts of citizen-actions
that mobilise purposive institutional or individual changes (Hertwich 2005;
IEA 2012). For instance, without analytical processes, such as the life cycle
assessment of consumer goods, or modelling of the delayed consequences
of carbon emissions on the livelihoods of future generations, the capacity for
decentralised decision-making is limited and can be ill-informed (Phillis et al.
2010). Sustainability citizenship is, therefore, as much framed by the resource
flows across urban boundaries into global networks and regions as by socio-
material arrangements within urban boundaries themselves.
To date, no agreed, operable methodological interface between ‘sustainability’
and ‘resilience’ has been developed. Sustainability and resilience have separate
histories and trajectories, but also interrelations, including the potential to
improve livelihoods and liveability of citizens. Their intersection is highlighted
in this chapter, which identifies complementarities between the dual ideals of
sustainability citizenship and the resilient city.
30 Alexei Trundle, Ralph Horne, John Fien and Ellis Judson
Resilience of what, to what?

Historically, resilience has been approached from particular purposive and
disciplinary perspectives, in particular, from engineering, psychology and ecology
(Brand and Jax 2007). However, the diversity of economic, ecological, built and
social networks in cities requires a more nuanced multidisciplinary understanding
of resilience in order to map, if not reconcile, their variations and contradictions
(Da Silva et al. 2012).

Formative applications of ‘resilience’ in the fields of ecology (Holling 1973),
engineering (O’Neill 1986) and psychology (Garmezy and Masten 1986) have
broad similarities: each refers to an ecological, structural or mental system
disrupted by an environmental, geological, or social shock or stressor. However,
their methodological divergence becomes evident when cross-examining their
respective interpretations of whether a post-shock state is considered to reflect
pre-shock resilience, or not. On the one hand, psychological resilience demands
the maintenance of ‘relatively stable, healthy levels of psychological and physical
function’ throughout, and following, an individual’s exposure to a traumatic
event (Bonanno 2004: 20 in Davoudi et al. 2012: 301). On the other hand,
engineering resilience assumes a bounce-back from a disruption of functional
form, the primary criteria for assessment being the return-time (Seeliger and
Turok 2013). Meanwhile, ecological resilience acknowledges multiple stable
regimes, or equilibria, and transition between them provided that ‘core’ systemic
characteristics are retained (Folke et al. 2010).
Such conceptual distinctions have significance in practice. For example, in
Australia, the imperative to rebuild communities devastated by the 2009 Black
Saturday bushfires ‘as before’ was driven by a perceived need for individuals to
‘bounce back’ to their previous state, an understanding consistent with engineering
resilience (Hall 2011; Griffiths 2009). However, a psychological resilience framing
emphasises human trauma and loss of community, phenomena that do not lend
themselves to simple ‘bounce-back’. Furthermore, from an ecological resilience
viewpoint, re-building without social learning would undermine future resilience.
Interpretations of these formative theories of resilience have continued to
evolve and attract additional disciplinary theorists from fields such as economics,
social science, disaster risk reduction, climate change, international relations,
education and security (Brand and Jax 2007; Coaffee and Wood 2006; Saavedra
et al. 2012). Reviews of the differences between these approaches are available,
for instance by Brand and Jax (2007: 3) and Leichenko (2011: 164), but four core
differentiations are evident: transformative vs. rebounding, fluid vs. stabilising,
specified vs. generalised, and reflexive vs. exclusive.
Transformative vs. rebounding

As mentioned, the modification of a system as a result of, as a response to, or
in preparation for, a shock polarises various theorists of resilience. Theories
Urban resilience for sustainability 31
of resilience tend to reflect any assumed or desired environment of stability

through a rigid understanding of ‘bounce-back’, with the speed of return as the
primary measure of the system’s resilience. In cities, for example, ‘reboundive’
resilience might include post-flood recovery. In contrast, transformative forms
of resilience allow changes to the structural regime, provided that it retains its
overall identity. Since ‘identity’ is value-based, it follows that transformative
resilience is subjective.
Fluid vs. stabilising

Socio-ecological systems resilience (also referred to as ‘evolutionary resilience’)
proposes a more radical departure from static, step-based conceptions.
These approaches reflect the nature of socio-ecological systems, perpetually
undergoing change as a function of complex dynamics (Davoudi et al. 2012:
303). Socio-ecological systems resilience, consequently, focuses on key points of
intervention that can enhance the adaptive capacity of the system as it undergoes
continuous change. The Panarchy Model, proposed by Gunderson and Holling
(2002: 41), sets out four states in which levels of resilience differ depending on
evolutionary dynamics. In contrast, stabilising theories of resilience presuppose
particular pre- and post-shock system states.
Specified vs. generalised

An increasing awareness of shocks and stressors that are uncertain, dynamic
and unknown has required theories of resilience to incorporate generalised, and
often unquantifiable, characteristics such as flexibility and redundancy (Jabareen
2013). However, implementing initiatives that enhance these generalised
attributes can often contradict or require trade-offs with more specific resilience
attributes, particularly when long-term feedbacks are taken into account (Klein
et al. 2003: 39). For example, reduction of a community’s use of water due to the
risk of drought can result in removal of urban vegetation, in turn increasing the
urban heat island effect and potentially increasing mortality during future heat
waves – a risk factor under climate change that might challenge cold-climate
inhabitants’ capacities to cope (May et al. 2013).
Reflexive vs. exclusive

An often under-emphasised and over-looked attribute of resilience is the extent
to which the shock or stressor – as well as any internal response or transformation
– is distributed throughout a system’s component parts (Davoudi et al. 2012:
309). For instance, New York City’s rapid recovery from Hurricane Sandy was
heralded by some as an exemplar of urban resilience due to the speed of its
reconstruction and the ‘bounce-back’ of its economic productivity (Seeliger and
Turok 2013). However, this perspective ignored the long-term exclusion from
recovery of numerous urban poor and the rejection of transformative retreat

measures by exposed local communities as public housing continued to be
disproportionately located in flood-prone areas (McArdle 2013: 43). Reflection
and decision-making around distributive consequences of resilience plans and
actions are critical factors in both neoliberal and authoritarian systems and have
consequences for broader urban inclusion and sustainability citizenship.
In short, views of resilience based too heavily upon singular disciplinary,

spatial, or temporal approaches can limit understandings of a system, exclude
impacted components, and prevent identification of possible resilience-
enhancing responses. This is especially the case when resilience concepts
such as self-organisation, replication, learning and adaptive capacity (Smith
and Stirling 2010) are in play. Consequently, urban resilience may better be
understood not just as the capacity to bounce back after adversity but also as the
heightened capabilities of communities and individuals to deal with particular
adversities (Kronlid 2014). This renders resilience as a socio-political ‘process of
reconfiguring institutional structures to develop new abilities for maintenance
and growth’ (Dobson et al. 2015: 43) – see also Boschma (2014). Thus, concepts
of agency, social learning, adaptive capacity and capabilities are integral to urban
resilience.
The (un)resilient city?

Detroit (US) had been a cornerstone of the North American automotive
industry, epitomising the twentieth-century suburban city model (Vojnovic
and Darden 2013). However, following the 1950s, Detroit experienced steady
decline. The municipal population halved, the city government declared
bankruptcy in 2013 – with an estimated US$18 billion debt – and metropolitan
murder and aggravated assault rates were higher than in any other city in the
US (Desouza and Flanery 2013; FBI 2013). Overspecialisation and globalised
automotive production and consumption systems – the kinds of cross-city
boundaries mentioned at the start of this chapter – make Detroit a useful
case study for examining what leads to a lack of urban resilience, providing a
definitional counterpoint for the resilient city.
In the case of Detriot, overspecialisation is the most widely cited causal
factor, yet its systemic and sustained decay had multiple sources. Even at its
height, the city’s economy was not geared towards diversity. Detroit’s social
structure remains fractured with endemic poverty skewed to African-American
communities. Detroit evolved an automobile-focused urban form, actively
excluding alternative transport, accelerating urban sprawl and facilitating social
and racial isolation (Colasanti et al. 2012; Desouza and Flanery 2013, Vojnovic
and Darden 2013). A sustained social malaise and exclusivity – not restricted
to the urban decision-making elite – limited capacity for urban innovation and
reinvention. Racially exclusionary ‘Caucasian only’ neighbourhood covenants
were upheld, with some suburbs continuing to discriminate through property

sales into the 1960s, and proposals to construct mass transit systems had been
rejected since the 1920s (Vojnovic and Darden 2013: 91).
Detroit illustrates the potential for a lack of socio-political resilience despite
economic success, highlighting some of the potential consequences of not
prioritising urban resilience when shocks or stressors seem distant, are deemed
unlikely by critical urban stakeholders, or are not perceived to threaten the
power of decision-makers. The ‘splintered urbanism’ (Graham and Marvin

2001) evident in Detroit’s urban and social form highlights the vulnerability
of such cities to potential shocks and stressors and the need to consider urban
resilience holistically. While wealthier residents deserted the city, the urban
centre’s disadvantaged and poor African-American population grew (Vojnovic
and Darden 2013) alongside small-scale, local, undercapitalised businesses.
Measuring city resilience

Frameworks and approaches for defining, measuring and mechanising urban
resilience are increasingly applied globally, having been promoted extensively
through the development sector and inter-city governance networks, for example
the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s Disaster Resilience
Scorecard for Cities, or the Arup City Resilience Framework (IBM and AECOM
2014; Arup 2014). Measures are fraught with complexities of interdisciplinary
interpretation and data collation, and the unique individual attributes of cities
to which they are applied. In the case of Detroit, the gradual onset of a cascade
of inter-related stressors and causally linked shocks had a greater synergistic
effect than if the city had been exposed to each individual shock or stressor
independently. The extent to which causes of such shocks and stressors are
‘external’ varies, given extensive internal aggravation and perpetration of risk
factors, such as the 1967 Detroit Race Riots (Colasanti et al. 2012). Thus, urban
resilience reflects more a process of grounded theorisation than conceptual
experimentation.
The frameworks for assessing urban resilience developed to date mostly
hybridise cyclical planning methodologies with a series of principles, metrics
and criteria that are allocated varying quantitative and qualitative values
(Saavedra et al. 2012). A number overlap with, or borrow from, established
urban planning or governance objectives. Attributes such as innovative ability
(Folke et al. 2010: 7) or participatory community-level capacity building (Da
Silva et al. 2012: 10) can be enhanced or mechanised independently of the
urban resiliency paradigm (Brand and Jax 2007). Others provide new lenses for
understanding the functionality of a city, with the potential to fundamentally
shift urban governance, planning, and the lives of citizens.
‘Safe failure’, ‘redundancy’ and ‘building back better’ are the three attributes
that most differentiate urban resilience thinking from conventional theorisation
of cities and urbanisation. Their premise is that a shock, a combination of
shocks or a city’s autonomous reorganisation in response to disruption, can be

inherently unpredictable, not merely uncertain, so scenario planning is limited,
requiring a ‘black box’ approach to conceptualising elements of systemic risk
and vulnerability (Jackson 2007: 86).
Generally, the particular need for ‘redundancy’ is not yet reconciled with
mainstream paradigms of resource efficiency, although Brown et al. (2012: 544)
found water utilities applying efficiency and redundancy simultaneously. The
‘Millennium Drought’ impacting much of the south east of Australia in the

2000s had unanticipated flow-on effects in encouraging water efficiency (Van
Dijk et al. 2013). A yet-to-be-used desalination plant for Melbourne being
characterised as a ‘white elephant’ highlights the difficulties of rationalising
redundancy within the current socio-political mainstream (Tomazin and Millar
2011).
Similarly, ‘safe failure’ has re-emerged as a resilience response. Throughout
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large areas of Bangkok operated as
a ‘floating city’; residents were familiar with and adapted to relatively frequent
floods (Liao 2012). Rapid urban expansion, following Western engineering-led
models, created a fixed metropolis incorporating dams and levees but reduced
community-level capacity to cope with heavy flooding, culminating in more
than 500 deaths and an estimated US$45 billion in damages in the 2011 floods
(Ziegler et al. 2012: 1748). Proposals to re-enable more frequent but less
severe inundation of the city are unable to compete with technological options
promoted by well-organised and powerful private sector technology providers.
Safe failure gains additional relevance when resilience is considered as a process
and outcome of social learning, where risk-coping techniques, rather than
mechanical technologies, are placed centre-stage.
In contrast to safe failure and redundancy, ‘building back better’ presents
challenges to emotive and ethical norms. Expectations and needs to bounce
back speedily often override arguments for developing and implementing a new
approach to prevent recurrence (Gaillard 2010: 221). Within urban contexts
‘betterment’ is a contested concept, distributed unevenly and unfairly (Vale 2014:
193; Weichselgartner 2015: 259). There is little consensus on what is ‘better’ – as
Vale (2013: 37) highlights in asking: ‘whose resilience, and whose city?’
Resilient citizens: Individuals, communities and values

For Campanella (2006: 141) ‘the modern city has an almost magical capacity
to rebound even from catastrophic destruction’. Following more than half a
century of urban decline, Detroit is now being heralded as an emergent hub for
innovative urban re-invention and shared community place-making, depressed
property values enabling an influx of young creative entrepreneurs and vacant
lots becoming urban agriculture and informal community shared spaces
(Colasanti et al. 2012; Seeliger and Turok 2013: 2117). Correlating the resilience
of a city to the sustainability-mindedness of inhabitants highlights residents’
transience (mobility) in a space that, to be deemed resilient, must have capacities

for innovation, reinvention and change.
This hypothesis that ‘resilient cities likely require resilient people’ (Saavedra
et al. 2012: 3) begs unresolved questions over the extent to which (and how)
resilient citizens might enable sustainable urbanism. Which citizens are we
talking about – present, future, migrants, itinerants? To take one example,
following Hurricane Katrina, an estimated 39 percent of New Orleans’ evacuees
decided against returning (Campanella 2006: 144). Yet a new wave of migrants
followed reconstruction (Vale 2014; Leichenko 2011). Beyond its material,
temporal and spatial setting, a city’s cultural resilience is heavily imbricated with
the fortunes of ‘other’ times, places and evocations of sustainability citizenship.
This interdependence of cities and generations of citizens advocates for
sustainability citizenship. If urban inhabitants embrace sustainability-driven
decision-making, the future resilience of cities is likely to increase along with
acknowledgement of mounting implications of environmental, social and
economic factors deepening the impacts of urban shocks and stressors (Leichenko
2011). For instance, sustainability-based values and decisions require concerns
with existing vulnerabilities of poverty and disadvantage to be considered in order
that damage by shocks and stressors are minimised equitably. As Weichselgartner
and Kelman (2014: 14) put it, where ‘chronic sources of vulnerability remain
unsolved’ they will ‘continue generating vulnerable, barely resilient groups’.
If urban resilience to long-term stressors can be enhanced through short-term
individual decision-making, city managers and community organisations must
identify how to prompt and promote sustainability-mindedness at individual,
household and societal levels. ‘Social learning’ (see Chapter 5) is one strategy
proposed, with cities such as Rotterdam having adopted ‘learning city’ processes
(see Chapter 15) in areas where urban resilience and sustainability objectives
overlap, such as the threat presented by anthropogenic climate change.
Climate change adaptation reveals the tensions in applying resilience thinking,
which largely stem from failure to build consensus around ‘core’ functions
and values for a transformative or transitional city when adapting to serious
but slow-onset stressors, such as climate change. Pelling (2011) distinguishes
three separate ‘visions’ of adaptation – resilience, transition and transformation
– aligning resilience-focused social learning with previously discussed
‘rebounding’ interpretations, and excluding transformative theorisations of
resilience (Kronlid 2014: 98). However, all three visions of adaptation can be
interpreted as imperatives for a socially responsive and responsible resilient city.
Indeed, Giddens (2009: 167) defines climate change resilience in terms of the
capacities to ‘make the best of adverse circumstances’ and to act collaboratively to
‘modify’ and ‘transform’ situations. However, each approach implies a distinctive
set of individual and community values with different core characteristics and
functions of cities.
Some values and subsequent decision-making – such as inaction on climate
change mitigation or subsidisation of fossil-fuel production against low-emission
alternatives – inherently contradict the long-term resilience of cities. Integrating

values underpinning sustainability, say considering slow-onset and long-term
stressors and feedback loops, reorients understandings of ‘resilience’ from
passive acceptance or re-silencing for short-term gain (Necleous 2013). Similarly,
shifting from ‘bouncing back’ interpretations of the aftermath of a shock to pro-
active preparation for potential shocks, and building capacity to circumvent
shocks, tends to mitigate adverse effects or even treat risk as an opportunity for
social and economic revitalisation, as in the learning city strategy of Rotterdam.

Sen (1999) reframes conventional economic development theory by defining
development as enhancing people’s capabilities to live a good fulfilling life of
their choosing. Kronlid underscores the importance of capabilities as the
knowledge, skills and freedoms that are ‘intrinsic dimensions of well-being’
(Kronlid 2014: 33) that a person may need for a life that they value (Robeyns
2005: 94). A resilient person or community is capable of choosing to avoid
vulnerabilities and risks, thereby exhibiting decision-making, sustainability
citizenship. Thus, a resilient city enhances citizens’ capabilities, providing the
means and conditions for enabling transitions to sustainable futures.
The approach centring on enhancing capabilities through social learning
implies roles for democracy and ethics: demanding participatory forms of
democracy that allow people to choose whether or not, and in what ways, they
will exercise agency to build adaptive capacity; allowing for deliberative ‘new
democracy’ processes for participation in decision-making and action; and
privileging action learning in a cyclical feedback process for reinforcing and
enhancing resilience within urban transitions and transformations. As such,
Sen (1999) conceives capabilities as fundamentally about social justice, with
governance fostering and supporting community strength and social networks.
In this way a resilient city is, by definition, an ethical city.
Interdependence and resilience

To satisfy citizens’ basic needs, cities depend upon regions and networks beyond
their immediate physical boundary (Desouza and Flanery 2013). Dependence
on globalised trade represents an ever-present ‘external’ risk factor. It follows
that ‘urban’ resilience defies easy definition and assessment, implying a need
for cross-boundary and cross-disciplinary examination across socio-material
domains, as in the life-cycle analyses of commodities. The framing of resilience
as an ability to withstand shocks and thrive during change links strongly
with concepts of deliberative diversity, equity versus disadvantage and social
vulnerability. In short, the inequitable distribution of resources across the global
population must be seen as undermining urban resilience.
In a complementary way, urban sustainability depends on carrying capacity
and intergenerational equity. If each global citizen consumed as much as the
average US citizen, an additional 4–5 ‘Earths’-worth of resource supply would
be needed (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2013). Coupling ‘resilience’ and ‘sustainability’
implies an urgent and radical reduction in resource consumption and more

equitable distribution of resources through purposive economic and ethical
shifts that foster human capacities. Overcoming existing vulnerability from
poverty and disadvantage is essential if urban resilience is to be maximised.
Conclusion
With half of the world’s population now living in cities there is little doubt
that urban resilience and the sustainability-mindedness of urban citizens are
inextricably linked. The current model for global urbanisation is increasingly
vulnerable to a range of shocks, many of which are likely to be reinforced and
even accelerated by a continuation of the current urban condition. Fostering
reflexive, informed sustainability citizenship as part of this global shift would
improve resilience and reduce the likelihood of sustained urban decline, as
suffered by Detroit in the second half of the twentieth century. Sustainability
citizenship would enhance both specialised and generalised resilience functions,
improving knowledge of potential future shocks while maximising the overall
flexibility, usable redundancies and innovative capacity of the cities within
which they reside.
In contemporary contexts of neoliberal and globalised yet decentralised
urban interconnectivity, a lack of participatory, community-level engagement
has the potential to enhance apathy and exclusivity, even generating internal
resistance to sustainability transitions. Instead sustainability-minded citizens
are a pre-requisite for embracing the transformative aspects of urban resilience,
such as safe failure, redundancy and building back better.
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4
Urban food security and
alternative economic
practices
Ferne Edwards
Food security has emerged as a major, global-scale challenge for citizens of

cities in the twenty-first century. Developing alternative food economies is a
key aspect of evolving sustainability citizenship, enhancing collective resilience,
sharing practices and more sustainable localised urban economies. This chapter
explores the emergence of alternative food economies in Sydney (Australia)
and in three Venezuelan cities, including its capital, Caracas. In both Oceanic
and Latin American settings, social food economies enable citizens to assert
independence from commercial agricultural systems and to gain more control
over food procurement while addressing food security and urban sustainability
concerns. Such economies facilitate and enable the growth of those responsible,
and collaborative, environmentally and socially ethical skills that characterise
sustainability citizenship.
Urban food insecurity has become a prominent issue in countries of both
the Global North and Global South. Cities now house more than half the
world’s population, with some city dwellers finding nutritious and healthy food
difficult to access at affordable prices. Inherent problems within the mainstream
industrial food system exacerbate these issues, distancing food production
from consumption with supply potentially compromised by various threats
anticipated with climate change. Furthermore, the capitalist agricultural model
and the current state of cities, as primarily consumptive sites requiring long-
distance transport for supplies, also contributes to the generation of greenhouse
gas emissions.
As a reaction against the globalisation, standardisation and risks of
conventional food systems, increasing numbers of consumers are trying to
encourage ethical production and trade by participating in alternative food
networks (AFNs). AFNs provide alternative pathways for food procurement
Urban food security 41
built on the ethics of sustainability, social justice, health, animal welfare and
aesthetic values of local food cultures. AFNs seek to diversify and transform
modern food provisioning by connecting ethical producers and consumers
in more local, direct ways. Examples of AFNs include community-supported
agriculture, organic food schemes, farmers’ markets, fair trade and Slow Food
(Goodman et al. 2011).
However, some scholars and food activists are critical of the efficacy of
AFNs. Amongst other concerns, many AFNs are dependent on and, therefore,
support rather than transform the capitalist food system; at best, they are seen
as filling a gap in the social economy of the ‘welfare state’. In short, ‘alternative’
does not always mean non-capitalist. Others argue that AFNs should reach
beyond geographically and socially exclusive perceptions ‘to include peri-urban
agriculture, food networks that cater for the urban poor, and cultural modes of
provisioning’ (Abrahams 2006: 30).
This chapter draws on doctoral research (Edwards 2015) to discuss why and
how citizens in Australian and Venezuelan cities participate in non-capitalist,
social food economies that aim to improve food security. Two case sites are
explored: people who ‘glean’, ‘grow’ and ‘gift’ their food in Sydney, the capital
of the state of New South Wales in Australia, and the emergence of the food
sovereignty movement in Venezuela. These sites represent diverse cultures,
landscapes and contested regions of food production and urban development,
with citizens in both countries demonstrating a strong interest in alternative
food systems. A theoretical framework of alternative food economies and lenses
of autonomy are applied to understand people’s desire to gain greater control
over their urban food choices.
Urban food insecurity in Sydney

Corporate control by major supermarket chains, price wars, weather
fluctuations and changes in international trade all impact on domestic food
production in Australia. Three supermarket chains control 80 percent of
grocery sales and 60 percent of the fresh food market. They increase profits and
edge out competition by lowering margins at the same time as increasing sale
volumes, coercing local producers to accept low prices, and encourage imports
of cheap food. As a result, Australia became a net importer of processed fruit
and vegetables in 2012. This has had a significant impact on local producers.
Furthermore, food prices have risen due to fluctuating weather conditions,
growing costs for electricity, labour and other inputs, and an overall increase in
the cost of living (Burch et al. 2013).
Some two million Australians cannot access sufficient, safe, nutritious food
to maintain a healthy and active life; in 2011 alone the number of welfare
agencies seeking food increased by 12 percent (Foodbank 2013). Key groups
affected include youth, the elderly and families (SecondBite 2010). Associated
health issues of obesity and diabetes have arisen, affecting more people
42 Ferne Edwards
located in western Sydney (NHPA 2013). Other factors that contribute to

the concentration of dietary-related disease include low educational levels,
ethnicity and evidence of ‘food deserts’, i.e. ‘Car-less residents, unable to
reach out-of-town supermarkets, depend on the corner shop where prices are
high, products are processed and fresh fruit and vegetables are poor’ (Laurence
1997).
Alternative food practices in Sydney

Three case studies in Sydney represent non-monetary AFNs that mainly exist
outside the regulated, commercial market. They include ‘gleaners’, people
who forage foods from public or private lands; ‘growers’, people who grow a
substantial part of their food; and ‘gifters’, people who donate mainly processed
foods from surplus industrial production to people in need. The author
conducted fieldwork in this location for 7 months; 14 stakeholders and 27
participants were interviewed.
Gleaning
Urban foragers collect exotic or native wild foods to consume, exchange or
sell. Foraged foods include edible or medicinal weeds, surplus fruits and
nuts overhanging people’s fences or found on public land, bush foods and
edible mushrooms found in state forests on Sydney’s fringes. Respondents
had either participated in ‘weed tours’ led by environmental artist, Diego
Bonetto, or were ‘food mappers’ using Google maps to locate wasted resources
on public, and sometimes private, land. Participants were well educated,
represented a wide age range and spoke confidently on local and global issues.
All participants ate what they found. Key motivations for foraging included
a desire to reconnect to the landscape for cultural identity and belonging, to
earn income by supplying wild ingredients to restaurants and to prevent feral
food from going to waste.
Growing
‘Growers’ grow substantial quantities of food at home or on public land in peri-
urban regions (Blue Mountains, Mount Tomah, Hawkesbury). Respondents
devoted considerable time to growing food to consume or share with others.
‘Growers’ characteristics varied: many were involved in food-sustainability
groups, such as Transition Towns, Permaculture Blue Mountains and Seed
Savers; some worked for individual benefit while others sought to improve
society. Most participants were well educated, generally older than ‘gleaners’
(aged at or more than 40 years) and represented both genders. ‘Growers’ often
owned their homes but some participants grew food in rented homes while
others grew food on public lands, such as community gardens and road verges,
or shared other people’s properties. Their primary motivations included

concerns for animal welfare and environmental resources, and preparing for
peak oil. Secondary motivations included a desire to educate others to grow-
their-own, self-sufficiency, social justice, pleasure, companionship, and to
build community and security.
Gifting
In Sydney, nearly all participants were ‘gifters’, sharing knowledge and skills,
produce, land or labour. In contrast to gleaners and growers, who demonstrate
the potential abundance of fresh, raw food in the city, gifters reveal the amount
of surplus, still-edible, processed foods that often result from commercial
overproduction. Three forms of gifters were studied: ‘dumpster divers’,
people who choose to gather still-edible foods from supermarket bins, often
as a protest against overconsumption and waste (Edwards and Mercer 2007);
people who work in the food rescue organisation, OzHarvest, receiving
donated food from restaurants, cafés and supermarkets to distribute to those
in need; and participants learning to budget and better plan and prepare their
meals through a 10-week bartering and life skills program operated by the not-
for-profit Food Within, in Penrith, one of Sydney’s poorest suburbs.
The motivations, goals and characteristics of gifters varied greatly: ‘dumpster
divers’ are often university students drawn to the practice for free food, fun
and excitement and to endorse a lifestyle politics of environmental and social
justice ethics. Dumpster divers often identify as ‘freegans’, i.e. people ‘who
employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the
conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources’ (Freegan.Info
undated). Alternatively, the not-for-profit organisations, OzHarvest and Food
Within, support those with little economic autonomy. OzHarvest rescues
excess food to distribute to charities supporting the vulnerable, while Food
Within emerged from founder Alicia Martin’s personal family experiences of
financial and health struggles. The goal was to establish a program to make
fresh food affordable rather than a luxury by providing ‘a hand up, not a hand
out’ for disadvantaged families (Martin cited in Fishlock 2013).
These three examples illustrate a range of underground procurement
activities engaging a diversity of people of differing ages, educational
backgrounds and motivations. These activities occur in often-overlooked
urban locations: people’s backyards, along urban rivers, creeks and road verges,
in nearby state forests, and at commercial front (OzHarvest) and back doors
(dumpster divers). Such activities re-unite and revalue food as nature within
the city to reveal existing natural resources and focus attention on resources
being lost as a consequence of capitalist food systems of the North, whereas
the next case extends this study to emergence of non-capitalist food systems
in the South.
44 Ferne Edwards
Venezuelan politics, land grabs, Dutch Disease and urbanisation

Venezuela is a country with a complex past that shadows its current state
of politics, economy, agriculture, cities and food security concerns. Since
Christopher Columbus’ arrival in 1498, Venezuela has experienced many
periods of political instability, dictatorial rule and revolutionary turbulence. By
1937, land ownership was so concentrated that only 4.8 percent of landowners
held all the holdings covering more than 1000 hectares (Delahaye 2003). Oil,
discovered in 1922, transformed Venezuela from a poor, largely agrarian country
into one of the richest nations in Latin America. This shift from an agrarian to
a petroleum-based economy had disastrous consequences for agriculture. By
1935, Venezuela was the world’s largest oil exporting country, with agriculture
declining to 22 percent of gross domestic product (Wilpert 2006).
The rise of oil production caused ‘Dutch Disease’: ‘a process whereby new
discoveries or favourable price changes in one sector of the economy – for
example, petroleum – cause distress in other sectors, for example manufacturing
or agriculture’ (Karl 1997: 5). The decline of agriculture propelled an equally
rapid process of urbanisation, chiefly through slum development. By the 1990s
the rural population had declined to a mere 12 percent, making Venezuela one
of Latin America’s most urbanised countries. Increasing oil costs, declining
world prices and heavy foreign debt – in addition to increasing population
demands – caused economic stagnation, triggering further economic decline.
Poverty levels increased significantly, from 17 percent in 1980 to 65 percent in
1996, and resulted in the devastating Caracazo riots of 1989, in which 500–2000
people were killed by Venezuelan soldiers (Wilpert 2009).
Venezuela’s food sovereignty movement

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) came to office in late 1998 promising to address
extreme economic and social injustices in Venezuela. He offered to break the
Punto Fijo Pact – representing Venezuela’s old political system – by creating a
new Constitution, and to end corruption and alleviate poverty (Wilpert 2006).
To further these goals, Chávez promoted transitioning from a capitalist economy
to the ‘New Socialism of the 21st Century’. The food sovereignty movement
emerged as part of this new national identity and a unique, nationwide effort to
create an alternative food system based on Bolivarian Principles, including the
building of new social and economic systems based on equality, social inclusion,
shared wealth and resources, endogenous development and participatory
democracy (Schiavoni and Camacaro 2009).
The food sovereignty movement involves the Venezuelan government
working with communities to implement a wide range of food security
initiatives. This AFN is discussed in three sections: ‘gleaning’ referring to the
redistribution of idle lands for food production; ‘growing’ referring to Gran
Mission Agro-Venezuela’s goal of increased domestic production; and ‘gifting’
referring to equitable and accessible food distribution strategies offering

subsidised, regulated and free food for all. This discussion is based on fieldwork
in the Venezuelan cities of Ciudad Bolivar, Merida and Caracas (the capital) for
six months (2011–2012), complemented by study trips in 2009 and 2010, and
draws on 11 formal interviews and copious notes from many more informal
conversations.
Gleaning: Rural and urban land reform

Chávez introduced rural and urban land reforms to redistribute public and
private land from large estates, latifundios, to collectives (Schiavoni and Camacaro
2009; Wilpert 2006). The contentious Law of the Land for rural land reform,
introduced in 2001, stated that all adult Venezuelans with basic prerequisites
had a right to apply for land in a program supported by government institutions,
working with farmers to ensure that they had the skills, credit, technology and
marketing channels to make a living from their newly acquired land. Urban
land reform was implemented as an anti-poverty measure, a collective process,
as families within slum neighbourhoods formed land committees to liaise with
government to acquire titles (Wilpert 2006). I refer to this government reform
policy as ‘gleaning’.
Growing: Urban productive programs

In 2011, the Venezuela government launched Gran Mission AgroVenezuela,
a government program to develop agricultural production, with private and
public funds for farming and distribution of food. Fundación CIARA is the
government institution responsible, supporting urban agriculture, including the
establishment and management of private, intensive, school, and institutional
gardens. Some sites are scattered through poor neighbourhoods offering greater
access to fresh produce or forming a community hub of food production. Food
production sites include innovative trial projects, such as an urban aquaculture
program to farm cachama (Venezuela’s national fish) as an affordable source of
protein. Food produced from these ventures is either shared amongst collectives,
sold publicly at a discounted price (‘precios solidarios’) or distributed to other
government food security programs. These are mass programs for household
growers.
Gifting: Subsidised, regulated and free food for all

Venezuela’s national food distribution strategy consists of a multi-layered and
multi-sited approach incorporating networks of supermarket chains, eateries
and free food providers. The Venezuelan government uses profits from
producing oil to subsidise essential food items in government supermarket chain
Mercal and regulates food prices in supermarkets PDVAL and Bicentenario,
46 Ferne Edwards
to make essential foods affordable. Mercal emerged from the December 2002
employer-sponsored general strike that shut down food distribution across
Venezuela, and has become the cheapest supplier stocking essential basic
ingredients, such as oil, rice and black beans. Mercal is open to anyone but
is particularly tailored to low-income communities with limited food access.
Beyond the ‘supermercado’, food is distributed in a range of forms in poorer
areas, including a ‘mobile’ truck driven around the city, temporary open air
markets, small shops or ‘mercalitos’, small Mercals located in the front rooms or
even windows of people’s homes.
Likewise, subsidised restaurants provide cooked food at accessible prices.
Arepera Socialista is an example of a government-owned restaurant that sells
typical Venezuelan food, arepa, at a fraction of their usual price. Launched in
2009, Arepera Socialista is mobile, serving breakfast and lunch from large trucks
throughout Venezuela. In 2013, a newer version, Arepera Socialista Nutritiva,
was launched to provide ‘healthy, tasty, safe and sovereign meals’ (AVN 2013).
Alternatively, free meals are available for pregnant women, children and senior
citizens at ‘casas de alimentación’ (eating houses). The School Feeding Program
provides another avenue of free meals for children, while the Law for Workers’
Nutrition requires larger workplaces to provide workers with either meals or
swipe cards for restaurants or food stores (Schiavoni and Camacaro 2009).
These two cases provide very different perspectives on urban, non-capitalist food
economies. The next section discusses the similarities and differences between
the Global North and Global South as settings for urban food security. Their
autonomy from the capitalist food system and how this relates to sustainability
citizenship is also explored.
Non-capitalist, alternative food economies and urban

food security
In Australia, food procured by gleaners and growers represents disparate
pathways insufficient to guarantee nutrition security and complementing rather
than replacing supermarket-bought foods. Initial motivations to grow food to
eat include being prepared for perceived future crises and viewing growing as a
way to learn self-sufficiency skills if required. Australian gleaners and growers
still purchase food from supermarkets, often choosing to grow exotic produce
rather than basic essentials. Gifters provide large quantities of food generated
by commercial excesses for the needy, yet nutritional diversity within this stock
varies dependent upon what others discard.
Australian non-capitalist food economies add freshness, diversity and novel
flavours, textures and nutritional elements that characterise procurement outside
commercial trade. Diego Bonetto, who runs ‘weed tours’ in Sydney, describes
foraging as ‘gastronomically entertaining’, an apt descriptor for both gleaners,
who sample fresh edible and medicinal weeds, and growers who enjoy year-
round fresh fruit and vegetables. Alternatively, gifters consume food produced
as commodities but re-imbued with social and environmental values through
rescue and redistribution, including reducing waste to landfill (Edwards and
Mercer 2007). In AFN literature, quality often incurs a high economic cost.
However, in non-capitalist food economies, quality appears through alternative
values conveyed in the considerable time, knowledge and dedication required
for harvesting and preparation, one of the few direct economic benefits being
sales of wild harvest to restaurants.

In Venezuela, food security is not about gourmet alternatives but access
to healthy, essential goods. Venezuela’s alternative food system has been very
successful in providing nutritious food, dramatically increasing both production
supported by national government programs and distribution through numerous
and various food outlets, providing essentials affordably or freely to the poor
majority. Although quality varies, there has been an overall improvement in
Venezuelans’ health. From 1999 to 2011 national poverty decreased from 23.4
percent of the population in extreme poverty to 8.5 percent, and infant mortality
fell from 20 to 13 per 1000 live births (Sedghi 2013).
In Australia and Venezuela, non-capitalist initiatives increased access to
food. However, the extent and beneficiaries vary. In Australia, non-capitalist
food economies represent multiple, independent, free food pathways reaching
relatively small numbers of participants ranging from middle-class, well-
educated individuals to those in poverty who rely on charity for food security.
Access is hindered by time, interest and energy, in addition to an absence of useful
technologies, such as computers to access information. Potential members’
political beliefs may exclude them from, for instance, dumpster diving. White
middle-class ‘do-gooders’ (Goodman et al. 2011) who instigate, access and
control alternative production may unconsciously exclude others. Food Within
is an exception; the direction of its founder – to empower disadvantaged people
through developing life skills and food bartering – helps participants gain an
equal standing.
In Venezuela, the majority poor benefit most from socialist food strategies.
Food access is improved through decentralisation and variety of supplies
everywhere and even more so in poor suburbs. Cultural acceptability is
demonstrated by Arepera Socialista Nutritiva, with national foods such as the
arepa being fully embraced, celebrated, and nutritionally improved. Bolivarian
food models are highly adaptive and innovative, responding to new contexts as
they appear, as shown by the cachama aquaculture trials.
Autonomy of social food economies towards sustainable

citizenship
Lenses of ‘autonomy’ have been usefully applied to analyse non-capitalist food
economies and social change. The concept of autonomy used by Cattaneo
(2008) has been adapted to address urban food sovereignty with ‘autonomy of
48 Ferne Edwards
thought’ and ‘autonomy from the system’ shown in developing food outside the
capitalist model through existing and potential alternative food models.
Key motivations of Australians studied included gleaners’ strong desires
to reconnect to landscapes, explore new flavours and prevent feral food from
going to waste; growers’ environmental, social and economic concerns, some
striving to develop extensive self- and community-sustaining gardens; and
gifters’ desires to rebalance issues of greed and need, voicing urban food security
concerns. For gleaners who sell produce to restaurants, harvesting wild resources
allows participation and profit, with top-end restaurants incorporating unusual
ingredients in menus and charging exorbitant meal prices. As such, the three
economies explored in Australia offer a disparate array of autonomy of thought
that, at the margins, encompasses mainstream (capitalist) practices as well as
radical cultural, social, economic and environmental justice values.
In Venezuela, participants’ motivations vary according to the initiatives they
engage in and their political affiliations. Although the principle of grassroots,
endogenous development was central to the Bolivarian Revolution, in reality
the Venezuelan government has led food sovereignty projects. Government
initiation reflects political aspirations not supported by all voters. The food
sovereignty movement represents a key governmental strategy towards
achieving an autonomous country, free from global capitalism, a tool to
empower the poor, to strengthen them physically and give them hope, engage
them in politics to fight for national autonomy. This patriotic discourse is
shared and fervently expressed by people in poor suburbs and people working
in rural colectivos.
However, not all Venezuelans desire such a future. Many citizens embrace
Western ideals. Respondents explained the slow uptake of Bolivarian strategies
by the loss of agricultural skills, preferring individualism to collectivism, and
expecting government hand-outs. One participant said: ‘It’s a petro-nation
and requires a change of culture, a change of mind’ (Edwards 2015: 171). It is
clear that the food sovereignty movement means different things to different
Venezuelans. For urbanites, issues of price, access and quality often come first.
For rural dwellers receiving support and land from government programs and
putting their lives at risk – close to 300 members of farming collectives have been
murdered to date (Ellis 2011) – political factors are strong. For the Bolivarian
government, food is a key political tool to feed bodies and souls of the majority
poor, who can support the Revolution.
Autonomy from the system

In the Australian case studies, the least autonomous and most environmentally
questionable practices involved foragers selling wild harvest to restaurants.
This green consumerist trend, commodifying natural resources for profit,
means risking resource depletion unless adequate regulatory protection, limited
supplies and high prices limit demand. Gleaners, who work with corporations
to redistribute waste, cannot be considered autonomous as they have little

control over the system. Conversely, their intervention reveals prominent
issues of hunger and waste to the public, with transformational change evident
when OzHarvest drafted state legislation for such activities. Food Within is less
autonomous, purchasing food from supermarkets, yet their approach requires
commitment and reciprocity from participants that improves – and allows
experiences of – autonomy and empowerment.
Dumpster divers represent the most radical group, setting themselves

apart both symbolically and materially from capitalist norms, expectations and
constraints. However, dumpster divers recognise that foraging practices would
not continue in a more sustainable and socially just society. Growers have the
most autonomy. Gardening and skill-sharing every day can create the beginnings
of autonomous food zones. Growers articulated visions of what an alternative
food future could look like. Their desire for change often extends beyond the
individual to care for people and landscapes within the region, to consider the
establishment of new political-economic systems and territories.
By contrast, in Venezuela, social change is clearly evident through changes
in the constitution, national legislation and national identity, and corresponding
reforms involving new social missions, institutions and programs, and new
political and social alliances to enable collaborative power. However, despite the
promising beginnings of a comprehensive parallel and socially just food system,
politics have harmed the ongoing success of the Bolivarian food system. Since
Chávez’s death (2013), civic unrest, extreme political polarisation, inflation,
corruption, bureaucracy and crime have further undermined food distribution,
causing food scarcities and hoarding. In recent years, political factors have
resulted in growing domestic food production and increasing food scarcity,
with immature and partial systems of domestic food production failing to meet
demand. Although the Bolivarian movement strives to detach from global
capitalism, in reality it remains enmeshed in global trade and politics. This
continued articulation prevents the complete transformation of the nation in
terms of autonomy of thought, food security and system change.
Conclusion
This chapter traced the emergence of non-capitalist AFNs in two very different
contexts to reveal that a wide range of people in cities are choosing to become
sustainability citizens by taking part in food procurement activities that
contribute towards both sustainable and socially just cities. Seen through the lens
of autonomy, case study respondents revealed abilities to think outside capitalist
relations by engaging in foraging, gifting and growing of food. These practices
became entry points for respondents to cast a critical eye over other aspects of
societal and environmental inequalities (such as hunger and waste), with some
participating in activities beyond their neighbourhoods, some changing laws as
others pointed in the direction that laws should change.
50 Ferne Edwards
The initiatives examined here were not necessarily associated with social
change networks nor did they have social change goals but still fit within
a spectrum of social change: revealing alternative views and practices in
productive cities, revealing the kinds of characteristics, practices and challenges
that sustainability citizens will face in the future whether living in cities of the
Global South or the Global North.
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5
Sustainability citizens
Collaborative and disruptive social learning

Arjen E.J. Wals and Frans Lenglet
Sustainability remains a contested concept, both normatively and scientifically,

although consensus about the rapidly declining state of planet Earth seems
to be growing. Even within niches, such as environmental and sustainability
education, there are different interpretations and meanings associated with
sustainability. To paraphrase Sterling (2004), Jickling (1992) and Dreyfus et al.
(1999), sustainability is an inevitably ill-defined and an attractively vague idea
with the search for sustainability a kind of treasure hunt for an infinitely illusive
object. Furthermore, Huckle and Wals (2015) point to the risk of the concept
becoming an extension of neoliberal interests.
In this chapter we acknowledge that there is a lot we know about what is, or
at least might be, sustainable and what constitutes sustainability but, at the same
time, there is a lot we do not know. The former suggests more or less robust
knowledge and higher levels of confidence and agreement about what is going
on and what needs to be done, ‘known sustainability’. The latter suggests that
sustainability is an emergent property, an outcome of continuous learning that
cannot be confidently translated into desirable behaviours or actions that can
be taught, trained, transferred or prescribed, ‘unknown sustainability’, perhaps
even ‘unknowable sustainability’.
This chapter presents the rationale and conditions for learning that must
bridge or negotiate these vastly different aspects of sustainability. We explore
the promise of methods and approaches that allow citizens to learn not just
about ‘matters of fact’ but to make these facts, and the sustainability issues of
which they are part, into matters of public concern and deliberation, leading
to collaborative learning and even collective action. In so doing, they help to
(re-)establish and (re-)vitalise substantive citizen rights.
Sustainability citizens 53
Known, unknown and unknowable sustainability

With respect to ‘known sustainability’, sustainability consists of three
hierarchically situated and dynamically interrelated dimensions: first, the
biological, geological and climatological substrate and its planetary boundaries;
second, the relationships between humans but also between humans and the
non-human or the more-than-human world, including its ‘natural’ substrate;
and third, the human-made economic, cultural, political and social structures,
belief systems, institutions and instruments that shape these relationships
and are shaped by them. This common description still raises questions; for
instance, the reference to ‘relationships between humans and the non- or more-
than-human world’ is not always well understood. Still, there appears to be a
growing consensus that sustainability is ultimately about the interplay between
people and ecologies.
People constantly seek to maintain or enhance the quality of their lives
– a rich mix of basic and more abstract needs. The fundamental task in the
coming decades is to redesign our socio-political-economic system in ways that
reintegrate the dependencies between people and their underpinning ecological
systems. Despite the inevitable confusion, contestation and complexity that
surround sustainability, there is quite robust knowledge on each of these
dimensions and, increasingly, how they are nested and influence each other.
There is a lot that we do know, for instance, reports from the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change are examples of ‘known sustainability’. However,
there are, and always will be, uncertainties no matter how robust the knowledge
appears.
Table 5.1 juxtaposes the known and unknown, the sustainable and
unsustainable in a somewhat simplistic but hopefully provocative way. We
speculate that for each of the six emergent possibilities different capacities may
be needed for moving towards sustainability. At the same time all six possibilities
must be considered when developing sustainability citizenship.
Note there is room for some movement between the categories, i.e. what
was once unknown (or known) can become known (or unknown) over time.
What we thought was known might result in unanticipated effects, leading to
the effects of a practice becoming less known than first thought, such as with
certain fertilisers and medicines.
If ‘sustainability’ was a once-and-for-all, defined, fixed end-goal then that
would restrict the scope and range of behavioural options (pathways) leading to
compulsory, if not repressive, systems of enforcement, and demanding diligent,
disciplined and complacent citizens. In contrast, if sustainability is seen as an
emergent and continuously redefined property, the range of possibilities or
pathways of actions to sustainability becomes larger. At the same time, there
are objective physical boundaries and inter-subjective, constantly re-negotiated,
social boundaries within which pathways need to be (re-)traced or (re-)defined,
as suggested by Table 5.1.
54 Arjen E.J. Wals and Frans Lenglet
Table 5.1 A typology of (in)determinacy, sustainability and associated action possibilities
Unsustainability Sustainability
Known Actions which one knew Actions which one knows for sure are
or could have known were sustainable or are at least clearly more
unsustainable at the time, sustainable than other available options,
and their negative effects. and their beneficial effects.
Example: dumping of Example: biking to work instead of

toxic waste in rivers, or taking the car.
littering plastics.
Unknown Actions which one Actions one is engaged in for quite
thought were sustainable some time without considering
but turned out not to sustainability, but which turn out to
be so, and the delayed be sustainable, and their (originally
negative effects. unintended) effects.
Example: the use of Example: the use of wind-power and

asbestos for fireproofing biking.
and insulating buildings
or the use of artificial grass
and rubber/Astroturf for
outdoor sports.
Unknowable Actions that are Actions one engages in and which one
unsustainable but one believes are the most sustainable, given
has no way of knowing what one knows now but of which
this (at least not in the one will never know if they really are
foreseeable future) or for sustainable (at least not in our lifetime),
which one does not have and their expected beneficial effects –
the resources or chooses at least in the short term.
not to allocate resources to
find out. Example: the use of solar panels and
wind turbines.
Example: none, we don’t
know (yet) …
Sustain‘abilities’
Drawing on experience, we do know much about sustainability boundaries and
what is unsustainable, while increasingly knowing about what is more (or less)
sustainable. Certain human qualities, pre-dispositions, bodies of knowledge
and ways of knowing are recognised as being generative of becoming more
sustainable in our practices. We can refer to a whole body of literature trying
to describe ‘sustainability competence’ and associated abilities (Barth et al.
2007, Wiek et al. 2011). Table 5.2 shows one way of trying to describe such
competences.
Table 5.2 Dimensions of sustainability competence and associated sustain‘abilities’
Sustainability competence Examples of sustain‘abilities’

Dynamics and content of • Sustainability literacy
sustainability • Systems thinking
• Adopting an integral view
Critical dimension of • Questioning hegemony and routines
sustainability • Analysing normativity

• Disruptiveness, transgression
Change and innovation • Leadership and entrepreneurship
dimension of sustainability • Unlocking creativity, utilising diversity
• Appreciating chaos and complexity
• Adaptation, resilience
• Empowerment and collective change
Existential and normative • Connecting with people, places and other species
dimension of sustainability • Passion, values and meaning-making
• Moral positioning, considering ethics
The use of the term ‘competence’ seems particularly useful when considered
a relational and emergent property manifesting when people endeavour to
enact sustainability: trying things out and learning from the experience in a
connected way both externally with others and internally with head-heart-hands.
However, when dissected and reduced to piecemeal behaviours and indicators
of such behaviour then a focus on ‘competence’ may do more harm than good.
A reductionist view perpetuates mechanistic ways of thinking that can easily
lead to prescribing behaviours rather than prompting the active and meaningful
engagement of citizens.
Table 5.2 is not meant to be exhaustive or to read like a shopping list. Rather it
highlights that there are at least four ‘dimensions’ of sustainability competence:
conceptual and systemic knowledge, critical thinking, change and innovation,
and an ethical or existential, normative dimension. While each dimension has its
own qualities and associated sustain‘abilities’, they are mutually interdependent.
For example, excluding the ‘existential and normative’ dimension would leave
out a set of qualities that a company wishing to expand market share, increase
shareholder value and maximise growth at all cost might want in its workforce. If
operationalised in isolation, many of these properties could be used for purposes
that have little to do with sustainability.
The same can be said about the critical dimension: without it there is a risk that
currently unsustainable systems would be strengthened rather than transformed.
For example, one might consider hegemonic neoliberal forces causing a systemic
‘dysfunctionality’ that accelerates unsustainability at a global scale. Think of, for
instance, the planned obsolescence of products rather than the cradle-to-cradle
production process; the inequity and exploitation that is built in market-driven
privatised economies rather than an economy built on cooperation and solidarity;
the reframing of human beings as consumers and lifelong workers rather than
empowered producers and life-long learners; ‘straight jacketing’ education to
serve the economy rather than people and planet; the built-in bias towards short-
term thinking and the maximisation of profit and materialism over the striving
for a dynamic equilibrium and meaningful living; the ‘cut and run’ mentality of
‘place-less’ and ‘people-less’ corporations rather than ‘place-based’ enterprises
rooted in communities and their people.
It is in this world that we need to become sustainability citizens rather than

just being passive inhabitants. And here is a dilemma: if we do not develop the
capacities, competences and qualities needed to become more sustainable as
citizens, then we are likely to remain at the receiving end of the diminishing
benefits of the diminishing welfare state and the negative effects of the dominant
model of social and economic organisation, while the costs of restoring or
cleaning up the environmental, social and economic damages to the global
commons caused by the pursuit of financial benefit expand exponentially.
Individual citizens would be reduced to consuming and coping with pre-
determined policies and decisions, unable to formulate, voice and act on choice
by deliberatively addressing collective intergenerational life-issues as opposed
to the short-term satisfaction of narrowly defined commoditised individual
(material and spiritual) ‘consumption’ needs.
Being a sustainability citizen cannot be left to the citizen alone. Much urban
development effort is based on the flawed assumption of the capable citizen,
equal before the law, with a level playing field between ‘atomic’ individuals.
But individuals are not intrinsically ‘atomic’. Rather their options and actual
behaviour are atomised by institutional practices and procedures and ‘democratic’
and ‘consumer choice’ ideologies over which they have little influence or control.
There are many different examples of applying deliberative democracy to
‘wicked’ situations – containing inevitable uncertainty and risk, poorly defined
specifications of fact and of cause–effect relationships, conflicting and diverging
norms, values and interests and contested framing and representation. To address
such complex situations, we can create new spaces for collaborative and social
learning that at times need to be disruptive to break away from hegemonic
routines and vested powers and interests countering the wellbeing of people
and planet (Barry 2005; Hopkins 2013). Being disruptive or ‘transgressive’ is
an essential part of sustainability-oriented learning, partly because it can create
substantive rights for formal citizens who cannot exercise their procedural rights
(Lotz-Sisitka et al. forthcoming). This accords with the way Barry (2005) frames
sustainability citizenship as a form of resistance citizenship existing within, and
as a corrective to, unsustainable development.
Creating spaces for being and becoming a sustainability citizen

Using a rights and duties definition of ‘citizens’, citizenship assumes that all
citizens use their voice and/or vote to participate in decision-making about both
the common space of the city and for whose purpose and benefits it is used.
Full citizenship assumes active participation in defining the procedures and
conditions for creating and using such space while ensuring that basic principles
and values, such as justice and equity, are honoured and advanced rather than
undermined and negated. Linking citizenship to sustainability re-configures
citizenship in ways the contours of which are emerging but not yet clearly
understood. As pointed out, with reference to other authors, in our previous
work (Huckle and Wals 2015: 494):
A sustainability citizen is one who displays “pro-sustainability behaviour,

in public and private, driven by a belief in fairness of the distribution
of environmental goods, in participation, and in the co-creation of
sustainability policy” (Dobson 2011: 10). Bullen and Whitehead
(2005) explain that sustainable citizenship represents a paradigm for
post-industrial living that disrupts the spatial parameters and temporal
scope of conventional citizenship and raises important questions about
the material constitution of the citizen. It requires citizens to exercise
responsibilities to distant people and places and past and future
generations, and to commit themselves to “ecologism” (Smith 1998;
Smith and Pangsapa 2008) to the extent that they are required to exercise
care or stewardship for non-human nature. It enlarges the public sphere in
which citizenship is conceived and practiced to include the environment;
embraces the private sphere of citizens’ lifestyles and consumption
patterns; and is relational in the sense that it requires a keen awareness of
the connections, which exist between social actions, economic practices
and environmental processes.
Exercising sustainability citizenship, i.e. citizenship that goes beyond the

formal rights and duties of being a citizen, is not a given – even if all people
in the world, irrespective of their formal citizen status, are considered world
citizens or global citizens. By engaging as individuals, and as members of
communities and collectives, in debates and activities on sustainability issues,
citizens become ‘sustainability citizens’. Engaging assumes that participants
are prepared to examine and question ‘accepted’ knowledge and frames of
themselves and others, to reflect on ‘unfamiliar’ thinking, interpretations, their
own and others’ behaviour, predispositions and perspectives, and to formulate
new understandings and joint action for pathways to greater sustainability. This
engagement requires the creation of conditions and environments of a physical,
legal, institutional, social, cultural and psychological nature.
There is much evidence, for instance, that the spatial organisation of the city
itself promotes a democracy of proximity (Rodgers 2011). At the same time,
the processes for arriving at a (re)construction of the urban landscape and
the actual outcomes of this process can enhance (or deter) the collective and
social learning of the citizens. The design of educational, learning and other
Table 5.3 The Fox–Gibson problem typology
Type of problem Simple Complex Wicked

Summary Easy to solve Resists solving Resists defining
Definition A clear problem The problem and Problem and
with a clear solution the solution are not solution not
clear but can be understood and
understood with keep shifting when

time we try to define
them
Properties Predictable Many familiar Ambiguous, chaotic
Straightforward elements Many stakeholders
Obvious Hidden root causes with conflicting
Non-linear perspectives
Inter-operating parts Many elements
affect each other are hidden and
unknown
No right/wrong
solution
Not quantifiable
No precedents
Adapted from Fox and Gibson (2013)
public spaces, such as schools, universities, offices or community buildings,

can encourage people entering them to ‘breathe sustainability’ as opposed to
unsustainability. Does the space ‘invite’ interaction, a sense of place and identity,
health promoting behaviours (such as physical movement and healthy food),
participation, engagement and possibilities for agency?
An appropriate physical space alone, however, is not sufficient for being or
becoming a sustainability citizen. Many, if not most, of the sustainability issues
around which citizens gather and engage are of a complex or ‘wicked’ nature,
as elaborated by Fox and Gibson (2013) – see Table 5.3. They, and the situations
in which they arise, are not easily addressed by social learning. Cultural, social,
political and administrative legacies, and the ways in which they are framed,
circumscribe how individual citizens or citizen groups can engage in a process
of social learning. Therefore, another condition for social learning in wicked
situations is to encourage, or allow, alternative ways of debating and deciding on the
public cause (‘res publica’). Particular methods and procedures can be introduced,
new rules of the game to help create or recreate spaces for collaborative and social
learning, while resisting and disrupting hegemonic routines and vested powers
and interests that are not necessarily serving the wellbeing of people and planet.
Education and learning in both formal educational institutions and in
situations where people meet and work can be considered spaces in which
citizen–learners are invited and encouraged to explore issues and to respond to
each other’s different, divergent and even mutually-exclusive concerns. These
are spaces where issues of public concern can be made public. For example, in
the words of Masschelein and Simons (2009: 237), the purpose of universities
is not ‘just about making things known (as “matters of fact”) but about making
them present (as “matters of concern”)’.
Methods and approaches for deliberative social learning

There are many examples of approaches and methods encouraging citizens to

actively engage in public debates about issues of common concern. They have
been developed and are continuously being refined to make visible implied or
hidden contestation and opposing interests. These approaches allow the various
parties and stakeholders involved to recognise the facts of a complex situation,
to appreciate the ‘sense’ that the different parties attach to these facts in their
complexity, and to allow commonalities and, therefore, potentially common
approaches and possible solutions to the issues at hand emerge.
A body of experience and insight has been accumulating over the last 20 years,
especially with respect to environmental and socio-ecological decision-making
and management, including social learning. An example is the ‘SLIM’ project
– Social Learning for Integrated Management and Sustainable Use of Water at
Catchment Scale (Blackmore et al. 2007). The heuristic that emerged from this
project shows the interacting elements of a process of social learning, where
‘social learning’ refers to a process of social construction of an issue by actors
whose understanding and practices change, leading to transformation of their
situation through collective or concerted action (Ison 2013). It sketches a holistic,
staged approach to action and change. The SLIM project acknowledges the
dynamic of social learning by recognising key interacting components: a variety of
stakeholders, different or competing ways of understanding the situation, legacy
conditions and methods that facilitate learning and concerted action.
Toderi et al. (2007) employed the SLIM heuristic when facilitating a social
learning process about Polish and French wetlands. Ecological data introduced
as ‘socio-technical objects’ were integrated into ‘dialogical tools’ and used during
multi-stakeholder participatory sessions, first, to de-construct the wicked issue
of wetland development and management and, second, to identify strategies for
concerted action. The project initiators concluded that: ‘the underlying model
… can be effective in building relations with stakeholders for the purposes of
knowledge management and for helping to elucidate competing claims around
complex agro-environment issues’ (Toderi et al. 2007: 551). The SLIM heuristic
has shown its value in non-European contexts as well, such as China (Wei et al.
2012).
Wicked sustainability problems are not confined to rural areas. Urban areas
are full of them. A multi-stakeholder collaborative and social learning exercise in
the city of Ahmedabad (India), examined by Bharti and Bansal (2012), illustrates
the experience of developing a collaborative learning approach around wicked
environmental and sustainability issues in an urban setting. Ahmedabad was
one of the cities participating in the Supporting Urban Sustainability Program

convened by the Swedish International Centre of Education for Sustainable
Development (see Box 5.1).
A well-regarded non-government organisation (NGO) invited a diversity of
stakeholder representatives to address the ‘sustainability’ issue of improving and
managing one of the many deteriorating water bodies spread around the city of
Ahmedabad. A conventional managerial approach by city administrators and
planners could have been to restrict the growth of precarious dwellings next to the
lake, and even to remove the inhabitants of such dwellings, to clean the lake and its
surroundings and to create a city park. Instead, an unconventional process resulted
in a legitimate and longer-lasting solution that would do justice to the planet
(ecosystem services, water management and water quality), people (social inclusion
and the quality of habitat and health) and prosperity (improved livelihoods).
After a first round of trying to appreciate the perspectives and interpretations
that the various parties – including representatives of city planners, NGOs and
a university – brought to the table, the newly formed multi-stakeholder team
defined the main question guiding their inquiry: Working together, how can we
improve the quality of life in informal settlements around water bodies and ponds
in Ahmedabad?
Next, during a 12-month period, the city team participated in a series of local
and international meetings and workshops (which were not without controversy
and conflict) to agree on a common conceptual plan. The significant outcome
was a decision that no informal settlers would be evicted even though the water
body would be physically restored. In fact, the proposal was for surrounding
communities to be included in the maintenance of the area, thereby creating a
sense of ownership of the lake and its surroundings, and developing livelihood
opportunities. The relevant local government made budgetary provisions for
the redevelopment, and tenders were issued with respect to the restoration of
the water body.
Deliberate social learning process

The learning that took place in the Ahmedabad case can be described with
reference to the social learning cycle depicted in Figure 5.1 (Wals et al. 2009).
This figure’s three ‘traffic signs’ are quite crucial: the one-way arrows refer to
the direction in the overall learning cycle; the roundabout signs refer to the
praxis of the learning cycle, simultaneous action-reflection taking place within
each stage of the macro-cycle; and the two-way arrows stress the importance
of linking the core actors in the macro-learning cycle with the more peripheral
actors who, in one way or another, will be affected by the project and/or have the
potential to influence the project at some point.
The Ahmedabad example shows the three main characteristics of a
deliberatively organised social learning process. First, the process is organised as
an ‘open inquiry’, i.e. without pre-defined outcomes, to which the participants
Box 5.1 The Supporting Urban Sustainability Program
The Supporting Urban Sustainability Program (2010–2014) was jointly

developed by the Swedish International Centre of Education for Sustainable
Development at Uppsala University, the Centre for Environment Education
in Ahmedabad, India, and the Regional Environmental Education Program

of the Southern African Development Community. To date, 20 city-teams in
Bangladesh, India, Nepal, South Africa, Sweden, Tanzania and Vietnam have
taken part. The program aims to enhance the capacity of key public, civic
and private organisations to collaboratively learn about and take action with a
focus on ecosystem services and poverty alleviation in cities. It is based on the
following assumptions:
• There are crucial linkages between ecosystem services and poverty, also in
cities.
• Investing in ecosystem services helps improve public health and livelihoods
in communities.
• Cities are complex social-ecological systems; a myriad of divergent or
conflicting views and interests relate to ecosystem services and poverty.
Therefore, a variety of stakeholders are needed to arrive at legitimate and
longer-lasting solutions.
The Supporting Urban Sustainability Program allows different stakeholders

to come together as a team and engage in a joint learning-action process to
tackle a sustainability issue. They represent such entities as local government,
academia, non-governmental organisations, private sector firms, and media.
Each city-team formulates an inquiry related to ecosystem services and
poverty alleviation. It guides their learning and action. It ensures ownership.
It assures that issues addressed are relevant to the team. The learning-action
process consists of a spiral of cycles linking knowledge creation to action on
the ground. In each cycle the team engages in reflection, planning, action and
data collection.
Collaborative learning takes place both within and between city-teams
using techniques such as mapping, story-telling, group valuation, reflection
and self-evaluation. External facilitation helps in establishing trust and co-
creating of knowledge among the stakeholders. The teams have access to
support from a community of researchers and experts in the partner network.
Source: data drawn from Westin et al. (2013, 2014)

Figure 5.1 A multi-stakeholder learning cycle
are invited and in which they actively engage. Together, they create an
environment of collaborative learning around the issue at hand while, at the
same time, learning from and about themselves and each other. Second, this
process is cyclical and reflexive. It follows a repeated sequence of assessment,
work planning and data gathering, sense making and reflection, until the
contours of a concerted ‘resolution’ have crystallised. Third, representatives
of concerned stakeholders participate, such as local government, civil society
organisations, private sector organisations, academia and media.
The success of this type of learning depends a great deal on the collective goals
shared by those engaged in the process. Whether such collective goals can be
achieved depends, at least in part, on whether possible conflicts, oppositions and
contradictions are allowed to surface and become explicit. In social learning the
conflicts and their underlying sources are explicated rather than concealed (Wals
et al. 2009). By deconstructing the oftentimes diverging norms, values, interests
and constructions of reality that different participants bring to a sustainability
challenge, it becomes possible not only to analyse and understand the roots and
persistence of the challenge, but also to begin a collaborative change process
in which shared meanings and joint actions emerge to contribute to forging
sustainability. When done ‘right’, creating space for this type of learning and
facilitating such learning will allow for sustainability citizens to emerge, but
the approach places high demands on the role and capacities of facilitators, as
summarised in Box 5.2.
Box 5.2 Facilitation qualities in social learning processes aimed at sustainability
The facilitator has a crucial role as someone who:
• keeps the learning process open (ensures access to the process, openness
regarding the agenda, transparency of the process)
• creates social cohesion and a pleasant atmosphere (physically, socially, psy-

chologically)
• guarantees basic levels of comfort and safety (protection against risks re-
sulting from participation)
• knows how to deal with conflicts that arise
• monitors progress (including the ‘soft’ results in terms of people’s learning,
social cohesion, motivation, commitment, etc. along with the more con-
crete ‘socio-ecological outcomes’ such as increased biodiversity, reduced
CO2 emissions, improved health, etc.)
• can articulate and show how progress has been made
• ensures sufficient stimuli, challenges and a ‘sense of urgency’ to keep en-
ergy levels high
• can keep the focus on the choices that have been made and the path that
has been chosen, but is also able to invite the group to reflect on those
choices and to challenge them to leave it as circumstances might change.
The process facilitator must also make sure there are suitable work styles
(role-playing, excursions, simulations, etc.), materials (flip-overs, apps, image
material, PowerPoint, etc.), feedback mechanisms (newsletter, website,
progress reports, blogs, tweets), and he or she will also have to monitor the
external relations (contacts with those granting subsidies, the environment of
the process, interested outsiders). Furthermore, a process facilitator is a good
listener, sensitive to signs (political, emotional), a good manager/organiser,
breeds trust, is a good navigator in areas of tension, a good discussion leader,
an animator and has no hidden agenda. It is not always necessary that all these
responsibilities and qualities can be found within one single person, they can
also be distributed among multiple people who complement each other.
Conclusion
In terms of human agency and capacity, sustainability ultimately has something
to do with our ability to sustain. But what, why and how to sustain are critical
questions not easily answered as the world rapidly changes, knowledge becomes
quickly obsolete, and values and interest shift, as do the powers that drive them.
We have suggested that the indeterminacy of sustainability coupled with the
normative position of having a moral responsibility of taking care of people
and planet in ways that sustain quality and dignified life for all including non-
human species, now and in the future, calls for new forms of learning and new
competencies and qualities.
Sustainability is an emerging property of an on-going learning process, rather
than an agreed-upon outcome that can be comfortably and authoritatively
prescribed, transferred or taught. Therefore, we need to focus our attention on
the physical, social, cultural and psychological spaces and conditions, such as
levers, barriers and support mechanisms that make such learning possible in
the first place. These learning spaces and conditions should allow for critiquing
and even subverting existing frameworks, frames, institutions, rules of the
game, procedures and patterns that have established themselves over time and
may have been useful in the times they were conceived but now turn out to be
inherently unsustainable.
A sustainability citizen is one who is able to interrogate resilient
unsustainability and who can participate in the co-creation of new systems
and associated practices that appear, at least for the moment, more sustainable
than the ones in need of replacement. Clearly this demands more than the
ability to adapt to changing circumstances due, for instance, to climate change
or, in light of such changes, to become more resilient as an individual or as a
community. Rather sustainability citizenship requires the capacity to disrupt
and transgress prevailing, dominant and unquestioned frameworks and
systems that predetermine and structure social and economic behaviour. This
capacity is not emphasised much in the current discourse around sustainability
governance or in circles connected to education and learning in the context
of sustainable development. By stressing disruptive capacity building and
transgressive learning (Lotz-Sisitka et al. forthcoming), the focus shifts away
from learning to cope with the negative and disempowering effects of current
hegemonic ways of ‘producing’, ‘consuming’ and ‘living’ to address the root
causes of unsustainability and to support the quest for morally defensible,
ethical and meaningful lives.
How to ‘design’ spaces for this type of learning and capacity building is an
interesting question. We know that breaking hegemonic systems and routines
will require creative and energising solutions that can generate a force strong
enough to create expansive niches or pockets of transformation that can, with
time, become new ‘regimes’ that may shift the entire ‘landscape’ (Geels and Schot
2007). Diversity and so-called boundary crossing serve creativity. Diversity, in and
by itself, is an insufficient community characteristic to automatically engender
creativity. Without social cohesion, diversity can become a source of conflict,
driving people apart by deepening cleavages and entrenching boundaries.
Learning for transitioning to sustainable practices usually takes place within
a continuum. At one end, like-minded and self-motivated people gather around
an issue in opposition to existing structures, powers and patterns. At the other
end, orchestrated ‘participation’ is arranged by the powers that be, giving a
semblance of ‘inclusiveness’ and openness to alternatives. Most activities occur
somewhere in between these two extremes, where finding common ground,

nurturing and giving voice, allow for negotiating alternative forms of decision-
making and exercising power.
The responsibility and possibility for sustainability citizenship clearly does
not only lie with citizens, both individually and collectively, but also with the
amount of space for critique, dialogue and participation that society at large
allows or encourages. The emergence of sustainability citizenship will be greatly
enhanced by the emergence of a sustainability culture embracing social learning.
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Part II
innovation
Housing and social

6
Green housing developments
Sustainability pathway or cul-de-sac?

Ralph Horne
Contemporary ideas of citizen engagement shifting to more sustainable

households span the disciplines and extend back across the sustained burst of
environmental concern since the late 1960s. Over a 50-year period, the debates
around ecological modernisation and its prospects and limitations have regularly
engaged with matters at the nexus of government, civil society, technology and
households. As with other consumption concerns, a key question for sustainable
housing is the extent to which social engagement with sustainability can or
should be ‘steered’ through the promotion of particular technologies or policy
mechanisms.
Citizens may have aspirations but they do not have free choice to live
sustainably, however we define it (Maller et al. 2012). Various social theories
inform our attempts to understand sustainability citizenship in the context
of innovative energy and water arrangements in owner-occupied housing
developments – the subject of this chapter. Anthony Giddens (1984) reminds us
that the agency inferred in the term sustainability citizenship is imbricated with
social structures. Bourdieu’s Habitus (1990) recognises individuals’ dependence
on social context, which constrains each of us to a specific set of dispositions.
Michel Foucault (1991) and other scholars of governmentality, such as Dean
(1999), reveal the myriad of ways in which governments and the markets they
preside over actively shape and constrain choices. Indeed, well before Marx’s
nineteenth-century analyses, the role of governments in shaping resources and
practices of citizens had been well established.
Technologies, governments, firms, civil society and households are all
engaged in creating housing and citizenship. Theories of socio-technical change
carry various ontologies. Geels’ (2010) multi-level perspective is useful as a
means of outlining important factors and relations involved in a transition to
70 Ralph Horne
sustainable housing. Influential settings for thinking about how sustainability

citizens and housing might form part of a sustainability transition include
the political and ecological ‘landscape’, factors such as international politics
or climate change; the regime (the dominant system of housing production);
and the idea of ‘niches’, such as supported networks of sustainable housing
technologies, policies and occupants. Social practice theory has been developed
by Shove (2003, 2015) and others in a similar endeavour, offering different,
critically important perspectives on how domestic practices shape – and are

shaped by – technologies, knowledge and societal structures.
Here, the focus is on owner-occupied households in purposive attempts
towards more sustainable housing. This chapter tackles the question: To what
extent can concepts of sustainability citizenship assist in understanding attempts
to promote more sustainable housing?
The remainder of this chapter is structured in three parts: first, an introduction
to the context of ‘sustainable housing’ and attempts to bring it about; second,
a case study based in an Australian capital, Melbourne, to explore citizen
engagement in two differing developments; third, a discussion and conclusion
where we seek to apply sustainability citizenship ideas to contexts of sustainable
housing.
Sustainable housing: Dynamics of innovative energy and

water arrangements
Sustainable housing is often defined in terms of innovative energy and water
arrangements, by either substituting energy and water sources or reducing
consumption through technological, design or utilisation efficiency (or a
combination thereof ). Technologies include solar photovoltaic (PV) panels,
solar hot water, insulation, heat pumps, efficient boilers, rainwater harvesting
and greywater systems, whether on- or off-grid. At a precinct scale, technology
options may expand to include combined heat and power systems and large-
scale water collection and treatment systems for multiple households.
There are many and varied experiments and demonstrations. They range
from householder-led individual efforts, to ‘up-scaled’, even national-scale,
programs, some ‘new-build’, others ‘retrofit’. The fact that they tend to be
materially defined indicates technologically determinist conceptions, add-on
or replacement technologies to secure a pathway to more sustainable housing.
Various social, ownership and economic arrangements include ordinary market
ones; private household-owned and run (off-grid); and collective ownership or
use, leasing and contracting.
Domestic energy and water technologies take place within a wider set of
production and adoption dynamics, for instance, in the case of household PV
panels, the development of larger-scale solar farms and other non-domestic
applications. The US and Japan were pioneers in installing capacity, then
Europe, particularly Germany, led the world in the 2000s. However, following
Green housing developments 71
the global financial crisis, there was a rolling back of support systems across
parts of Europe. In Spain, taxes were levied on solar systems in a retrospective
attempt to claw back some initial state support. With Europe passing a peak, in
2013 China became the top solar PV market, adding to its dominance as the
main solar PV manufacturer, installing 11.8 GW out of the world total of 38.4
GW (EPIA 2014).
Outside Europe and China, Australia is notable for solar PV penetration, in
particular, for the pace of domestic installations. In 2008, there were only 14,064
solar PV systems. By 9 February 2015, 1,367,628 homes had a solar PV system on
the rooftop (ECRC 2015). This expansion by more than 9700 percent in seven
years is extraordinary, given that the 2011 Census counted only 9.12 million
dwellings in Australia in total, with only 75 percent of them detached. In 2015,
Australian householders continued to install solar PV systems on their rooftops
despite the rolling back of a feed-in tariff and other support; their government
becoming the first in the world to repeal progressive carbon pricing policies;
and a powerful fossil fuel energy lobby hostile to the ‘people power’ that may
ensue from any radical disruptive shift. In addition to this extraordinarily rapid
technological transition, almost one million solar hot water units have been
installed over the same period.
What does such a shift tell us about the dynamics of innovative energy
and water arrangements and the role of sustainability citizenship? First, the
global landscape is shifting, with technologies such as domestic solar PV
becoming accessible, and fossil technologies under threat. The International
Energy Agency (IEA 2013) suggests that international climate action may be
galvanised around a 450 ppm CO2 concentration, meaning global coal demand
might fall by 30 percent over the next 20 years, leaving coal exporters such as
Australia highly exposed (Horne and Fudge 2014). Second, it would appear
that Australian citizens are not necessarily being ‘driven’ by rational economic
utility-maximising behaviour – otherwise installations would have stopped
when tariffs were reduced. Instead, citizens have continued to invest in this
sustainable energy technology.
Is this a case of sustainability citizenship in action? Certainly, the housing
regime is shifting, with more and more installers, designers and builders
advertising innovative energy and water systems. Furthermore, householders’
practices are shifting, as the materiality or technology of energy and water is
changing, along with the skills and knowledge of such technologies, and the
narratives, structures, common understandings and social rules about what
constitutes appropriate housing energy and water arrangements.
Aurora and WestWyck case studies

The case studies presented here involved two locales in suburban Melbourne.
Both were ‘new-build’ developments, built and occupied within the previous
five years, with future additional phases planned, had a similar set of technologies
72 Ralph Horne
incorporated into their design, and were grid-connected to electricity, gas and
water. Both studies involved all the dwellings in their development projects.
The cases were investigated in the context of research on climate-adaptive
communities.
The following observations are drawn from project reports (Arcari et al.
2011) and re-examination of interview data involving 20 interviewees to focus
on household tours, practices and understandings of the systems of electricity
and water provision, and perceptions of resilience, adaptation and vulnerability

within those systems. Re-examining this data in the context of sustainability
citizenship shows contrasts and comparisons of affective dimensions and the
effect of these approaches on innovative energy and water arrangements. The
analysis is presented in five parts:
• Material settings of the innovative energy and water systems

• Householders’ motivations, aspirations and life stage
• Householders’ skills and knowledge
• Governance arrangements
• Social rules and common understandings of sustainability.
Numbers following anonymised quotes refer to coded interviews, with the

prefix ‘A’ referring to the Aurora development and ‘W’ for WestWyck.
Material settings
Although some technologies are common across the two sites, such as passive
design, solar hot water and greywater treatment and reuse, their settings vary.
Aurora is a new outer-urban greenfield development on the northern fringe
of Melbourne. Led by state land development agency VicUrban (now Places
Victoria), the first dwellings were completed in 2006. Around 8000 dwellings
will be constructed over the 20–25-year lifespan of the project (around 800 were
built at the time of this research). While various builders construct dwellings
at Aurora, the guidelines mandate that all houses have passive thermal design,
gas-boosted solar hot water units, a six-star energy performance rating (above
the then standard five-star minimum), and a supply of recycled ‘Class-A’
water delivered via a ‘third-pipe’ non-potable water network. At the larger,
development scale sits stormwater collection, and filtration and infiltration with
water-sensitive urban design features.
WestWyck is a small ecovillage development in an established inner-city
suburb, based in an original school building and additional terrace townhouses.
It is part of a gentrification and infill phenomenon in a relatively well-serviced
inner suburb. At the time of the study, WestWyck housed 32 people in 12
households, with a further stage planned. The technologies included solar
hot water and space heating, solar PV electricity, passive thermal design, on-
site rainwater collection, greywater treatment and reuse, and onsite blackwater
treatment and stormwater collection. All five townhouses and several apartments
within the old school building have solar PV panels and solar hot water units
supplied by rainwater collected onsite. The remaining apartments share a single
solar-boosted hot water system. All solar hot water units are linked to hydronic
space heating systems and domestic hot water outlets. Greywater is collected
centrally, treated, stored, and used in toilets, laundries and gardens. Rainwater
from each townhouse is stored in a 5000-litre under-deck tank. Rainwater from
the main apartment building roof is stored in visible tanks onsite and pumped
to roof-mounted hot water units and to external taps.
Householders’ motivations, aspirations and life stage

At Aurora, householders interviewed were mainly aged 45 years and over – some
with children under 18 – having moved from suburbs within a 15 km radius.
They included Indonesian, Macedonian, Greek, Dutch, Italian and Canadian
migrants and those born in Australia. They were attracted by affordability,
proximity of parks, play areas and schools for children, and familiarity with the
area, often with family and friends close by.
In contrast, WestWyck interviewees were attracted to its alignment with
their lifestyle values and ethics, accessibility (inner Melbourne) and the social
component of an ‘instant neighbourhood’ (W7) that ‘encapsulates a lot of my
values’ (W4). WestWyck householders were mainly aged 55 years and over and
no children resided there. Only two households had moved from neighbouring
suburbs. Almost all interviewees described themselves as Australian, New
Zealanders or of Anglo cultural heritage.
WestWyck households generally had higher levels of qualifications than those
at Aurora, although there was no difference in income levels between the two
groups of interviewees.
Several residents of WestWyck had come from a background of practical
engagement with sustainability or ecological concepts, whereas none of the
Aurora interviewees had previously lived with alternative systems or according
to sustainability or ecological values. Although some Aurora householders were
aware and supportive of green technologies, their understandings were more
recent and less developed:
A couple of people, our neighbours, they also like the idea of all these
energy-saving things, I’m not sure whether that’s the general idea here in
Aurora though.
(A3)
The ‘green’ motivations and aspirations of WestWyck residents were tested

when comfort was at stake. Lack of the air conditioning – frowned upon by
members of the WestWyck Owners’ Corporation (WOC) managing the
development – some inter-seasonal hydronic heating glitches and a lack of
74 Ralph Horne
tumble dryers had prompted a mix of strategies, including using stand-alone

electric heaters for certain areas on occasions. Fortunately, the comparatively
well-serviced location provides choices, for example, in the absence of tumble
dryers:
If I had a load [of washing] and I really wanted to dry them, I’d probably
take them to the laundrette.
(W3)
Householders’ skills and knowledge

Both developers had given householders sales packs, followed up with
‘education’ packs explaining how to work houses’ passive design features and
technologies. Since the interviewees could not in general recite or recall the
information distributed, it is likely they were largely ineffective in their intent.
Instead, informal and formal networks were called upon as needed. In general,
both sets of householders were resourceful and inventive, and could describe
and demonstrate ‘correct’ use of the innovative energy and water technologies.
For example, across both developments, householders linked passive design
features to comfort:
So that’s where we noticed a big difference in our bills because we’re not
having heating on or cooling as much.
(A6)
Technological change also prompted unexpected shifts in social practices,

such as householders substituting showers for baths because the flow restrictor
meant that a bath took unbearably long to fill. At Aurora, manually zoned
heating required householders to use a chair or ladder and, say, a broom, to close
off a vent, which created various difficulties, and put it off the radar for many: ‘I
believe I can but I don’t know how to do that’ (A1).
Picking up new skills was apparent across both developments, although the
process of sharing and learning from each other was more evident at WestWyck,
where a combination of shared technologies and communal areas and regular
community meetings was described by one householder as an ‘instant
neighbourhood’:
We make decisions communally. Whether you are sharing a clothesline or

whatever, the fact that you are sharing, you have to talk with one another,
and negotiate.
(W2)
Help and knowledge was ‘on tap’ at WestWyck – there were go-to people for
the water system, solar panels, water tank and garden. Some householders also
practised and shared skills in recycling, worm farming and using non-toxic
cleaning products.
At Aurora, one householder speculated on the relative lack of interaction
with neighbours:
Probably because it’s not an established suburb that, you know, we don’t
have that sense of community yet. Well, we do but, you know, we have to
help grow it to that point.

(A7)
However, for members of the Aurora Community Association (ACA) it was a

different story:
We get to learn a lot from each other and, with the problems that I had
with the guttering – I mean it affected next door and it’s affected a few of
these houses, so we’re able to, sort of, band together.
(A13)
While access to share skills and knowledge initially appeared to be lacking

at Aurora, there was opportunity to interact, yet the ACA had few active
members. Most interviewees at Aurora appeared to be time-poor due to family
commitments, work and travel. Basic services, such as shopping, taking kids
to school, visiting cafes and libraries that were not located locally, has led to
car-dependency and absenteeism from the likes of ACA meetings. Instead,
they were more reliant on extended family and friends and virtual community
networks for their innovative energy and water systems skills and knowledge.
Governance arrangements
Developers played a significant role in setting the initial governance
arrangements at each site. At Aurora, Places Victoria set out the lots, mandated
the innovative energy and water technologies, and entered into contracts with
privatised electricity grid suppliers, mains water suppliers and with the builders
who constructed the dwellings. They were concerned with energy and water
sustainability, and saw sustainability technologies offering an incentive to
potential buyers compared with other affordable housing developments on offer.
They also set up the ACA. Hence, although not generally legally responsible for
defects, servicing or ongoing issues with technologies or performance, residents
often associated Places Victoria with responsibility for defects in building work
or units installed. Some interviewees recalled promises made by Places Victoria
when purchasing homes and whether those promises were kept or not.
Institutional arrangements at Aurora have involved numerous stakeholders,
often with complex divisions of responsibility splintered between organisations
around the same service. For instance, with water supply, third pipe systems,
76 Ralph Horne
new technologies and water pipes either side of the meter were all supplied
by distinct organisations. The one clear line of responsibility was between the
householder, as customer and client, and providers: the developer, builders,
contractors, utilities and, eventually, local government. This supply–demand
relationship was consistent in accounts from Aurora interviewees.
At WestWyck, the developer commissioned the design and practices at the
site. While technically constituted, the partly shared arrangements reflected
the developers’ vision of an ecovillage designed on both environmental

and community ideals. Due to the presence of shared facilities, there was a
requirement for a body corporate organisation, WestWyck Owners’ Corporation
(WOC), under legislation governing residential developments other than
detached lots. The developer, a resident, has been a member of the WOC, which
enacts all contracts and negotiations with system manufacturers, installers and
contractors. As a key governance mechanism, meetings are frequent and well
attended:
Initially and with the standard approach, they said ‘Oh, we’ll have four
to six people or something and then just an annual meeting’ and, very
quickly, that dropped off and it’s every household at every meeting – you
know there is no committee we are all members and everybody’s invited
to every meeting. There’s a fair bit of red wine goes around on the night
so you know it, it’s a social event really.
(W7)
Hence, at the time of the study, there was a distinct difference between
Aurora and WestWyck in governance arrangements, particularly the ‘go-to’
arrangements for detected housing problems and responses to them. At Aurora,
lack of clear lines of responsibility and links between residents and institutions
that they relied on for their services meant delays in information reaching
responsible organisations, often even ending in a metaphorical cul-de-sac. At
WestWyck, householders were clear about to whom to go, and were more likely
to be forgiving of technological glitches and the contractors responsible. They
referred to system adjustments as:
a bit related to the innovative nature of the technology … these guys [the
service contractors] are learning as they go and I think WestWyck provides
them a laboratory in a sense. ‘Yes we’ve installed a system for you but
we’re working out the best ways to make this system work.’
(A3)
In summary, the governance arrangements at Aurora reflected classic

‘splintered urbanism’ (Graham and Marvin 2001), whereas at WestWyck the
WOC was a key intermediary organisation that provided a counter to the
splintered arrangements of private suppliers.
Social rules and common understandings of sustainability

Integrated into its governance function, WOC provided a social framework
and became a player in setting and re-setting the social rules and common
understandings of sustainability, for example, through various forms of
community obligations to participate. There were pros and cons to such
arrangements. For example, WestWyck residents with uncomfortably hot upstairs
rooms in hot weather faced resistance from the WOC if they resorted to installing
air conditioning units. However, most of the house packages at Aurora included
air conditioning and, for those that did not, developers and builders were there
to help out:
The site supervisor was kind enough to let our air conditioning guy come
in and pre-wire or pre-pipe … because we’ve got four units upstairs and
one here.
(A5)
It was part of the house and land package … with that particular builder,
because not everybody has it, most people have the evaporative … yeah.
(A6)
It is tempting to generalise WestWyck and WOC as a case where social rules were
being reset by an organised, interested group of sustainability citizens in contrast
to a private sector development (Aurora) peddling rampant energy consumption
through air conditioning. However, two observations suggest otherwise. First, the
social rules and common understandings of householders at each site were not
fundamentally different. In each case, householders wanted to do the ‘right’ thing
by the environment, but also had private homes, priorities around comfort for
themselves, other family members and guests, and practical everyday challenges
(work, time, conflicting priorities) that needed to be managed. Second, dominant
understandings of keeping cool in hot weather have increasingly pointed to air
conditioners as an international standard. Across Australia their use proliferated
from 32 percent of households in 1995 to 74 percent in 2014 (ABS 2008, 2014).
This ‘transition’ follows the US and coincides with the UK and Europe (Shove
et al. 2012), with even greater demand increases in Southeast Asia (Winter 2013).
Without detracting from the well-intentioned and concerted sustainability
efforts of WestWyck residents, to the extent that they traded-off comfort services
from air conditioning, this may say less about changing social rules than about
relative opportunities. The fact that there are fewer households with air conditioners
at WestWyck than at Aurora does not necessarily reflect lower environmental
impacts per se. To test this, one would need to balance the environmental ‘savings’
at WestWyck with the environmental ‘costs’ of the various substitute hot-period
activities that WestWyck residents undertake when non-air-conditioned upstairs
rooms are abandoned, such as going out driving, shopping and cinema-going.
78 Ralph Horne
Discussion and conclusion

This discussion dives off from the key question: To what extent can concepts
of sustainability citizenship assist in understanding attempts to promote more
sustainable housing? Resisting air conditioning at WestWyck may be a valid – if
symbolic – gesture to a sustainability culture. But, does it constitute sustainability
citizenship? Taking a pragmatic view of sustainability citizenship, the answer is
‘yes’. Such resistance signifies a heartfelt attempt to overcome practical everyday
dilemmas in attempting more sustainable routes.

However, as the case studies show, social structures matter. Governance,
skills and knowledge matter. The life stage, aspirations and resources available to
a householder matter. The smaller scale of WestWyck and active engagement in
WOC had pros and cons but provided clarity and ‘a place to go to’ that was less
apparent at Aurora. The WOC could be said to be an ‘active intermediary’ (Guy
et al. 2011) in that it sought to shape sustainability actions through an articulated
vision, active relationships and information exchange.
There are clear differences in the ways that each community treated unmet
expectations. At Aurora, residents were concerned about defects, and fixing and
upgrading costs that they would incur in the future. In contrast, such costs were
rarely mentioned among WestWyck residents; there was a sense that any faults
would be dealt with as a community, with costs distributed fairly.
In terms of sustainability citizenship, the householders at WestWyck and
Aurora were equal in that they each innovatively engaged with the housing
regime, sought sustainability outcomes where practicable, and shared priorities
around housing, comfort needs and family or network priorities. Differences
do not lie in aspirations, skills and knowledge, or behaviour, but in governance,
structuring and social practices. Affectively, people have common aspirations
– ‘comfort, cleanliness and convenience’ (Shove 2003) are the priority at
WestWyck and Aurora, and these are not traded off easily. At WestWyck, electric
heaters are just as likely to be brought into play when innovative technologies
fail as at Aurora. However, WestWyck citizens have an edge through their
privileged backgrounds. Furthermore, there is a greater imperative to ‘think’
green in a small development where air conditioning is frowned upon by the
community owners’ corporation. Evolving and localised social rules impinge on
technological options, resulting in potential trips to the laundrette.
Speculating on a potential role for sustainability citizenship in sustainable
housing transitions reveals numerous pathways and cul-de-sacs. In an era where
the imbricated socio-technological bundles that define sustainable housing are
rapidly changing, the dominant focus on technical and managerial solutions
casts a shadow across other promising transition pathways. Yet, there is a role for
intermediary organisations well versed in the arts of community engagement
and co-management, and able to act as a network conduit.
Citizenship in sustainable housing is not a personal responsibility but
part of a social process shaped, in turn, by policy and regulatory settings and
market mechanisms – such as feed-in tariffs or technology rebate arrangements
that preference particular options in particular places at particular times. The

domestic solar PV transition in Australia has been a social and cultural project as
much as a technical and market-driven one. Indeed, sustainability citizenship in
housing is shaped by social practices, which are in turn shaped by frameworks of
governance and social rules, circulations of skills, and material culture.
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7
Structuring housing
provision for urban
sustainability
Trivess Moore and Tony Dalton
Residential housing is significant to developing the concept of urban

sustainability citizenship and the agenda for developing more sustainable
cities. The way households use energy and contribute to greenhouse gas
emissions depends on a number of factors, including housing design,
construction and maintenance; dwelling size and age; climatic conditions;
household composition and income; and household appliance use and other
daily practices. In considering possible futures for the way citizens might
contribute to the urban sustainability project, we must see their reality within
the social, economic, cultural and policy context of residential housing systems
of provision. In short, citizens in households in different types of dwellings
have particular relationships with the materiality of residential housing.
Globally, the housing sector is a significant contributor to resource
consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. In the period 1990–2005 global
residential energy use increased by 19 percent and CO2 emissions increased by
21 percent, driven mainly by an increasing population. While CO2 emissions per
capita remained a constant 0.7 tonnes, there was a significant difference between
countries. In OECD countries, CO2 emissions per capita are, on average, five
times greater than in non-OECD countries (IEA 2008). Already, greater energy
efficiency in the residential sector has contributed to reducing CO2 emissions
and produced other social and economic benefits. During 2000–2010 there was
an average annual decrease of 0.07 percent, a reduction of 0.2 GJ per person
(IEA 2013).
It is not just a matter of encouraging households to try harder to reduce
energy use. Individuals constituting households have agency and can reduce
their environmental impacts but this agency is exercised in the context of
dwellings that have been designed and built in different ways at different
Structuring housing provision for urban sustainability 81
times; are connected to network infrastructures that supply resources through

regulated market arrangements; have different ownership and financing
arrangements; have different levels of tenure security; and confer specific
property and occupancy rights on residents. These features greatly influence
the way in which citizens in households live their lives and are empowered or
constrained in their potential to reduce consumption of resources. Therefore,
the development of urban sustainability citizenship relies on attention to
housing systems of provision in guiding appropriate practices, programmes and

policy towards a low carbon housing future.
This chapter discusses the ways that citizens are both constrained and
empowered, by their circumstances within the housing system of provision,
to act as sustainable urban citizens. First, we review the opportunities and
constraints that the social and economic relations of different housing
tenures present in developing sustainability citizenship. Second, we explore
the implications of both the urban housing stock, which is constructed and
reconstructed over long periods of time, and householders’ movements in and
out of different tenurial arrangements. Third, we discuss how public policy
shapes housing provision and how environmental objectives have been added
in to this landscape. This discussion is developed within tenure arrangements
characteristic of the developed countries of the Global North and associated
policy initiatives framed around the sustainability imperative.
Housing tenure
Housing tenure refers to the different sets of laws, property rights, practices
and understandings of housing provision systems (Hunter and Blandy 2012;
Ruonavaara 2012). The two main tenure types contain further sub-categories.
Owner-occupiers include households who own their dwelling outright and
those repaying a mortgage. Renters are distinguished between private rental,
where private landlords own dwellings, and social housing, where government
agencies or non-profit organisations (such as rental housing associations or
cooperatives) own dwellings.
Tenure mix varies considerably irrespective of national wealth. For example,
homeownership is 40 percent in Germany, even less in Switzerland and Japan,
but more than 90 percent in some Eastern European countries. Across regions
and cities within countries the mix of private rental and social rental housing
varies greatly. In a few countries social housing accounts for more than 50
percent of the rental market, in others it is almost non-existent. The proportion
open to all on a wait-turn basis, or targeted to low-income households, also
varies (Andrews et al. 2011).
Tenure arrangements give residents different levels of power over their
dwelling, which affects their choices. Owners, purchasers, private tenants and
social housing tenants experience different property and occupancy rights,
and ways of relating to their dwellings. Levels of power are shaped by security
82 Trivess Moore and Tony Dalton
of tenure laws, ability of households to control housing costs, and to modify,

improve and maintain dwellings, and opportunities to move to another dwelling.
While tenures do not have fixed universal characteristics, generally, owner-
occupiers have had more control and ability to make decisions than tenants in
private rental and social housing.
Within national and regional jurisdictions, tenures evolve over time and
become institutions constituted by practices, norms and understandings about
housing services and ownership. The continuous buying, selling and renting
constituting home ownership and rental markets shape their institutional
characteristics. They are also shaped by government policy, in areas such as
consumer rights, taxation, building quality, housing finance, income security
payments, welfare and community services, land use planning and specific forms
of assistance to renters, landlords and purchasers (Hunter and Blandy 2012;
Ruonavaara 2012). The growth of the idea of ‘urban sustainability citizenship’
heralds that practices in household use of resources are changing, are a factor in
ownership and rental markets, and a focus of government policy.
What, then, are the main ways in which tenure relations enable and constrain
households seeking to reduce their use of resources, in particular, energy?
The main categories of energy residential use are space and water heating,
lighting, powering appliances and cooking. In the Global North, energy for
space heating and cooling forms the largest share of household energy use,
although its share is declining. Powering appliances forms the second most
significant share and is increasing. Meanwhile, other uses have remained stable
(IEA 2008: 46). The ability of owner-occupier and rental households to make
and implement decisions to reduce household energy use across such categories,
while maintaining comfort and amenity, is significantly different.
Space heating and cooling is the category where the difference is greatest;
the amount of energy required for space conditioning is closely aligned to the
quality of the building envelope and the efficiency of the space-conditioning
equipment. Owner-occupiers have much greater capacity to improve the
building envelope and space-conditioning equipment than do tenants. Tenants
must rely on landlords for envelope and heating equipment improvement.
Owners can make decisions to replace refrigerators, dishwashers, washing
machines and clothes driers with more energy-efficient models. Tenants may
have the same opportunity but in countries where landlords supply these
items, tenants have limited choices. Frequently, owner-occupiers have more
opportunities than tenants to install more energy-efficient water heating,
lighting and cooking equipment. However, both owner-occupiers and tenant
households have control over their adoption and use of smaller household
appliances and networked technologies, such as computers, games consoles,
home theatres and Internet television.
Overall owner-occupiers have the greatest opportunity to make decisions to
reduce energy use by making changes to the building envelope and internal
equipment. Within the constraints of planning and building regulations and
household access to capital, these households can renovate and retrofit their
dwellings to become more energy efficient, for instance, installing on-site
renewable energy as an energy source to reduce reliance on fossil fuel energy.
Private and social renters can, perhaps, make small changes such as placing
draught excluders around doors and windows, replacing existing high-flow
showerheads with low-flow ones and fitting curtains and pelmets to windows.
However, landlords must make significant changes, such as installing double-
glazing, renewing space-heating equipment or installing ceiling insulation.

Private and social housing renters are more likely to be constrained by low
incomes and lack of savings to make even small changes to increase their
dwelling’s energy efficiency feasible within normal landlord–tenant relations.
This is a structural problem stemming from one person or organisation
owning the building and someone else using it. Variously described as the
principal–agent, split incentives or investor–user problem, an asymmetrical
situation arises because the benefits of capital expenditure enabling a tenant
to lower energy use tend to flow to the tenant through reduced energy costs
and improved thermal comfort. That the landlord normally does not receive
a return on the investment is recognised as a significant structural barrier to
action that could otherwise result in significant energy savings in the residential
sector (IEA 2007).
This problem can be addressed by regulations requiring landlords to improve
the energy efficiency of their properties; government support for improvements;
and increasing rent to return a proportion of the savings enjoyed by tenants to
landlords, as has been achieved in certain countries (Whitehead et al. 2012: 30).
In the European Union, information about the energy efficiency of the dwelling
at point of rent or sale gives landlords a competitive advantage, particularly as
costs of living continue to increase (Arcipowska et al. 2014).
Landlords may also be willing to allow tenants to make improvements.
However, this is less likely in countries with poor security of tenure provisions
and no rent controls, such as Australia. In countries with longer leases and
stronger security of tenure provisions, renters can exercise greater control over
their dwelling and make improvements. In some European countries, private
rental agreements can be for 5, 10 or even up to 99 years (Whitehead et al. 2012).
Social renters generally have fewer opportunities than private renters.
In many countries social renters tend to have low-income and educational
levels and have been offered social housing because of ongoing health issues
or other disadvantages (Andrews et al. 2011). This lowers their ability to fund
any improvements for energy efficiency or, due to social housing shortages,
opportunities to find a more energy-efficient dwelling (JCHS 2013; Wulff et
al. 2011).
In building and managing social housing stock, social housing agencies
balance requirements to improve the energy efficiency of existing stock with
other priorities, such as expanding stock numbers and providing safe and secure
housing. Other priorities may not align with sustainability outcomes. However,
improving the amenity and thermal performance of dwellings can result in

significant health, financial and social benefits for social housing tenants.
Housing agencies are starting to recognise the importance of continuing to
improve social housing properties for sustainability. In the UK, social housing
provided by housing associations and local government has become a more
energy-efficient tenure than either owner-occupied or private rental housing
(DCLG 2013: 40).
Particularly in Europe, the drive to increase the energy efficiency of buildings,

and reduce carbon emissions, is leading to measures that support improving
energy efficiency of private rental housing (BPIE 2013). For instance, tenants
can be given greater rights to energy-efficient housing. With the spread of
energy efficiency certificates, tenants, perhaps those with higher incomes and
therefore more choice, will increasingly choose to live in more energy-efficient
dwellings, thereby encouraging landlords to increase the supply of energy-
efficient dwellings.
Housing stock
Residential stock is built over time, with new dwellings being added at around
1–2 percent per annum in most developed economies. Therefore, existing
housing stock presents the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity to
make further energy savings and reduction of CO2 emissions in the residential
sector. The Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE) (2011: 7) has
summarised the challenge thus: ‘while new buildings can be constructed with
high performance levels, it is the older buildings, representing the vast majority
of the building stock, which are predominantly of low energy performance and
subsequently in need of renovation work’. This stock typically comes in many
types, ages, designs and qualities. The impetus to improving the performance of
dwellings in the Global North was driven initially by the oil shocks of the 1970s
and, more recently, by the challenges of climate change.
Over the past 30 years, minimum building codes have been introduced and
regularly improved, leading to significant improvements in energy efficiency
in new residential construction. In some jurisdictions, such as the UK and
California, governments have signalled that they will require near zero net
energy/carbon new housing (Moore et al. 2014). More recently, these codes
are being adapted to require owners who are renovating to improve the energy
efficiency of existing dwellings concurrently. Requirements for existing buildings
evolve as regulators seek to respond to the complex material and socio-technical
dimensions of existing housing structures (Horne and Dalton 2014).
Nevertheless, the critical role that the existing housing market will play in
achieving a low-carbon housing future is well recognised and many countries are
pursuing strategies for more sustainable renovation. In recent years the EU has
developed a range of policies and strategies focused on facilitating sustainability
renovations and ensuring long-term energy and climate goals are reached across
the built environment (BPIE 2013). However, policy development for new and
existing housing is not occurring consistently across the Global North, with
some jurisdictions, like Australia, lagging behind in areas such as certification of
energy performance and standards for renovations of existing dwellings.
Typically, minimum housing performance regulations have focused on
reducing space conditioning and lighting energy requirements. However,
recently, this approach has broadened in some jurisdictions to include
appliances, energy generation and wider elements of sustainability and place-

making. Evidence suggests that such regulations are working, that housing
constructed today will be more energy and water efficient than those built
previously (IEA 2010). However, changing housing and demographic trends,
such as larger house sizes and declining numbers of occupants per house with
more appliances, has meant that overall total residential energy consumption
continues to rise.
New housing is most cost-effective in reducing environmental impact
because it easily includes advanced materials, technologies, design and
construction approaches, increasing energy efficiency. Within financial, planning
and time constraints, knowledgeable owners can make selections and trade-offs
to improve their house’s sustainability. A sustainability citizen will think about
how they want to use the house in the present, in the future, and needs of
future occupants. Accessibility, allowing for aging-in-place, integrating ‘smart’
technologies and designing for a changing climate are all more easily, and cost-
effectively, included in new builds rather than renovations.
Renters have less opportunity to make decisions because they simply occupy
a completed building. Their choice of rental properties, perhaps guided by
information in energy performance certificates, is an indirect influence on
industry through changing market demand. Certificates facilitate tenants
taking energy efficiency into account, but more affluent ones have more
choices. Regulations, such as those in development in the UK (DECC 2015),
will empower tenants to require landlords to improve properties to a required
standard, the landlord in turn becoming eligible for government financial
support.
Clearly, the ability of owners (and renters) to influence design and
construction of housing requires the support of the wider building industry,
networks and infrastructure along with regulatory requirements and urban
planning developments. For example, planning is important in shaping cities
for sustainability – particularly as cities move towards more sustainable, higher
density, mixed-use infill development (New Climate Economy 2014). In
places like Australia most new dwellings add to low-density suburbs on the
urban fringes (Kelly and Donegan 2015). In other places, such as London,
there has been more focus on urban growth boundaries, containing sprawl and
establishing demonstration projects, such as BedZed. Houses built on the urban
fringe tend to be cheaper to buy but more expensive to maintain and, at least
initially, have poor local amenity and access to public transport.
Once a dwelling is built it is difficult and costly to change its design and
building materials without significant renovation (Horne and Dalton 2014).
Despite this, existing dwellings are continually being extended, maintained and
fixed, with occupants becoming amateur designers and building experts putting
their own tastes, values and ideals into the dwelling. This is easier for owner-
occupiers to achieve than it is for renters. As Ruonavaara (2012: 186) explains:
Residents actively make dwellings homes by redesigning, decorating, and

changing them according to their values and wishes. As different housing
tenures invest residents with different degrees of power over their living
space, tenure may also be relevant for homemaking. If one’s housing
tenure gives little say over the living space, it may not be easy to feel at
home in it.
There are increasing products available for improving the sustainability of

existing dwellings, such as ceiling, floor and wall insulation, solar photovoltaics
(PV), solar hot water, secondary glazing of windows and draught proofing. Some
of these options are low cost and can be undertaken by ‘DIYers’ to save further
costs. Research, such as that undertaken by Boardman et al. (2005), demonstrates
how the knowledge, materials, technologies and skills are currently available so
that existing housing can significantly reduce environmental impacts within a
broad cost-effective framing. Trying to upscale sustainable housing renovation
efforts to significantly reduce energy use is challenging. For this to be achieved
at scale requires government agencies to lead the process based on knowledge of
housing stock and renovation industries.
Additionally, different types of dwelling shape different opportunities and
constraints for an owner or tenant to improve its sustainability. It is easier to
make decisions about improving a detached house than a unit in a multi-unit
dwelling, which typically involves making agreements between multiple owners
within the framework of an owner corporation or condominium body. In this
context, the legislative and regulatory framework that these bodies operate in
will have considerable bearing on the ease with which decisions can be made
about the future of the building and sustainability priorities.
Citizens seeking to live more sustainably need to think holistically about their
housing needs. How will this dwelling meet my housing needs, now and into
the future? What are the energy and water use consequences of my lifestyle?
How can the energy and water efficiency of my dwelling be improved? What
are the costs and benefits of improvements? How suitable will this dwelling be
in a changing climate? How does the performance of this dwelling compare to
the performance of similar dwellings? Owner-occupiers have fewer constraints
in answering and responding to such questions because they have greater
opportunities to make decisions about improvements. However, they are still
constrained by planning requirements, costs and neighbours’ activities, such as
shading potentially affecting the performance of passive solar design or solar PV
installations. Typically, renters are restricted to making minor improvements to

their dwelling’s energy and water efficiency performance.
Policy
Governments shape housing provision in all societies in many ways by
establishing the preconditions, especially the property rights and contract rights,
which enable the production and exchange of property and housing services.
They shape the exchange relations of buyers and sellers of property and housing
services, through measures such as grants, subsidies and tax expenditures. They
also supplant the market by directly funding the provision of non-market social
housing. This is the context within which governments overlay measures that
seek to improve the energy and water efficiency of residential housing.
Four principal categories are evident. First, governments regulate by making
rules backed up by laws about how buildings must be constructed and about what
must be disclosed to renters and purchasers. Second, governments influence
or establish new utility markets connecting households through network
infrastructures. Third, governments penalise or support actors in specific ways
through taxes and targeted expenditures. Fourth, governments have sought to
change behaviours by developing and running information and educational
programmes (Ürge-Vorsatz et al. 2007). Table 7.1 presents a summary of the
main measures within these four categories evident across developed countries
of the Global North.
Building codes set rules about how residential housing must be constructed,
including minimum energy and water efficiency requirements. Internationally,
Table 7.1 Energy efficiency measures and tenures
Categories Measures In-built tenure preference

Regulation • Building codes • All tenures
• Appliance standards • All tenures
• Energy performance • All tenures
certificates
Market shaping • Energy-efficient obligations • Owner-occupiers
• Renewable energy • Owner-occupiers
certificates
Fiscal measures • Tax on CO2 • All households, all tenures
• Grants and loans • Owner-occupiers and
• Tax exemptions landlords
• Owner-occupiers and
landlords
Information • Leadership projects • Social housing
and engagement • Awareness campaigns • All tenures
• Disclosure programmes • All tenures
two approaches are evident. Incremental tightening of energy efficiency

requirements on a semi-regular strategic approach is evident in the EU, the UK
and California (Moore et al. 2014). For instance, the EU adopted the Energy
Performance of Buildings Directive in 2002, revised in 2010 (BPIE 2011: 63).
Setting goals and pathways for zero/low emission housing standards, it became
the policy driver for improving the energy efficiency of commercial and
residential buildings in member states. The UK responded with policy requiring
a stepwise reduction in carbon emissions over a ten-year period (Panagiotidou

and Fuller 2013). This strategic approach has the benefit of giving building
industry businesses, consumers and other stakeholders a roadmap for change,
providing certainty to innovators investing in skill development, new products,
construction techniques and technologies.
European code regulation to improve the energy performance of existing
housing stock was extended through the 2002/91/EC Energy Performance of
Buildings Directive (EPBD). Its two main provisions have the potential to fulfil
its objectives by offering a methodology for calculating the integrated energy
performance of buildings and energy certification of existing buildings based on
an assessment of energy performance. Certification is registered and available to
purchasers and renters in the owner-occupied and private rental markets.
In the UK, the methodology for assessing energy performance is an index,
based on calculated annual space and water heating costs for a standard heating
regime, and used to assess performance and certify buildings on a seven-point
scale before sales and re-lets. The headline finding of the most recent analysis
of certificates is further improvement in the energy efficiency in all tenures.
The private rental stock, however, continues to have the highest proportion
of worst performing dwellings on this scale (DCLG 2013). This outcome is
closely associated with low incomes of tenants and high levels of ‘fuel poverty’
and has prompted tenure-specific regulation. New Tenant’s Energy Efficiency
Improvement Regulations will empower tenants to request energy efficiency
measures from landlords eligible for programme supports that accompany this
regulation. This policy development regulation addresses the split-incentive
problem evident in landlord–tenant relations (DECC 2014).
Energy efficiency obligations start by setting a mandatory target for energy
efficiency gains. Usually this obligation rests with energy suppliers who are
penalised if they do not meet their obligation. The prospect of a penalty creates
a price for energy saved which, in turn, can be treated as a credit expressed
in a tradable certificate, generally referred to as ‘white certificates’. The Prime
Minister’s Task Group on Energy Efficiency (2010: 51) has pointed out that
‘this additional transferable value … drives the take-up of energy efficiency
opportunities that were previously ignored’. However, there is a tenure bias
in obligation schemes because large-scale savings rely on significant changes
in residential building structures and appliances, for example, double glazing
windows and new heating systems. On such expensive items the cost is partly
met by sale of white certificates but still requires investments by owners. When
the owner is a landlord, the split-incentive problem militates against investment

and can only be fully overcome by regulation and, perhaps, direct assistance to
landlords, as implemented in the UK.
A similar problem emerges with the operation of the renewable energy
market based on Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), which provide
evidence of the production of renewable energy through devices such as solar
PV panels and solar hot water heaters mounted on dwellings. However, they
too require considerable up-front investment over and above what the owner
receives from the sale of the certificate in the RECs market. However, the
creation of an RECs market can have a profound effect, as shown in Chapter
6 by Ralph Horne; the Australian REC regime coupled with further subsidies
resulted in enormous growth in residential solar PV systems and a self-
sustaining industry. However, owner-occupiers have benefited most from the
RECs coupled with subsidies regime.
Three types of fiscal measures can influence residential energy use and
contribute to lowering CO2 emissions. The first of these is putting a price on
CO2 emissions at source and cascading this price through the energy system
to all users, including owner-occupier and tenant households. The increase in
price aims to encourage reduced use. The effectiveness of this tax in lowering
emissions will depend on numerous factors, including the size of the tax and
the ability of households to lower consumption. Other fiscal measures, grants,
loans and tax concessions, are directed to owner-occupiers and landlords to
encourage them to renovate their dwellings in ways that make it easier for
them, or their tenants, to lower their energy use. In the UK case, noted above,
tenants have been empowered by regulations to require the landlord to use
available grants and loans to increase energy efficiency.
There have been many schemes across countries of the Global North. In
Europe, grant programmes are used more than subsidies, loans and tax credits.
At the same time, it is reported that although ‘there are many programmes
in place understanding of their overall effectiveness is unclear’ (BPIE 2013:
16). The history of the Australian 2009 ceiling insulation subsidy programme
illustrates acknowledged programme management and effectiveness issues in
this area. Programme rebates of up to $1,600 were paid to owners who insulated
previously non-insulated roof space. The programme was shut down within a
year because of safety issues associated with the rapid growth of retailers and
installers, many with limited expertise (Hawke 2010). The programme was
discontinued after deaths of several workers and more than 100 house fires
(Dollery and Hovey 2010). Nevertheless, the programme resulted in more
than one million houses being insulated at a cost of $1 billion. Yet, this cost
doubled once the government paid for safety checks on more than 150,000
dwellings insulated by subsidised private contractors.
Increases in energy efficiency and opportunities for more citizens to
become sustainability citizens can also result from changes in culture. Western
developed societies became consumer societies as increases in household
income supported increasing use of fossil fuels and growth in carbon

emissions. In the Australian culture this has meant that citizens have ‘low
engagement in and understanding of energy use, how different energy using
activities drive costs and how to manage their energy bills’ (Prime Minister’s
Task Group on Energy Efficiency 2010: 100). This type of analysis has led to
a continuing focus on information and engagement programmes. Typically,
these programmes are directed to households, such as programmes seeking to
educate households about the impact of their energy and water consumption
and advocate other household behaviours and practices. For example, such
programmes advocate the exchange of old inefficient light bulbs for low-energy
LED lights. Other programmes involve energy utilities informing households
on comparative energy use on their bills and some provide consumers with
opportunities to track, and even manage, their energy use on smart phones
and computers.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored the way citizens are constrained and empowered by
their circumstances within systems of housing provision to act as sustainability
citizens in cities. Clearly, tenure is a key dimension of systems of housing
provision and shapes the ability of citizens to control their use of energy and
water. Exactly how tenure shapes the level and nature of control that citizens
have varies across countries because tenures are constituted by practices and
understandings about different forms of housing service and ownership.
Owner-occupiers generally have more opportunities than tenants to
improve sustainability outcomes. Further, while new housing performance has
improved significantly due to minimum performance standards, there has been
less attention to improving the performance of existing housing. However, this
is not the case for all jurisdictions. In some jurisdictions, particularly in Europe
and some states in the US, regulations, shaping of markets, fiscal measures
and information provision are addressing this divide – requiring owners and
landlords to improve the energy efficiency of their dwellings and, therefore,
providing tenants with the opportunity to become sustainability citizens.
The connections between sustainability citizenship and housing provision
are multi-layered, and tenure and the material nature of dwellings are factors
shaping such connections. Members of households have agency and can
make decisions about the way they use resources in and around their homes.
However, their capacity to do this is shaped by whether they own or rent.
Tenants who rent from a landlord have less control over their dwelling and the
way it can be modified to support energy and water use reduction. However,
the extent of this lack of control relates closely to the broader pattern of
landlord–tenant relations found in different jurisdictions. The nature of
dwellings also has a considerable bearing on the way in which sustainability
citizens can lower their use of energy and water. The residential housing stock
has been designed and constructed over long periods of time. The challenge
of up-grading this stock, so that both owner-occupier and tenant households
find it easier to reduce energy and water use, is massive. Some jurisdictions,
particularly EU countries, have been developing public policy frameworks
and programmes that support systematic action. Others have engaged little
in policy and programme development. More is required in these laggard
countries.
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8
Co-working communities
Sustainability citizenship at work

Tim Butcher
The spaces of work that built the dominant modernity in Westernised societies
of the Global North in the twentieth century are changing (Dale and Burrell
2008). Many once-foundational jobs have been resigned to the past, are in
short supply or have been dispatched offshore. In rhetoric, if not reality, a new
spirit of entrepreneurialism has emerged to fill the void. The current political
dictum of ‘doing more with less’ posits the notion that communities of citizens,
not institutions, will now work to create the sustainable solutions we need for
the future (Sennett 2012). Without the rigidity and security of mass-industrial
work, sustainability citizenship in urban economies of advanced capitalism may
be expected to take on collective entrepreneurial forms – constructing new
organisations around sustainability ideals that challenge mainstream state and
private institutional dominance and are directed towards alternative futures.
Such citizens see an opportunity to organise themselves and work collectively
in ways that they believe to be unbound by, and outside of, capitalism (Kostera
2014). I refer to the protagonists of this emergent social group as ‘sustainability
citizens’. Many such citizens I encounter in my research do not see themselves
as ‘workers’. The notion of being a worker, to them, is something embedded
in and constrained by the capitalist spaces of organisation (Dale and Burrell
2008). Instead they see themselves as freelancers and entrepreneurs, operating
outside of capitalist norms, with ambitions of influencing significant social,
environmental and economic transformations (Kostera 2014).
Commonly framed as ‘social entrepreneurs’ (Peredo and McLean 2006),
the citizens I research are uncomfortable with this discursive device, itself
bound within capitalism. Instead they see themselves as having broader
aims, and construct their identities accordingly. So, in framing this group as
sustainability citizens, I draw on their rhetoric of alternative futures via projects
94 Tim Butcher
that they claim circumvent capitalism. While some individual freelancers and
entrepreneurs focus their ventures on environmental sustainability, others focus
on social sustainability or economic sustainability. However, as I show later, they
collectively organise themselves in order for their ventures to become entwined
to meet sustainability challenges holistically – they do not differentiate between
social, economic and environmental sustainabilities.
The aim of this chapter is to explore one such alternative form of citizen-
based organisation, ‘co-working’ in shared member-based spaces, which enable

peer-to-peer interactions that engender camaraderie and a collective sense of
achievement that enhances individual sociality and productivity as a form of
socially and economically sustainable work. Hence, I focus this chapter on the
spaces of organisation and their cultures of sustainability. Under this broad
definition, co-working takes various spatial forms, from ad hoc meet-ups at
cafés to low-rent shared office and maker spaces to high-fee architecturally
designed workspaces.
The starting points for this chapter are that co-working in its late neoliberal,
post-industrial form has not yet attracted sufficient theoretical attention and
holds great appeal to entrepreneurial sustainability citizens. Accordingly, my
purpose is to conceptualise this emergent phenomenon, to analyse how it relates
to ideas of sustainability citizenship. My initial conceptualisation draws from the
lived experiences and symbolic interactions of co-working in Austin (Texas, US),
London (UK), Sydney and Melbourne (Australia) – participatory observation of
how co-workers interact with the ‘things’ of co-working, and with each other, to
derive shared meanings of what it is to co-work (Blumer 1986).
Drawing on four years’ ethnographic participation in co-working, I make
particular links between co-working and a specific idea of ‘community’. Spinuzzi
(2012) finds that community is a thread through co-working discourses, but
how the co-workers he studies experience and define community remains
unclear, despite its importance as a symbol in their everyday lives. Instead, I
start by conceptualising co-working as a collective identity and aim to show
how co-workers make sense of how they practise in more sustainable ways and
how they foster a sense of collective working towards more sustainable futures.
Co-working is a key component of contemporary sustainability citizens’
entrepreneurial identity construction, a symbolic expression of unconventional
and to some extent anti-organisational work. I find that co-workers typically
position their communal ways of working against conventional views of other
forms of work created through neoliberal and bureaucratic organisation. To
co-workers, their working ‘community’ seems postmodern, more humanistic,
fluid and sustainable than working in a factory, office or retail space. It offers a
distinct ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 2005) of entrepreneurial sustainability citizenship,
and a sense of belonging to a social movement towards change.
However, I reflexively critique the ‘sustainability’ of these perspectives.
Through dialogue between theory and case study vignettes, I show that, while
some co-working ventures are small-scale, others are grown only by adopting the
Co-working communities 95
norms of conventional organisations. I uncover a tension between community

idealism and the organisational realities of co-workers.
Co-working has experienced exponential growth since its emergence in
2005. From fledgling ventures in San Francisco, within a decade protagonists
speak of more than 7,000 co-working communities globally, with many
interconnected through franchising and partnering (Foertsch and Cagnol
2013). Many co-workers presuppose the collaborative potential of co-working
as a social movement for sustainable change (Gandini 2015). However, as co-

working grows, others seek to rapidly redefine it; co-working and co-workers
are stratifying.
For some, co-working is solely emancipation from conventional solid
government and company organisational structures and the alternative sense
of belonging that community symbolically affords them. Meanwhile, some
entrepreneurs seek to profit from the commodification, growth and consequent
institutionalisation of communities of co-workers. This tension between the
supposed utopia of community and the apparent dystopia of modern organisation
is not uncommon (Bauman 2001, Cohen 1985, Kanter 1972, Sennett, 1999).
Yet it must be resolved for co-working to become a practicable and sustainable
alternative, or, as many of its protagonists postulate, ‘the future of work’.
Citizens, not workers

Spinuzzi (2012, 431) illustrates how co-working can have different meanings
for different co-workers and his definition – the first founded on empirical
research – stresses the tangible and spatial:
Coworking is not a concrete product, like a building, but a service – in

fact, a service that proprietors provide indirectly, by providing a space
where coworkers can network their other activities by engaging in peer-
to-peer interactions.
Spinuzzi’s proprietors commodify work-based interaction by sub-letting spaces

that are seemingly socially-constructed to foster collaboration.
For ‘Chris’ and ‘Rick’ – two co-workers interviewed for my research – co-
working was not a service but a fluid, collegial way of working. Early protagonists
of co-working, these friends met while studying in a Texan university town but
lived and worked in Austin when I interviewed them. We met in the lobby
of the hotel with the fastest Internet in town. They each had a mobile device,
a power source and connectivity, so the lobby space was all that they needed
to co-work. It was a loose arrangement. Both were busy, taking on freelance
‘tech’ development work to pay the bills while making time to work on more
economically and socially sustainable ‘game changing’ projects on the side.
Co-working has always been laissez-faire for Chris and Rick. While studying,
they rented a space in their university town to work together off-campus, on their
96 Tim Butcher
own projects. To cover the rent, energy and Internet costs, they figured out that all
they needed were eight co-workers. Membership was straightforward; they had
a shared understanding that they’d all chip in and, if a member left, that member
simply needed to find a replacement. This co-working group did not last long
though; tech entrepreneurs tend not to stay long in a small town after graduating –
it isn’t Palo Alto. As group members moved on, they became increasingly difficult
to replace from their existing network. Eventually Rick, and then Chris, left for
the city of Austin, handing their co-working space back to the landlord.
Chris and Rick did not see the activity of co-working as their core business,
or as providing a service. It was merely a means to an end that improved their
work through its sociality and potential to improve productivity. For example,
when Chris got stuck in a piece of code, Rick or another co-worker might well
have the solution, thereby saving Chris time and effort. Though certain spatial
conditions may have assisted, when we met in Austin, I got no sense of what
their old co-working space looked or felt like.
However, I did get a strong sense that they understood the advantages
gained from working collectively, independent of conventional organisational
constructs, free from the Weberian iron cage (Clegg 2012, Clegg and Baumeler
2010, Gabriel 2005). Neoliberal governments and the corporate sector promote
individualism and entrepreneurialism to provide for the future, because they no
longer can or are not willing to (Sennett 2012). Retrenchment and difficulties
finding conventional employment detaches workers from the institutional
structures on which they once depended (Sennett 2012). For many citizens this
stark reality begins a journey towards perpetual ‘precarity’ and poverty (Bauman
2011, Sennett 1999, Standing 2014).
For others, like Rick and Chris, the withdrawal of state support and
the casualisation of the mainstream workforce has become an incentive to
entrepreneurship and freelancing, reforming, even revolutionising, business
and society (Ruef 2010, Sennett 2012). This Schumpeterian ‘new model army’
sees entrepreneurialism as a calling, a commitment, a duty to self, gaining self-
fulfilment (Ruef 2010, Sennett 2012), and with a sense of greater purpose than
other work. Co-working offers attachment to an alternative form of collective
working that co-workers call ‘community’. Together they gain something
greater than solidarity, what Sennett (2012) refers to as ‘beruf ’ (German for a
‘calling’ beyond profession or vocation).
Community working
Co-working communities tend to be homogeneous, and focused or themed.
Some are communities specific to tech entrepreneurs and developers, or to social
entrepreneurs, or to freelance architects. Ruef (2010) finds that entrepreneurs in
general tended to work most closely with extant networks that accelerated both
the growth and progress of projects and ventures with entrepreneurs, typically
limiting their searches for business partners.
These tendencies reflected extant notions of community. First, as a flight

from established society, communities set boundaries against constitutive
outsiders (Bauman 2001, Cohen 1985, Kanter 1972). Second, utopian ideals
of communes have always centred on commitment, harmony, cooperation and
mutuality. Community offers refuge from convention, from the mainstream,
from modernity (Bauman 2001, Kanter 1972). It is co-working communities’
homogeneities that bring these collectives together around communal ideals
that bind them. However, we cannot call Chris and Rick a community, nor
do they speak of their experiences in their university town as communal; their
idea of co-working is perhaps something more akin to the Australian idea of
‘mateship’ – being there for each other when required. Notions of a co-working
community come into play when more members are required to cover the costs
and co-workers look beyond their immediate networks.
An early co-working space in Sydney that I visited originated with its
founder’s vision to work in a post-industrial backstreet warehouse space. But,
to cover the costs, he needed enough likeminded freelancers with a shared ideal
of working in more socially and economically sustainable ways to join him.
Though his search for members began with close friends in the tech sector –
former colleagues and friends of friends – he foresaw the challenge of member
turnover. To create the space that he wanted to work in – one that would attract
sufficient likeminded members – required upfront investment in installing
facilities.
Put together on a shoestring budget, with a handful of friends, it had a
handmade feel. Community is not easily defined, and yet we know, or rather feel,
it when we see it (Bauman 2001). With a matching web presence, this Sydney
space, community and associated events attracted the occasional new member,
but there seemed to be no plan to grow. The website and social media did not
over-promise but rather reflected a self-sustaining community. Events tended
to be regular tech-focused workshops or seasonal celebrations of community.
Members cleaned and stocked the fridge, and the flat-pack furniture looked a
bit tired.
The occasional visitor could co-work for free for one day every other week,
a loose arrangement regulated by a space host employed to meet and greet
members and visitors, and generally muster the community interactions and
maintain a sense of commitment and harmony. Simple etiquettes were observed
at the bike rack, the lounge space and workstations. The host made it clear to
visitors that certain desks and spaces were the preserve of individual members.
Visitors sat at a separate desk. You were an outsider if you were new. But, if you
kept coming back, you’d know if your face fit and whether the community was
willing to invite you in further, as a member. This co-working space seemed to
bring in enough membership fees to cover costs with everyone getting on okay.
Longstanding members had carved out their spaces to make it feel like home.
Sociality, rather than spatial boundaries, organised this workplace. Its familial
communal rituals were informally observed by its members and reinforced by its
98 Tim Butcher
host. They had unwritten rules to maintain a certain harmony and commitment
to their shared beruf of entrepreneurial sustainability citizenship. They had built
their collective identity and sense of self through their aesthetic repertoires to
unify, generate and maintain their collective way of co-working – their habitus
(cf. Meinhof and Galasinski 2005).
In providing ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 2005) to homogenous entrepreneurial
groups, such as sustainability citizens, co-working is a space of dispositions. The
fluid communal habitus at the Sydney co-working space maintained its social
boundaries through ongoing symbolic interactions between members across
the space. For co-workers to imagine themselves as community members was
entirely plausible. It was a familiar, helpful, term even if without clear definition.
Though community is not in Bourdieu’s vocabulary, his conceptualisation of
the habitus trope is useful in understanding the collective identity work that
co-workers construct and opens us up to the idea that, despite the symbolism,
co-working may not be community. Habitus is not the preserve of community;
habitus is found in other social groupings, such as organisation (Dale and
Burrell 2008).
The same homelike, homemade, post-industrial, relatively long-established,
worn-in aesthetic and habitus is one that I found again at a London co-working
space – also an early co-working space in the short history of the phenomenon.
Not unlike the Sydney co-working space, I first found it difficult to find from
the main street. Close to a major transport terminus, hidden down a backstreet,
I found no obvious signage until I poked my head around a half-opened heavy
door and found a stairwell, which led me up to the top floor. Though contained
within this post-industrial relic of the past, the first thing that greeted me was the
events board, filled with activities planned to promote work towards solution-
focused collectivism and sustainability speaking of the future.
Inside, the habitus felt as if it was constructed by its early members and
nurtured by their successors. Like the Sydney co-working space, it was low
budget and felt more home-like than work-like. Sharing and caring was a
recurring theme. From the library space, to the message board, to the kitchen,
there was that familiar sense that its members had co-built their sense of
belonging. It was not a big space, but was crammed with desks in no particular
order, soft furnishings and greenery. It was difficult to avoid other members in
the space – you just had to get along. Anyone coming into the space that did
not quite fit would know it, and not stay long. A distinct habitus includes and
excludes.
As the first of a leading global network of co-working spaces, many co-
working symbolic interactions have had trials, and been honed, here. Ideas such
as weekly communal lunches and evening learning events offer co-workers
more than a hot desk or office services. They offer workers opportunities to
connect with others, to learn and to explore ideas. Such community-style
events are organised. As at the Sydney co-working space, the role of the host
was essential. Here, the host’s job was to know the members. As her knowledge
of their ongoing needs grew, she was better able to identify opportunities to
connect individuals who might assist each other or have similar needs. Such
connecting of ‘weak ties’ (Granovetter 1983) and consequent skills-sharing is
symbolic of community, yet also organisational.
The organisation (and spirit) of cooperation and mutuality at this London
co-working space enabled all to flourish individually and collectively. Such
symbolic exchanges maintained a habitus that changed with the comings and
goings of members. Few current members were there at the start. Identities
had changed and grown, but the collective habitus was perpetuated through
reinforcement by the space host.
Organising co-working
The mainstay of my ethnographic study was at a Melbourne co-working space.
It too had a homelike, handmade feel when I joined in 2011. It too was ‘hidden
in plain sight’ in a post-industrial relic close to a major transport terminus. The
host here also welcomed and connected me. I felt a similar entrepreneurial,
social sustainability-focused habitus constructed through frequent ritualistic
collective events such as ‘town hall meetings’, ‘mixed bag lunches’, social
evenings, wellbeing classes and club meetings.
At this co-working space, the organisational role played by the host was pivotal,
yet members also organised events. The habitus of mutuality and cooperation
proved seductive to prospective members. The idea of combining work and
play drew many new members, and we quickly outgrew the original space. As
we grew, we moved into new spaces in the building, co-created architecturally-
designed spaces in which members defined the habitus.
One problem of such community growth is keeping track of members.
This habitus held such broad appeal that the diversity of its members quickly
increased. The host’s role as gatekeeper and connector split into separate tasks. A
‘community catalyst’ role was created to focus solely on pervasively identifying
shared interests and strengthening ties. The key competence of its incumbent
was to foster connections, to build social groups, to create a network and organise
the community. This left gate-keeping to the host.
Clubs and groups formed around business ideas and social activities.
Members with services to offer others, in need of resources for their fledgling
ventures or simply wanting to socialise, used community social media, bumped
into others at events and made connections that were ‘catalysed’ rather than
occurring through happenstance. The community catalyst organised social
cohesion – the ‘community glue’ that complemented increasing diversity and
members’ entrepreneurial zeal. The management team recognised that habitus
would attract and embed new members but that habitus alone would not sustain
entrepreneurs and freelancers. In the spirit of individualism, interactions needed
to be purposeful and instrumental, in short, organised. Ultimately, the primary
goal for many members was to grow new ventures not community.
100 Tim Butcher
Prominent in the symbolism of this co-working space was an idea that the
community could foster innovation collectively. The catalysing of connections
was underpinned by purposeful entrepreneurial rhetoric. Catchphrases and
slogans abounded on walls, on desks, online and on t-shirts to symbolically
combine the erstwhile distinctive rhetoric of homeliness, togetherness,
innovation, social responsibility and political activism – embedding the idea
that this diverse community was distinctly innovative, sustainable, citizen-
based and, together, could be ‘world changing’. Skills were shared, ideas were
grown, and new ventures were built. They outgrew spaces and new co-workers
took their place. Practitioner case studies of sustainability citizens joining
together to become sustainable enterprises abound from this space, such as
‘Our Say’ (Halamish 2013), an online platform to enable citizen engagement
in democracy.
As if to prove these points, the feel of the Melbourne co-working space
changed as it exponentially grew, and its original members left as they achieved
their entrepreneurial goals. Habitus takes time to socially construct, uniquely
through the dispositions within each space, and this co-working model’s rapid
growth demanded that it become more of an organisation than a community.
With scale and diversity came complexity and the need to organise. Interestingly,
this shift from community to organisation mimicked the formation and
institutionalisation of early modernity (Dale and Burrell 2008), contrary to the
intent of co-working’s originators. When seen through an entrepreneurial lens,
work and organisation are seemingly inseparable, and community is merely a
symbolic means to an end, and it becomes a commodity (Bauman 2012: 2001).
As Kanter (1972) writes, community is often short-lived, differing in meaning
for its originators compared with their successors. Community becomes a
‘spray-on solution’ (Cohen 1985).
Is co-working sustainable?
Co-working is both structural and agent-driven (Bauman 2012, Giddens 1991)
and mainly made up of individuated citizens who choose not to engage with
mainstream business (Bauman 2012, Sennett 2012). Instead, co-workers look
to the margins, to the urban post-industrial landscape to work on their own
ventures and envision creating their own economy. Without recognisable
identity constructs to hang on to, co-working offers a solution of attachment to
a solid, if nostalgic, ideal of community.
Familiar but intangible, the symbolic resources that construct community
offer something to belong to, and enable a sense of social becoming. Hidden in
the plain sight of the mainstream, co-working protagonists are not easily found
but exist in previously neglected urban spaces. Once inside, we find spaces in
which members envisage alternative sustainable futures – perhaps a collective
ideal with a vision of rising together as the proverbial ‘phoenix from the flames’
of current capitalism, collectively forging an alternative.
Co-working is a space of dispositions, a habitus where members symbolically

construct a collective sense of belonging that sets boundaries against the
constitutive outsider. However communal in feel, the dominant dispositions
within co-working spaces are entrepreneurial. The symbols of community are
thus adapted for entrepreneurial identity work, and commodified for ambitions
towards the capitalist ideal of ‘progress’.
Central to this entrepreneurial movement is identity construction towards
becoming established as legitimate capitalist entrepreneurs who can make a

difference and, in their rhetoric, ‘disrupt’ the mainstream. They collectively
construct their symbolic repertoires, embedding themselves in their chosen
aesthetic, reciting their rhetoric, practising their rituals and establishing
their habitus. To co-work and co-create towards the sustainable futures they
envisage, they must agree and affirm their dispositions communally to realise
themselves as a social movement. Their co-working habitus constructs their
beruf (Sennett 2012).
This conceptualisation of co-working illustrates how entrepreneurial
sustainability citizens work in liquid modernity though they do need to (re)
attach to something solid. Co-working symbolised as community offers this.
A recurring theme through the above vignettes is the difficulties of up-scaling
co-working as community. When membership grows and weak ties ensue, co-
working requires organisation. So the co-working movement faces a dilemma;
to sustain community ideals, each community must consider its scale and scope.
To stay small will be to remain communal, but forever at the margins.
To grow will be to organise, to institutionalise and to mainstream, not as
an alternative to current capitalism, but embedded within its structures – a
very real tension of identity construction being played out in co-working
today. Some seek to explore its growth potential. Others would prefer the
belongingness of the commune. The problem entrepreneurial sustainability
citizens confront is to remain citizens or become entrepreneurs – distinctions
made by Bauman (2012) and Standing (2014). Until now, co-workers have
been largely ambivalent. However, as co-working becomes more popular, it
becomes more stratified.
Some new spaces offer a more communal habitus and others a more
organisational habitus. Small-scale, self-sustaining communities (such as the
Sydney case discussed here) continue to rely on the dedication and goodwill
of longstanding members to maintain habitus. Global co-working providers
have emerged to meet the growing demand and offer standardised ‘cookie
cutter’ spaces in which entrepreneurs can efficiently join, navigate and leverage
the collaborative potential of working alongside other entrepreneurs before
outgrowing the space. Hence the current key dilemma is whether to build and
maintain sustainable closed communities or to offer a viable scalable business
model with commercial appeal.
Though the aims of community and of organisation are not necessarily
oppositional, inevitably one must be prioritised. Community is not scalable, and
102 Tim Butcher
small-scale co-working organisation is not profitable. At this point in time, of

rapid co-working expansion, this research debunks the myth of community as an
organisational form designed to meet entrepreneurial business objectives (Dale
and Burrell 2008). Though early protagonists adopted the community trope to
develop their business models, the need for organisation has superseded the
ideal of community to gain economic sustainability over social or environmental
sustainability. I would argue that, here, community has become Cohen’s ‘spray-
on solution’ (1985). The underlying tension involves subscription to neoliberal

political rhetoric and incentivisation. The single unified co-worker identity is
no longer sufficient.
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9
Urban social innovation
Mobilising sustainability citizenship

Ian McShane
This chapter examines the concept of urban social innovation and its
contribution to sustainability citizenship. Social innovation (SI) is a ‘hot topic’,
seeming to offer a new approach to social and environmental problems that have
resisted state and market solutions (Moulaert 2009). Yet, as this chapter argues,
SI has a long, if under-appreciated, history – particularly in its application to
urban settings and urban problems. Recent developments in digital information
and communication technologies (ICTs), together with the growth of cities and
changing practices of liberal governance (particularly the rise of partnerships),
have reinvigorated interest in SI.
The focus here is on digital ICTs, particularly wireless mobile communication
devices, which are described as increasingly significant components of
innovation systems (Cunningham and Potts 2009). Mobile devices are
important both for their ubiquity and features. While unevenly distributed,
the number of active mobile (cell) phone accounts now approximates the
global population (International Telecommunications Union 2014). Mobile
devices, combining powerful computing and communication capabilities,
have enabled new spatial, institutional and social relationships. I analyse how
these developments are influencing citizen engagement in innovative forms of
‘urban care’ (Hall and Smith 2015), or the activities, institutions and ethics that
constitute sustainability citizenship.
This chapter is structured as follows. I briefly outline the conceptual history
of innovation, contrasting the Schumpeterian theory of business innovation
in capitalist market economies, with later theories of institutional innovation
grounded in urban social movements. Next, I outline recent work theorising
urban social innovation that combines these two strands through new
assemblages of the technological and the social exemplified by digital ICTs.
Urban social innovation 105
Taking a broad view of urban sustainability as constituted by environmental

and social sustainability, I discuss examples of urban social innovation centred
on mobile devices that afford new ways to imagine and enact sustainability
citizenship. I conclude by considering citizenship as a balance of rights and
responsibilities, discussing some tensions and contradictions associated with the
positioning of mobile devices as agents of sustainability citizenship.
Defining social innovation

The distinctive physical and social characteristics of cities – population density
and diversity, information flows, technological and institutional clustering, scale
economies – have been viewed for at least four centuries as the building blocks
of innovation, disruption and change (Johnson 2008, Marceau 2008, Fagerberg
2005). Much of this thinking has rested on a conceptualisation of innovation
as a dynamic element of capitalist market economies. The work of Austrian-
born American economist Joseph Schumpeter has been highly influential in
framing innovation as an entrepreneurial process that brings existing resources
(financial, technological, human capital) into new combinations.
Schumpeter saw innovation as a process of adoption and diffusion,
distinguishing it from invention, or the original occurrence of an idea. Innovation,
according to Schumpeter (1939), was spurred by clustering – physically in cities
and temporally in certain historical periods or ‘cycles’. In tracing the history of
social innovation, Moulaert (2009) has argued that Schumpeter’s ideas, often
reductively viewed in terms of creative destruction, were informed by Durkheim’s
and Weber’s theories of the social and institutional mechanisms for regulating
change. Moulaert (2009) connects these sociological antecedents of innovation
with more recent attention to the social character of firms – to the firm as a network
of social relations, and the firm as embedded within a community (evident, for
example, in the concept of corporate social responsibility). This helps explain why
much recent writing about social innovation has come out of business schools.
The surging interest in SI has added newly emerging examples of innovation
to the existing catalogue and further iteration of the concept (Phills et al. 2008).
Mumford’s (2002) list of SIs, for example, spans three centuries and includes
cooperative finance and mutual benefit societies, subscription libraries, recycling,
fair trade, crowdfunding and Wikipedia. As Mumford comments, novel ideas,
processes and institutional alignments are not necessarily recognised at the point
of their inception.
SI has two key features: first, the existence of a problem or unmet demand;
and, second, the social rather than individual benefits returned by the innovation.
The much cited passage of Phills et al. (2008: 36) captures this succinctly:
Social innovation is a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective,

efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions and for which the value
accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.
106 Ian McShane
These writers, connected with Stanford University’s School of Business, are

agnostic on whether SI necessarily involves civic or social action, or precludes
business entrepreneurship. SI’s business school connections are also seen in the
UK, through prominent SI thinker Geoff Mulgan’s association with Oxford
University’s Said College of Business. Mulgan et al. (2007) argue that the
sources of innovation can be individuals, social movements, market dynamics
or organisational incentives. The scale of challenges presented by processes
such as climate change, argue Mulgan et al. (2007), are beyond the capacity
of governments or markets to confront, and can only be overcome through
SI. Phills et al. (2008) assert that SI is most powerfully mobilised from a post-
ideological or neutral point of view. Setting political ideologies or programs
aside, they argue, can facilitate new partnerships between the state, business and
community sectors to tackle endemic problems.
Not all SI theorists share this view. Several writers (for example MacCallum
et al. 2009, Moulaert et al. 2005) locate SI in struggles and social movements
of the 1960s. This is a key for understanding the uses of SI in urban contexts.
These writers introduce the concept of territorial social innovation, which
is typically focused on driving changes within neighbourhoods and cities. In
this framing, SI is highly contextual, emerging in particular times, places and
institutional settings. An innovation in one place, argue these authors, might not
be elsewhere. Moulaert et al. (2005: 67) argue that SI:
• contributes to satisfying human needs not otherwise considered or satisfied

• increases access rights (such as, by political inclusiveness, redistributive
policies etc.)
• enhances human capabilities (such as, by empowering particular social
groups, increasing social capital).
In this formulation SI may also be short-lived, in contrast to views that SI

necessarily involves systemic change that is durable and has broad impact
(Westley and Antadze 2010). At stake here is a question of whether SI should
be imagined exclusively in terms of replication and scale, or whether local-level
creativity and adaptation, perhaps tactical and situated, forms part of a wider
landscape of SI.
The concept of territorial SI, though, is explicitly framed in opposition to
innovations in products, processes and technologies that form the elements
of Schumpeterian theory (MacCallum et al. 2009: 1–2). The transition from
industrial to knowledge and service economies, and especially the growth
of the creative and cultural sectors, has challenged a distinction between the
entrepreneurial and social dimensions of innovation sketched above (Mulgan et
al. 2007, Von Hippel 2005, Pratt and Jeffcutt 2009). The linking of technological
innovation and social production – clustering around what might be considered
the major SI of the twentieth century, the internet – represents an important
development in SI theory and practice. The potential of new assemblages of
technologies, institutions and social relations has attracted the interest of urban
sustainability theorists and is explored in recent literature on urban-focused
social innovation (Mieg and Topfer 2013).
Cities, digital networks and innovation

While cities are acknowledged as innovation hubs, they occupy an ambivalent
place in the SI literature as spaces of innovation. Analysts have criticised the

limited attention to urban built environments in wider discussion of innovation,
sensing lost opportunities to contribute to problems such as greenhouse
gas abatement (Pinnegar et al. 2008). This is changing with the capacity of
digital ICTs and networks to access and coordinate information, from inter-
personal and micro-level information, to ‘big data’ about the environments,
infrastructures and flows of cities. At the same time, digital tools potentially
challenge hierarchical and centralised urban management structures to embrace
participatory, multi-layer and multi-user processes. Dork and Monteyne (2011)
describe this as a shift from urban planning to urban co-creation.
The spectrum of digital participation ranges from the use of mobile
‘apps’ – computer applications designed to run on mobile platforms – to
report infrastructure faults, such as 311 (2015), FixMyStreet (2015) and
SnapSendSolve (2015), through to hacker labs or events that experiment with
cities’ digital data to produce public interest outcomes. The National Day
of Civic Hacking, which began in 2012, attracted more than one hundred
participant cities in thirteen countries to its 2014 event (HackforChange 2014).
The event has produced apps coordinating information on the accessibility
of urban spaces for people with physical mobility challenges, water wastage,
volunteer demand and supply, animal rescue and many other purposes. The
capacities and dispositions of city governments to explore such frontiers,
though, vary significantly. In some countries, commercial and political
interests have a record of litigating and legislating to protect existing markets,
while neglecting under-serviced regions. Such moves have spurred grassroots
activities such as local optical fibre-laying cooperatives and non-government
organisations working to overcome digital disadvantage in poor urban areas
(B4RN 2015, Mourad et al. 2014).
City governments, though, hold a key advantage in their ownership of urban
physical infrastructure such as utility poles and structures, and even vehicle
fleets. These provide an ideal host environment for ubiquitous public wireless
internet access, which is increasingly viewed as essential 21st-century urban
infrastructure. A good example is the Portuguese city of Porto’s partnership
with mobile networking start-up Veniam to use buses, taxis and garbage trucks
as mobile wi-fi hotspots, contributing to the city’s mesh wireless network
(Camara Municipal do Porto 2015). Such a platform can deploy the internet
of things, with sensors and scanners used to plan and monitor urban services,
minimising resource use and generating real-time service responses.
108 Ian McShane
The integrative and coordinating capacity of the internet has enabled

innovative approaches to the effective use of urban infrastructure previously
thwarted by high transaction costs. A good example is the use of the on-line
environment to match demand for and supply of vacant or under-utilised urban
space. Creative Spaces is a website that coordinates demand for artist studios
with unused building space (City of Melbourne 2015). The dramatic escalation
of commercial and residential property prices and the re-population of inner
cities have combined to squeeze creative arts practice from inner urban regions.
Creative Spaces acts as a property broker and provides useful information on
liability and insurance that can be stumbling blocks for re-use projects.
Digital communication networks and applications that are developed and
deployed through hybrid and cross-sector partnerships, though, may serve
multiple and competing interests that can be difficult to balance. The much-
vaunted partnership between Google and Kansas City, the first location for
Google Fiber – a project to install an optical fibre network at no capital cost to the
city – appears to have entrenched existing patterns of digital advantage (Halegoua
2015). The arts-led revitalisation of urban precincts fostered by Creative Spaces
may ultimately serve property market interests above all. Alternatively, the re-
use of public assets facilitated by the on-line service may foil their designation as
redundant, providing a defence against aggressive privatisation.
We might also question whether civic engagement through mobile and on-
line environments, as described above, principally engages responses grounded
in citizenship and civic participation, or appeals to individual property owner
interests. The communication environment may also set expectations of rapid
or on-demand service that the bureaucratic and fiscal capacities of some city
governments may find difficult to accommodate. As Alfano (2011) observes, these
interactions challenge the principles of legitimacy, hierarchy and specialisation
that are integral to Weberian bureaucratic structures. City managers, he argues,
must now operate in ‘internet time’.
Sustainability citizenship and community mobilisation

Community mobilisation is a key characteristic of sustainability citizenship. Hall
and Pfeiffer (2000) argue that climate change adaptation and social cohesion are
two principal challenges to urban sustainability in the 21st century. This section
discusses innovative bottom-up or community responses involving mobile
communications to each of these challenges, providing concrete illustrations of
urban social innovation discussed above.
Responding to climate change

The global challenge presented by climate change and climate instability
has particular manifestations in large cities. The heat island effect intensifies
heatwaves in urban areas, and the impact of climate-related disasters such as
flooding is magnified by population density. The famous description of climate

change as ‘the greatest market failure we have ever seen’ (Stern 2007) sets
expectations for market solutions to the constellation of causes and outcomes
that constitute the climate change problem. Climate activists have worked both
within and against market structures in developing urban-level SI responses.
For example, the winners of the 2014 MIT-sponsored Climate CoLab, a crowd-
sourced competition for new responses to climate change mitigation, then in
its fourth year, included a mobile app to monitor home energy use during peak
demand, as well as a proposal to encourage off-grid living (Climate CoLab 2014).
Participatory or bottom-up responses to climate change cover a wide
spectrum of activity, from co-generation of electricity through domestic solar
photovoltaic systems to innovations in telecommunications networks. The
localised nature of emergencies or disasters has highlighted the role of local
communities as first respondents. We are seeing increasing use of participatory
and DIY communication strategies such as community wireless networks to
build response and recovery capacities.
The interaction of horizontal or many-to-many communications with
‘official’ information moving up and down communication hierarchies is
an uneasy and evolving one. However, in emergency situations where other
infrastructures, typically configured in top-down and centralised modes, are
affected by disaster, the value of communication networks with decentralised
and self-repairing characteristics – typical of mesh wireless configurations,
many of which are built and operated by community wireless groups around
the globe – has been demonstrated. Hurricane Katrina (New Orleans 2005)
and Hurricane Sandy (New York 2012) are two well-known examples where
local wi-fi networks were the sole operating telecommunications services in
the immediate post-disaster phase, defying wi-fi technology’s fragile reputation
(Open Technology Institute 2013). The capacity to jerry-rig networks for rapid
deployment and easy connectivity is a bonus in such settings.
Shifting focus to disaster preparedness and sustainable resource use, the
frontier of ‘do it yourself ’ (DIY) environmental monitoring and management
is advancing rapidly, with the adoption by grassroots activists of monitoring
technologies such as low-cost remote sensors, drones and even low-orbit
satellites outpacing regulatory frameworks and exposing communication
network bottlenecks (Antunes 2014). As Antunes suggests, institutional
innovation is required not simply to coordinate and utilise the data that is
produced by these initiatives, but also to overcome implementation challenges
such as suspicion over the deployment by citizens of novel electronic gadgets in
increasingly securitised urban settings.
Promoting social inclusion

On 15 December 2014, an armed man barricaded 19 hostages in a central Sydney
café, compelling them to periodically display a black flag with Arabic script in
110 Ian McShane
the café window. Consequently, the event was quickly interpreted as a terrorist
attack, and some Sydney residents who could be identified as Arabic or of Muslim
faith began to fear the sort of public backlash that has occurred in cities with
Islamic populations in many parts of the globe (Dunn 2009). The #illridewithyou
was a Twitter campaign initiated after a Facebook post by Rachel, a Sydney train
commuter, who observed a fellow female passenger removing her hijab. In
response, Tessa, another Sydney commuter, posted this message on Twitter:
If you reg take the #373 bus b/w Coogee/MartinPl, wear religious attire,
& don’t feel safe alone: I’ll ride with you. @ me for schedule – Sir Tessa
@sirtessa
By the evening of 15 December, the #illridewithyou hashtag had gathered

about 120,000 tweets, as Australian Twitter users supported people who felt
insecure or vulnerable to possible racist backlash (Ruppert 2014). This episode
raises questions about relationships between public space, sociality, identity
and technology that are increasingly in play in culturally diverse urban settings,
questions that go to the heart of community cohesion and sustainability.
Twitter and other forms of social networking accessed through mobile devices
enable a ‘double mobility’ (Lee 2013), or mobility simultaneously in physical
and virtual space. Physical space provides a context for digital communications,
and the sense of virtual proximity and support created by social networking
influences interactions in physical space. Indeed, Lee (2013) argues that social
networking tools, while egocentric in design (consider Facebook’s ‘profile’
and Twitter’s ‘follower’ constructs), create new forms of trust and ontological
security in urban space, partly compensating for the loss of traditional social
bonds that authors such as Giddens (1991) regard as emblematic of advanced
industrial or post-modern societies.
Whether Lee’s assessment romanticises ‘community’ in both traditional
and post-modern settings is beyond our consideration here. The pertinent
point is that the #illridewithyou campaign and similar interventions across the
globe, such as the Board the Bus campaign initiated in response to violence
against women using Indian public transport, are innovative attempts to reclaim
rights to the city through the interaction of public space and many-to-many
communications (Breakthrough 2015).
Conclusion: Urban social innovation and citizenship

In the tradition of T.H. Marshall’s (1950) classic restatement of citizenship,
the communications scholar Paddy Scannell (1989) argued for the inclusion of
communication entitlements as a citizenship right. Many governments around
the globe have installed principles of universality and equity in regulating
communications provision, from universal service obligations for basic
telephony, to minimum bandwidth speeds for broadband services. However,
natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy, with their capricious and sometimes
devastating impact on communications infrastructure, highlight the importance
not simply of regulation, but of institutional conditions to foster experimentation
and adaptation.
The unfolding impact of climate change, with a predicted increase in extreme
weather events and natural disasters, makes this an urgent question. However, a
broad understanding of sustainability citizenship, incorporating environmental
and social dimensions, also draws attention to autocratic responses to social

movements, such as in Hong Kong, Egypt and Iran, where governments
targeted internet and mobile service providers to shut down communications
between and with activists (Howard et al. 2010). Experimentation with open-
source software and user-owned networks, designed to operate anywhere there
is sufficient density of mobile devices, independently of either commercial or
government infrastructure, or internet service gatekeepers, seeks to reinforce
communication rights (Serval 2015).
However, we need to be mindful of some tensions in this field. If digital ICTs
are a locus for urban SI as instanced above, they are also a focal point of debate
and political action around consumption and waste. Mobiles occupy a unique
place in consumer electronics, due to their ubiquity and rapid turnover. Around
150 million mobile phones are replaced every year in the USA alone, most still
in working order (United States Environmental Protection Authority 2014).
The feedback loop of technical enhancement, media convergence, corporate
strategy, governmental action and consumer behaviour positions mobile phones
within a complex stream of material flows. At a local level, they are a major
contributor to municipal hard waste, but the ethical and policy challenges are
larger than developing sustainable city-level approaches to e-waste. The mobile
phone’s product cycle is situated within a global political economy renowned
for its ruthlessness, encompassing the social and political chaos that ‘conflict
minerals’ have brought to west Africa, the labour relations of FoxConn and
other production companies, and the export of end-of-life toxic waste from rich
to poor countries (Slade 2006). The development of the Fairphone (2015) offers
an alternative grounded in SI traditions.
There is a clear consensus amongst legal and communications scholars that
innovation in the digital ICT environment is promoted by easily accessed,
minimally regulated and decentralised communication architectures, or ‘cheap,
open and cooperative’ networks, in Castells’ (2010) terms. However, the history
of communications is characterised by tensions between decentralisation and
democratisation, and centralisation and control (de Filippi and Treguer 2015).
This dynamic is especially evident in recent years. New global securitisation
concerns have sanctioned increased surveillance through mechanisms such as
data retention.
While the suppression of political dissent by shutting down internet or cellular
mobile communications attracts publicity, privacy activists worry about more
mundane developments, such as ubiquitous tracking and surveillance enabled
112 Ian McShane
by RFID tags and security cameras (Frith 2015). Assaults on net neutrality, the
founding principle of the open internet, are unlikely to cease despite a recent
US Federal Communications Commission ruling against the prioritisation of
commercial interests in data transmission (Weisman 2015). The trend of major
technology manufacturers to ‘black box’ their products to resist tinkering and
adaptation, or to maintain stable computing in an environment of malware and
viruses, can also be seen as a strategy of control.
In short, while commentators such as Jonathan Zittrain (2008) worry about

the future of digital communications, we have numerous examples, some
cited above, where cooperation and ingenuity combine to produce new social
technologies and institutions, all of which can enhance sustainability citizenship.
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Part III
Place, access and equity


10
The gendered city
Annette Gough
The concept ‘gender’ encompasses learned roles and responsibilities of men and
women created in society as well as learned expectations about the characteristics,
aptitudes and behaviours of men and women. This chapter on gender takes, as
its starting point, the pre-condition and aim of urban sustainability citizenship to
achieve societies that are ‘economically viable, socially fair and environmentally
sustainable’ (Thematic Social Forum 2012: 33). Furthermore, to achieve gender
equality ‘women and men need to have equal conditions for realizing their full
human rights and for contributing to, and benefiting from, economic, social,
cultural and political development’ (Chan 2010: 17). Gender is one side of the
‘wicked triangle’ of race, class and gender (Grünell and Saharso 1999: 203) that
needs to be addressed and overcome to fully develop sustainability citizenship.
This chapter will discuss some of the most necessary hurdles for women and
girls to feel and be empowered enough to contribute to and express sustainability
citizenship in cities.
While cities may not immediately appear to be gendered, many authors –
such as Bondi (2005), Jarvis et al. (2009), Chant (2007; 2013), Fenster (2005),
Foran (2013), GenderSTE (2015), Suri (2011) and Viswanath (2012) – argue
that cities are gendered. For instance, Liz Bondi (2005: 4) states:
Gender is an integral, ubiquitous and taken-for-granted aspect of urban

life. It is an influential dimension of urban identities, an axis of urban
inequalities, and it animates the everyday practices that characterize and
constitute cities and city life.
Therefore, a discussion of gender and the city needs to consider urban

demographics, division of labour (in paid and unpaid employment), physical
118 Annette Gough
capital (land, housing, urban services, violence, health services), space, mobility
and connectivity, and power and rights. In this chapter, while discussing each
of these considerations, there is a particular emphasis on barriers to women’s
empowerment, which is needed in order to achieve gender equality.
Recognising gender equality as an issue

The importance for sustainable and equitable development of women actively

participating in ‘economic and political decision-making’, overcoming gender
discrimination and having ‘access to land and other resources, education and safe
and equal employment’ was first recognised in Agenda 21, the action program
from the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UN 1993, para. 24.1). Recommendations for governments related to women
and gender included:
• Increasing the proportion of women as decision-makers in the design,

development and implementation of sustainable development policies and
programs
• Eliminating female illiteracy and expanding education opportunities for
women
• Reducing the heavy workload of women and girl children at home and
outside the home
• Enabling accessible and clean water, an efficient fuel supply and adequate
sanitation
• Strengthening preventative and curative health facilities for women
• Supporting and strengthening equal employment opportunities.
The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (UN 2002: 4)

continued a similar theme in its Political Declaration:
We are committed to ensuring that women’s empowerment, emancipation

and gender equality are integrated in all the activities encompassed
within Agenda 21, the Millennium Development Goals and the Plan of
Implementation of the Summit.
At this Summit, consistent with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),

poverty eradication was a major focus. This is a key issue for women who, with
their children, tend to be most exposed to poverty.
Indeed, MDG 3 specifically promotes both gender equality and women (UN
2000), which is also the focus in The Future We Want (UN 2012: 45–8) which
reaffirmed the vital role and unrealised need for full and equal participation
and leadership of women in all areas of sustainable development. While much
of the focus of those concerns has been gender equality in society writ large,
particular issues are identified in the State of Women in Cities 2012–2013 by
The gendered city 119
UN‑Habitat (2013) where the results of a survey across five cities showed

specific factors limiting the ability to achieve greater levels of equity (see
Table 10.1). For example, in Rio de Janeiro, all ten factors are ranked between
3.08 and 4.05 out of 5, where 5 means very limiting.
Urban ‘prosperity’ is used as a positive term by UN-Habitat (2013: ix),
implying ‘success, wealth, thriving conditions, wellbeing or “good fortune”’
and encompasses ‘equity, equality and participation and therefore the gendered
dimension of cities’. Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Margot Wallstrom has recently

established a ‘feminist foreign policy’ with gender equality as a ‘prerequisite’
for Sweden’s foreign and security policy objectives, because ‘human rights are
women’s rights’ (Tung 2015). However, as Chant (2013: 9) and Bradshaw (2002:
12) point out, especially in the urban Global South, empowerment barriers are
buttressed by poverty experienced in multifarious ways.
Urban demographics
As pointed out by others in this volume, with more than half of the world’s
current population living in cities, nearly all future demographic growth
is expected to be urban, and future cities are expected to be characterised by
feminised sex ratios, particularly older women and women-headed households
(UN-Habitat 2013). Already women increasingly form the majority urban
population across the Global South, with the exception of Asia, particularly
South Asia (Chant 2013). In the European Union (EU) an average 33 percent
of women aged 55 and over were living alone in 2008 compared with 15 percent
of similarly aged men. However, across the EU (excepting Sweden) the material
deprivation rate – a headcount of people who cannot afford to pay for housing
and fuel, keep adequately warm, eat meat or proteins regularly, go on holiday,
buy a television, a fridge, a car or a telephone – was higher for women than for
men (European Commission 2009).
Informal settlements make up close to one third of the world’s urban
population and these areas continue to grow as ‘exclusion of women from land
and property in rural areas has pushed many into the slums of urban areas,
contributing to the rise in woman headed households among the urban poor’
(IANWGE c. 2009: 11). Their occupants experience varying deprivations and
risks, including a lack of durable housing, overcrowding, insufficient access to
clean water, poor sanitation, and threats of forced evictions, with women and
girls often suffering the worst effects and illustrating the ‘wicked triangle’.
Women also make up half or more of international migrants (Morrison et al.
2008; Thematic Social Forum 2012), attracted by ‘greater access to employment
and independent earnings, reduced entanglement in and control by patriarchal
kinship systems, and higher levels of urban female land and property ownership’
(Chant 2013: 13). Chant and McIlwaine (2013) note that traditionally lower
levels of female-selective rural–urban migration in sub-Saharan Africa and
South Asia are related to:
Table 10.1 Factors identified as limiting the ability to achieve greater levels of equity
Factor Bangalore Johannesburg Kampala Kingston Rio de Janeiro Total Rank

India South Africa Uganda Jamaica Brazil
History of gender inequality 3.22 3.62 3.10 2.79 3.97 3.32 5
History of class inequality 3.11 3.69 2.96 3.91 4.05 3.50 1
History of racial/ethnic inequality 3.02 3.89 3.02 3.21 3.98 3.37 2
Institutional discriminatory practices 3.02 3.89 3.02 3.21 3.98 3.22 6
Ineffective government institutions/policies 3.34 3.27 2.98 3.35 3.74 3.33 4
Non-representational governing bodies 3.22 3.20 2.85 3.01 3.48 3.14 8
Weak civil society 3.27 2.91 3.19 3.32 3.80 3.32 5
Lack of democracy 2.94 2.70 3.09 2.48 3.08 2.88 9
Lack of access to just legal systems 3.24 3.17 2.92 2.94 3.71 3.19 7
Lack of resources to support sound policy 3.22 3.14 3.07 3.69 3.63 3.35 3
Responses: 1 = not limiting, to 5 = very limiting
Source: UN-Habitat (2013: 61)
deeply-intertwined social and spatial processes, such as moral and physical

restrictions on independent female movement, virilocal [patrilocal]
marriage, the encouragement of young men to gain experience in
the city as a form of masculine ‘rite of passage’, and poor employment
opportunities for women.
As cities become increasingly feminised, gender-equity measures to optimise

their economic, social and environmental sustainability become more significant.

For example, the Caracas Slum Upgrading Project (CAMEBA, Venezuela) did
not originally have gender as an explicit goal. However, a change in management
at the funding agency – early on in the project’s history – helped to raise women’s
profile, and women became active participants in community consultation and
training. They also played a major role as construction workers, project staff and
‘neighbour inspectors’ supervising construction works. A World Bank review
concluded that involving women in CAMEBA had been resoundingly positive
because women had been offered training workshops covering gender identity,
self-esteem, violence and children’s rights and citizenship that had transformed
their gendered positions. Other reported benefits included the greater financial
security for women’s households, a ‘heightened sense of empowerment’,
increased problem-solving abilities and positive gender role models for girls
(UN-Habitat 2013: 63).
Division of labour: paid and unpaid employment

While men largely engage in ‘productive’ income-generating work, women
undertake a major role in reproductive unpaid labour – routine domestic chores
and more specialised care work. Even as women are increasingly engaged in
paid work, men do not seem to have increased participating in domestic unpaid
work to the same degree, which can ‘reinforce, if not exacerbate, a female
biased “reproductive tax”’ and ‘impinge upon the type of income-generating
activities available to women, as well as leading to lower value being placed
upon women’s work in the market’ (Chant 2013: 13). While women’s share
in waged employment in the non-agricultural sector has risen (Chant 2007:
8), the urban ‘feminisation of labour’ tends to be in lower paid positions with
a widespread ‘segmentation by sex’ associated with other forms of inequality
such as uneven access to health insurance and pensions (UN-Habitat 2013: 11),
despite recognition that women tend to be a docile but reliable workforce with
higher rates of efficiency (Chant 2013: 14).
While women have gained entry to male-dominated professions and
more explicitly challenged gender stereotypes in cities (Bondi 2005), there
is a longstanding debate about how far paid employment empowers women.
According to UN-Habitat (2013: 11), studies show that while ‘women are fairly
uniformly exploited by their incorporation into the labour market’, ‘women’s
paid employment is emancipatory and fairly uniformly positive’ with the
122 Annette Gough
‘context, place, type of work, life course, and the interplay between working
conditions and wider social relations’ being decisive in the balance of benefits
and disadvantages.
What constitutes both economic viability and social fairness from an
individual and gendered perspective are key enabling aspects of sustainability
citizenship. The type of work is more significant than labour-force involvement
alone; information and communication technologies have the potential to
improve women’s lives by enhancing access to information and improving

productivity by opening up opportunities for new skills, paid employment,
‘techno-preneurship’ and ‘remote working’ (UN-Habitat 2013: 55). For
example, Liberia’s ‘Trade at Hand’ program aims to empower women and
enhance productivity by initially linking 50 women traders in Monrovia with
50 women farmers through a mobile phone network, with SMS offers using
readily recognisable symbols so illiterate women can participate in exchanges
Human capital
Human capital focuses on work, and work is ‘central to the security of urban
livelihoods’ (Jarvis et al. 2009: 256). Human capital development, education and a
skilled workforce are key requirements for the future generation of urban prosperity,
and UN-Habitat (2013: 12) regards gender disparities with respect to human
capital ‘critical in terms of women’s participation in labour markets and economic
growth overall’. There is strong evidence that positive effects of education are that
women with schooling tend to marry and have children later, have lower fertility
levels, are healthier and are more empowered (UN-Habitat 2013).
While there have been substantial improvements in the provision of primary
education, MDG 2 (universal primary education) had not been achieved by 2015.
Even though urban girls have been more advantaged than their rural counterparts,
large disparities remain in access and quality of education between slum and
non-slum areas of cities. Girls are often withdrawn from schooling (if they are
enrolled at all) because either their education is not seen as important or they
are needed to help with unpaid chores or generate income for the family. Lack
of education affects women and their families and impedes prosperity overall
so women still constitute approximately two thirds of the 774 million illiterate
people worldwide (Chant 2013: 15). Gender inequalities in vocational training
and apprenticeships tend to be sex-segregated (UN-Habitat 2013: 49); while
girls are less likely to complete their education, even in countries where there
are more women than men enrolled in tertiary education, women are poorly
represented in traditionally masculine fields such as science and engineering.
Nevertheless, various strategies have led to more girls attending school
(UN-Habitat 2013: 49): Gambia’s ‘Girl Friendly’ schools, launched in 2001
with the support of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), led to the
establishment of a Gender Education Unit, waiving junior secondary school fees
for girls, more female teachers, scholarships, subsidies for purchasing uniforms
and educational materials, establishment of school-linked mothers’ clubs,
workshops to encourage girls to study science, mathematics and technology,
and the construction of female-only toilet blocks.
Women’s fertility levels

Women in urban areas have lower fertility rates than those in rural areas.
However, access to safe and adequate contraception is uneven. Fertility is
higher among poorer groups of the population in slums than in wealthier urban
neighbourhoods, due to factors including lack of family planning information,
early marriages, early school drop-out and high teenage pregnancy rates (UN-
Habitat 2013: 9–10). Access to and use of maternal health care services (MDG
5), and the quality of such services, are issues for women in slums and this
can affect the survival of both mothers and children (UNICEF 2012). Women
can also be denied access to birth control when paternity is socially important
to men. However, children are an important economic, social and emotional
resource for poor urban residents, as well as a means of women legitimising
‘female’ identities and with strong implications for women’s empowerment
Sexuality
Gill Valentine (in Bondi 2005: 10) argues that urban spaces are intensely
heteronormative, such that the demonstration of affection (holding hands or
kissing) between heterosexual couples in public spaces is generally acceptable
in the West but much less so between same-sex couples. However, lesbian and
gay people tend to find greater acceptance in urban environments where they
are able to create their own neighbourhoods, and assert themselves through
colonisation of heterosexual spaces, such as gay pride marches. Rukmini Sen
(2014) studied a lesbian collective in Kolkata (India), which was formed to
voice solidarity against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code to provide a safe
space for women with same-sex preferences but evolved into a rights-oriented
movement to fight discrimination and hatred against women with same-sex
preferences. This movement acted as a ‘change agent’ to support sustainability
citizenship for same-sex couples.
Cities have traditionally been associated with female prostitution – often a
means of income generation for migrant and slum-dwelling women who cannot
find other forms of employment. Sharda’s (2014) recent study of female sex
workers in Goa (India) found that selling sexual services relies upon patriarchal,
socially constructed notions of gender, sexuality and heteronormativity. Cities
can also be sites for sexual slavery (Jarvis et al. 2009: 183–4) with girl children
particularly vulnerable as subjects of child trafficking; research indicates that
large numbers of trafficked girls are put to work as sex workers (UNICEF
124 Annette Gough
2012: 31). Such practices need to be challenged and changed if we are to achieve
the empowerment necessary for all women to contribute to and express the
responsibilities of sustainability citizenship, which assume the time and power
to make decisions and be active in communities as well as households.
Physical capital
Examples of physical capital – land and housing, and urban services – illustrate
the gendering of the city.
Land and housing

As stressed by the Inter-Agency Network on Women and Gender Equality
(IANWGE c. 2009: 11), significant gender differences disadvantage women in
access to and ownership of land and housing, which both offer social benefits
and status. Women own less than 15 percent of all land and property worldwide
(Chant 2013: 17). Women are excluded from ownership through male-biased
inheritance, discriminatory titling practices, female disenfranchisement on
death, desertion or divorce of spouses, and male presumption of property
even when women are legally entitled (UN-Habitat 2013). Housing is critical
to people’s identity, dignity and sense of belonging as well as being a route to
women’s prosperity and sustainability citizenship beyond the ‘wicked triangle’.
Lack of regular income and employment can be an obstacle for women
obtaining accommodation. Concerns about safety and security also limit
single women’s housing choices. UN-Habitat (2013: 20) points out that rental
property can be particularly problematic because it:
has been more neglected policy-wise with fewer provisions to protect

women as a result… Women renters may also be discriminated against in
relation to sexuality, either because of issues of propriety of single women
without male ‘guardians’ as in southern India, or in terms of lesbian
women finding it difficult to rent as in Quito, Ecuador.
Limited access to land and housing can restrict poor women’s opportunities
to establish microenterprises, to generate income and gain prosperity, because
household activities can be limited by landlords, relatives and other residents
(Chant 2013: 18). However, positive actions to build human agency and
operationalise sustainability citizenship include examples in Nepal, Peru and
Vietnam (UN-Habitat 2013: 29). In Nepal, the 2002 Country Code (11th
Amendment Act) provided equal inheritance rights for unmarried daughters
and sons, but married women still stood to lose their natal property rights. Since
gender-responsive budgeting was introduced in 2007, households reporting
some degree of ownership by women have increased to 35 percent (2009) from
11 percent in 2001. In Peru, regularisation of title for urban squatters released
time for women (and men) to engage in activities other than protection of
their properties. In Vietnam, a World Bank land-titling program has enhanced
women’s access to loans, including for business start-up and expansion.
Urban services
Access to safe drinking water and sanitation, ‘public assets’, were established as
human rights in 2010. Although access to water is improving – consistent with

MDG 7 (to ensure environmental sustainability) – sanitation services are not
improving as quickly. These deficiencies are a threat to human health as well
as creating a gender-inequitable time-burden that greatly constrains women’s
ability to benefit from urban prosperity (Chant 2013: 19).
Other obstacles to be overcome or addressed before women can participate
in sustainability citizenship include the lack of other urban services such as
electricity and waste collection, which increase the time required for collecting
or buying fuel, making fires to cook and heat water; over-frequent shopping due
to lack of refrigeration; and disposing of waste, including human waste when
there is no sanitation. Together with childcare, such activities constitute a heavy
‘reproduction tax’ on women which reduces time for rest and recreation as well
as income generation (Chant 2013: 19; UN-Habitat 2013: 41). Transport and
markets are other areas where much more needs to be done to promote and
improve conditions for women’s economic viability and social fairness and to
achieve gender equality in accessing the physical capital of cities – so that women
will be able to participate fully as sustainability citizens.
Space and mobility

There are gender divisions in how people access and move around different
spaces in the city. As Shashikala (in Viswanath 2012: 18) points out: ‘You don’t
see any girls and women out in the night as it is really dark and most of the
street lights don’t work … streets are dominated by men’. Women’s access to
the facilities cities offer is generally more limited than men’s, particularly in
public spaces. This can be due to domestic-based time and resource constraints
associated with reproductive labour and ‘because of strong symbolic dimensions
surrounding the “forbidden” and “permitted” use of spaces governed by
patriarchal power relations and norms of female propriety, which may require
certain modes of dress and/or behavior to render women “invisible” or
unapproachable’ (Chant and McIlwaine 2013: 7). A study of Bangladeshis in
London and of Palestinians and orthodox Jews in Jerusalem by Fenster (2005)
highlights this – she found that Bangladeshi and orthodox Jewish women are
rarely allowed out in public and, if they do appear, they need to dress according
to specific male-defined norms for these spaces. Limited mobility can impact on
the ability of girls and women to attend school, participate in employment and
to socialise (Foran 2013).
126 Annette Gough
Provision of public transport is often gender-blind – assuming male-

dominated work patterns of travel from suburbs to city centres in peak hours
– ignoring women’s dominance in domestic, informal, part-time work in non-
centralised zones and their use of non-peak journeys for personal and household
purposes. Public transport creates gendered personal safety and security issues
that can lead to women’s and girls’ fear of moving about the city.
Several studies (Chant 2013; Foran 2013; Suri 2011; UN-Habitat 2013;
Viswanath 2012) have focused on building better communities where urban

areas are redesigned and redeveloped to be more gender-sensitive, inclusive and
responsive to everyone’s needs. Many of these proposals focus on having well-lit
and well-designed streets and public spaces that attract a critical mass of people
who act as a deterrent for abusive behaviour. The focus is on providing equal
access, which, while seemingly achieved in cities such as Vienna (Foran 2013),
remains a challenge in many places – because of the ‘wicked triangle’ effect.
Violence
With increasing urbanisation and population density in cities, urban crime in
general is on the rise with gender-based violence against women a particular
concern (Suri 2011). For example, a 2012 London survey found that 43 percent
of women between 18–34 years of age had experienced street harassment in
the previous year (EVAW 2012 in GenderSTE 2015). Gender-based violence
occurs mainly through domestic or partner violence, but sexual violence and
fear of being the target of violence in public places limits women’s freedom of
movement. The UN-Habitat (2008: 8) Global Assessment on Women’s Safety noted
that women’s safety is an acknowledged factor in women’s health, development
and human rights. Safer cities for women are safer cities for everyone – an aim
for creating sustainability citizenship in cities. Racial violence impacts on more
than just the perpetrators and the persecuted. Men are also at risk of violence
and of premature mortality in urban areas, especially in slums where being ‘part
of a youth gang – often associated with drugs and turf wars – is the only viable
means of livelihood’ (Chant and McIlwaine 2013: 6).
Conclusion
There is still much to be done to achieve gender-equitable conditions for
sustainability citizenship in cities. The challenge is ‘to ensure that towns and
cities provide healthy and safe living environments, productive economies and
social benefits to diverse groups, and for generations to come’ (IANWGE c.
2009: 1). That requires good governance and engaging men and women as equal
partners and agents for change. A particular area for action is participation in
public life. Women need to feel safe and participate in gender-sensitive urban
planning and design. Gender equality in cities is for all men, women and
children. As Anna Tibaijuka (in IANWGE c. 2009: 12) writes:
To create inclusive cities that respect the rights of everyone, we need to

create conditions and physical environments where women, men, girls
and boys can live, work, go to school, move around, and socialize without
fear of harm. We also need to change attitudes and policies that perpetuate
violence against women.
The women referenced earlier in this chapter and many other women, such
as Vandana Shiva (1989) whose ground-breaking work challenges and highlights

concepts of environmental sustainability, have been prominent in urban social
movements. They are increasing women’s economic, political and social
mobilisation, addressing aspects of the ‘wicked triangle’ as well as challenging
traditional gendered practices, creating conditions where women might take an
emancipatory role in sustainability citizenship.
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11
Informal settlements
Sustainability citizenship in action

Jaime Hernández-García
Global urban expansion in the last five decades has contributed to the growth
of informal housing and informal settlements. In Latin America, more than 75
percent of the population lived in cities in 2001 with more than 30 percent (128
million people) of the continent’s urban population living in conditions defined
by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS 2003: 14)
as ‘slums’. Informal settlements not only make up a large proportion of Latin
American cities, but are also a dynamic part of them in physical, social and cultural
terms. Fiori and Brandao (2010: 188) argue that: ‘Urban informality is inexorably
interwoven with the city as a whole – at all scales and levels – and has to be seen
as another way of being in the city and constructing it.’ Most significantly – and
the focus in this chapter – the production of space in these settlements is largely
steered by the residents.
Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia, has more than 7 million inhabitants
(DANE 2007) and replicates this development scenario. According to Rueda
Garcia (2000), more than 50 percent of Bogotá has grown on an informal basis, on
illegally held land much of which also lacks housing permits. Gradually, however,
many of these settlements become well integrated into the existing and ‘formal’
urban fabric, to the extent that it can be difficult to trace their informal origins.
Similarly, Kellett (2005) explains how in some cities, consolidated settlements
of informal origins can become indistinguishable from those that originated by
formal means.
Production of informal urban space is an on-going process in Bogotá, with many
older barrios – in Latin America, ‘barrio’ refers to a neighbourhood – becoming fully
legalised at the same time as new informal barrios are continuously being created.
Romero and Mesías (2004) explain how the production of informal settlements in
Latin America is in the hands of the people, and far from being a problem, should
130 Jaime Hernández-García
be considered as a legitimate alternative to urban development and sustainability.

In this argument, and established state, families provide themselves with housing
and urban services by means of rent, by purchase from public or private bodies, or
through self-help practices.
If sustainability citizenship is about people acting within and managing their
environment, informal settlements are one of the best examples of demonstrating
citizenry organisation and collective responsibility. People transform places and
places transform people (Holloway and Hubbard 2001). In informal settlements

this dialectic is a way to overcome difficulties and lack of opportunities outside the
market. People in the barrios certainly implicitly acknowledge ‘reality as a product
of both ecological (bio-physical) and social relations and processes’ (Chapter 1).
Informal settlers do not constitute an organised social movement as such but do
act like one, taking collective responsibility for their lives and places to overcoming
everyday challenges. They pursue practical and collective transformation, rather
than engaging in political and economic discussions. However, their actions and
relations can be read as political statements. In this sense, informal settlements are
practical and realistic, with political and economic impacts. They do not create
theories for structural change (Torres and Castillo 2009) or engage in purely
idealistic and philosophical discourses. Most significantly, quite unconsciously,
they create a model for future urban citizens, householders living in small
private spaces optimising expansive potentially nature-rich public spaces where
‘community’ is privileged and is self-governing.
In one important sense, informal settlements are a form of practical
sustainability citizenship. The core ideas of self-provision, cooperativism and
collective action found in the realisation of informal settlements are also central
elements of sustainability citizenship. Bringing together these parallel ideas,
engaged citizenry and collective individual interventions can contribute to urban
sustainability, centrally because of the social- and spatial-change agency they
display. Informal settlement residents respond to political and organisational
issues by developing urban governance agendas in particular settings. All these
actions by an engaged citizenry develop communal ethics. Admittedly, however,
people living in barrios do not demonstrate clear unified concepts of sustainability
in either local or eco-global terms. While simple living is more sustainable than
mainstream consumerism, their sustainability practices are forced through
economic circumstance rather than conscious choice.
Sustainability citizenship is about people taking action with a purpose. Drawing
on interviews and observations researching informal settlements in Bogotá,
Colombia (Hernandez-Garcia 2013, Beza and Hernández-García 2014), this
chapter discusses how socio-spatial production of barrios can constitute constructive
examples of sustainability citizenship in practice. The term ‘informal settlement’ is
commonly used in literature but ‘popular settlement’ is the term commonly used
in Bogotá, because these settlements offer a common form of housing for many
of the city’s residents (Hernandez-Garcia 2013). Nevertheless, the more familiar
international ‘informal settlement’ is maintained throughout this chapter.
Informal settlements 131
Sustainability citizenship in practice

In my interview in 2008 with Rocio, an Aguas Claras barrio resident, he declared:
I love my barrio very much, because many things have happened to me

here, for example the first football championship I ever took part in. After
that, teams always ask me to play with them, it was good fun.
Public spaces are a feature of informal settlements. These spaces are

important to residents, from the beginning of the settlement’s development,
regardless of whether it had a formal or informal origin. A central question in
the realisation of these spaces, and one that is relevant to understanding and
assessing what might constitute an engaged sustainability citizen, stands out:
What were the initial perceptions and visions of residents when creating these
spaces? Niño and Chaparro (1997) argue that the ‘parque del barrio’ or ‘cancha’
(barrio park or sports field) is very significant and valued by residents because
of the activities, and memories created, in these spaces. Rocio, for example,
valued social relationships formed in these spaces and its active use as a setting.
In Bogotá’s informal settlements, attention to urban spaces often only comes
after the initial development of housing and basic arrangements for water,
sewage and electricity. Hernandez Bonilla (2004) highlights this process when
discussing colonias populares (popular settlements) in México. Two arguments
explain the great importance of public spaces to settlement residents: firstly, the
purely practical issue of lack of indoor house space and, secondly, aspirational
motives of residents. The first suggests that public space will operate as a
common playground: ‘Facilities for active recreation are generally more
suitable to informal settlements than spaces for passive occupation, especially
in places with large populations of teenagers with limited educational and
employment opportunities’ (Beardsley and Werthmann 2008: 33). The second
rationale implies that public spaces might represent the characteristics typical
of city life (Silva 1992). Kellett (2009: 4) writes of residents who ‘adopt forward
looking strategies based on optimism and aspiration’ and whose ‘dwellings
embody future aspirations with little time for nostalgia for a rural past, rather
a fascination with modern, urban, progressive images: a striving towards
imagined futures’.
One way or another, whether because of neglect by authorities, personal
ambition or neighbourhood pride, a driving force (fuerza motriz) motivates
and inspires spatial transformation, converting local people into agents for
change who take responsibility for their surroundings. These undertakings by
community members generally start with people deciding to act rather than
waiting for someone else to do ‘it’ for them. Action evolves from the residents’
close relationships with the territory of the barrio because this setting connects
them with the larger context of the city of Bogotá. Yet this connection and
focused relationship also works to individualise their place in the city, i.e. they
are grounded in their barrio (Hernandez-Garcia 2013). Here sustainability

citizenship is enacted when residents decide to act with responsibility towards
their territory and the community in which they live.
Community involvement, participation and organisation

Kellett (2008: 23) argues from research in popular settlements in Santa Marta
(Colombia) that a barrio is far from cohesive, and that clear and effective
community organisation is frequently absent. However, the community is the
leading, dominating, actor in the production of urban space in barrios (Carmona
et al. 2003). Whether formally or informally organised, or even acting quite
individually, residents are the driving force of socio-spatial transformation in
the barrio. Indeed, Alejandra Miranda, a Caracoli barrio resident interviewed in
2015, considers them the main asset of the settlement: ‘The best thing of my
barrio is the people.’
The park developed in the Danubio barrio of Bogotá was prompted by an
individual resident. In the early development stages of the settlement, around
what is today known as the park, several houses were at risk of being destroyed
because of land instability. The emergencies office of the municipality offered to
relocate the affected residents. However, when I interviewed Danubio resident
Jose Rubio in 2008 he found the proposal an unsuitable and expensive ‘solution’
for his large family because: ‘After 15 years I will have paid for a house three
times smaller and three times more expensive than one I could build myself.’
Instead of relocating, Jose convinced, and organised, his neighbours to undertake
the task of stabilising the land, seeking the resources to form the area that later
became the park.
Similarly, residents of La Andrea barrio were living around a spare piece of
land left by a ‘pirate’ developer, known as a ‘cesion’ who sells inexpensive lots
without public services, land title or official documented property ownership.
At that time, the president of the Community Action Group, Junta de Acción
Comunal (JAC), was a neighbour of the cesion and was able to mobilise JAC
members to work on realising the park.
Turning to community street improvement efforts in informal settlements
as inspiration to enact sustainability citizenship, in the case of Aguas Claras
barrio, improvements to the barrio’s streets were initiated by interested
community actors. The first transport company to service the settlement did so
‘informally’ (i.e. without a licence from the municipality), organising for soil to
be strategically placed along access streets to the barrio, and residents helped to
compact it. A partnership between the company and residents transpired, which
led to the improvement of streets and mobility for community members. Soon
after the success of this partnership, the Aguas Claras JAC took responsibility for
these roads and continued organising street improvements.
Community initiative, involving both individuals and organised groups, is
the driving force for the production of space in informal settlements. In these
examples, the idea of people taking action to instigate development of their

built and natural environments helps guide organisational and governance skills
required for sustainability citizenship: first, individual mobilisation, second,
local community action and, third, the utilisation of private/public partnerships
to enact change. Public spaces in popular settlements are continuously developed
through these examples of local initiatives and through constant negotiation
with other actors, such as the local municipality. In this sense informal settlers
constitute a social and political force influencing the governance of the barrio
and, ultimately, the city.
Production and transformation of space and self-provisioning

Typically, the agency of individuals gradually gives way to the agency of organised
groups and, in the process, immature community organisations become
stronger. For example, the JACs in these barrios gradually take on a greater role
within the community and move on to work with the municipality. Municipal
authorities play a relatively small role in the barrio until some threshold in the
community organisation or a settlement’s development is reached. A side-effect
of reaching this threshold is that participation and conflict become more evident
in the dynamics of producing spaces – as Carmona et al. (2003) suggest occurs
when actors interact to pursue their own objectives, motivations, resources and
constraints.
The particularities of these kinds of public space production engender
what Lefebvre (1991) has called ‘own space’, a permanent process of space
transformation and consumption practices. Involvement of the municipality
begins to reveal a number of issues. The dialectic with broader structural forces of
the municipality is one of them, as Carmona et al. (2003) suggest when referring
to the institutional model of the production of urban space. The community
interacts with public institutions and politicians to get what they need. In this
sense power relations develop and reinforce the governance dimension of self-
provisioning practices.
An ‘agency model’, which draws on ‘behavioural or institutional explanations’
and has a strong ‘focus on the actors and their relationships’, is the best fit for
describing the processes in these barrios (see discussions by Carmona et al. (2003:
224) regarding processes of development in urban environments). In the early
stages, people act either individually or in a group to develop their park, and
the municipality is drawn in later. The social production of space results from
residents forming relationships with their environment. Following the insight
of Lefebvre (1991: 31): ‘every society – and hence every mode of production
with its sub variants – produces a space, its own space’.
The inter-relationship with the place that begins here also produces and
transforms meanings in relation to the space, as Lawrence and Low (1990)
argue. The agency of barrio people in the production and construction of urban
space links with the idea of self-interested individuals becoming responsible
citizens. The case of Danubio barrio is especially revealing but not an exception;
an active and engaged citizenry provided alternatives to the municipality’s
proposal to relocate people through slope stability and establishing a park.
Actors, roles and decision-making

Carmona et al. (2003) identify eight different types of actors in the production
of urban space. In the barrios, there are two main actors, ‘community’ and
‘municipality’. However, they encompass sub-categories: ‘community’
involves ad hoc and temporary connections and activities by individuals and
groups and the ‘municipality’ is a network of agencies, including the state.
Within the broader municipal category, arguably, the most influential actors
are politicians. The relationship between politicians and barrios has a long
history in Bogotá (Hataya 2007). Other actors, who are not always involved
but when present play a significant role, are NGOs and social and cultural
organisations (including religious ones). The ‘pirate’ or illegal developers may
play a role, but their involvement usually does not go beyond selling plots to
individual residents, and only very occasionally providing public spaces.
Paraphrasing Carmona et al. (2003), the actors in the production of space
in the barrios are occupiers, community, municipality, politicians, NGOs, social
organisations and ‘pirate’ developers. Each actor brings different objectives and
motivations to the barrio, apart from offering resources and forming constraints
– observed in the relationships in which the actors engage, with the specific
outcomes of participatory practices and conflicts. These can be seen as power
relations, where the different actors ‘negotiate’ with something to obtain
something else, this being especially clear in the relationship between the
community and politicians.
In this sense, public place is not only bio-physical but rather strongly
associated with social relations, including authority and power (Cresswell
1996). Consequently, the municipality and the JAC, on behalf of the state and
the community respectively, define spaces within the barrio. In this dialectic,
power relations are created and transformed not only between them but also
within sub-groups they claim to represent.
The community actors involved can be individuals and/or settlement
communities engaging as change agents. For example, Jose and Lucy of
Danubio managed to mobilise the community to stabilise the land where the
park was to be developed, and Lidya of Aguas Claras led and braved the ongoing
legalisation process of the barrio (i.e. formalising municipal appropriation of
areas within the barrio). Carmen, in Tanque Laguna barrio, led a long struggle
against private and public bodies on behalf of the park in her barrio – an
example of a public defence of open space for the locality. Lucy, Lidya and
Carmen confirm the important role of women in the production of the urban
environment in informal settlements in Latin America, as acknowledged
by Avendaño and Carvajalino (2000), Hordijk (2000), Segovia and Oviedo
(2000) and Kellett (2005). These latter examples reveal developments whereby
women decide and act as equal citizens to men (as reviewed in Chapter 10).
Public space: Place-making

We have seen how, following their construction of informal housing, locals
create public spaces, which play an important role not only in the physical and
social dynamics of popular settlements but also in developing institutions or

norms for governance. Public spaces are the most important social places in the
barrio. They are places for cultural exchange and building values (Hernández-
García 2013, Niño and Chaparro 1997, Segovia and Oviedo 2000, Viviescas
1996). The relationship and exchange between the dwelling place (home) and
the public space (park or street) is another important characteristic in these
settlements, especially in terms of the unconscious sustainability elements of
such activities – pointers to the ways in which more communality means more
sustainable, efficient, use of nature’s resources.
Frequently, public space is seen as a spacious extension of the house. Homes
are often small and limited. Doors and windows are the connection points, and
it is not uncommon to find them open, functioning as transitional elements
through which the open space continues into the house and the house extends
into the street. In their research on public spaces in the barrios of Venezuela,
Ontiveros and De Freitas (2006) found a close relationship between the home
interior and the exterior public setting, whereby the interior is a place totally
impregnated with exterior social space and vice versa. In this regard, Riaño
(1990) argues that public spaces in informal settlements are more concerned
with the relationship between the home’s interior and the street outside, rather
than the dichotomy between the privacy of the home and the public character
of open space.
Together these private–public, interior–exterior spaces contribute to realising
the barrio as a place within a capital city, Bogotá. To better understand the
ways sustainability citizenship is enacted, we need to elaborate on the typical
processes that lead to the realisation of ‘place’ in the barrio. Place-making ‘can be
understood as a concept where through a social and political process, value and
meaning in a particular setting is created’ (Beza and Hernández-García 2014)
while enhancing ‘the quality of all of those who experience and use’ such places,
in turn assisting to ‘foster the creation of sustainable communities’ (Beza 2012:
120).
This is why and how place-making and sustainability citizenship have so
much in common, particularly through their conjunction in public space. Here
sustainability citizenship takes a spatial form in the public space; public space can
be seen as the ‘spatialisation of sustainability citizenship’ through place-making.
If this inference is accepted as valid, in the same way that public space in the
barrios is collectively produced and allocated meaning, sustainability citizenship
can also collectively work to create meaning and value in wider urban settings.
Caracoli barrio – described in greater detail in Chapter 12 – is another

example of creating value and meaning, place-making, in Colombia and offers
a case for further exploration. Initially, a set of decision rules were established
by the popular settlement’s citizenry and the ‘pirate’ developer and acted upon
outside of the formal process of regulations. This activity side-stepped many of
the ‘higher order’ concerns of Iveson and Fincher (2014). Although they all had
similar decision-making powers, residents had different kinds and amounts of
resources to offer. Furthermore, they had different interests both as individuals

and as sub-groups, generating the potential for conflicts. Yet they were able
to create value and meaning in their popular settlement. In fact, their parque
del barrio became an exemplar of self-help practices, the JAC thereby gaining
legitimacy for the settlement and receiving municipal funding for it.
Such place-making exhibits the processes of value-creation and meaning-
creation through:
• self-organising citizenry who decide, plan and act

• consultation and dialogue between stakeholders
• developing visions for central open spaces within settlements
• physically transforming settings
• institutionalising pride in collective achievements.
As described here, place-making and sustainability citizenship occurs in

informal settlements through place-based interpretations and ad hoc practices
of community values achieving desired outcome within a place. The same can
be said with sustainability citizenship expressed in neighbourhoods where a
physical and cultural transformation of the built environment requires local
people to act as change agents.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that the main way that informal settlers produce space
and transform their living environment is by self-organising on the basis of
individual and collective initiatives. They overcome resource and organisational
obstacles to improve their quality of life through collective action. Their actions
result in social and spatial improvements in and formalisation of previously
informal settlements within the larger territory, Bogotá, both as a geographical
city space and an arena of governance.
In a political governance sense at least, informal settlements can be seen as
examples of burgeoning sustainability citizenship, with organisational forms that
might be flexed to encompass new purposes, such as food self-provisioning (as in
Venezuela – see Chapter 4). Distinct from most of the housing and neighbourhood
developments in the Global North (as analysed in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7),
where crucial roles are played by the state and markets, informal settlers achieve
their goals and gain legitimacy very much from ‘the bottom up’, initially without
municipal support and outside the market. Sustainability citizenship is not an

objective as such, but can achieve results and certainly becomes more likely and
feasible because of the set of collective skills developed in the process.
In the Global North, sustainability citizens often act collectively to directly
petition government to promote sustainability policies, programs, regulations
and legislation. When barrio residents decide to act, they take full responsibility
for their actions. When they undertake an initiative, they organise themselves
to pursue objectives, and follow non-formal procedures to achieve goals.

Communities in informal settlements quite unconsciously offer models for
sustainability, through efficient and collaborative use of space. Gaining legitimacy
for the urban spaces they create is a result, not an assumption of their activity.
Over time, municipalities acknowledge achievements by providing additional
formal services and infrastructure to barrios and, ultimately, even accompanying
land title. Most importantly, these examples show that citizens can influence
governments who failed to meet their needs and that, by collaborating with
the municipality, communities can become political actors influencing city
governance. Such models are basic to certain forms of sustainability citizenship,
especially in the South, but also even, say with squatter communities, in the
North.
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12
Places for sustainability
citizenship
Beau B. Beza
The age Homo Urbanis is upon us (Gleeson 2014). Fifty-four percent of Earth’s
population now live in urban settings (WHO 2012) and urban optimists would
lead us to believe that this ‘benchmark’ in our collective human history is cause
for celebration. Gleeson (2014) points out that words and phrases such as
‘triumph’, ‘welcome’, ‘genius’ or ‘good for you’ underscore various assertions
on this evolutionary occasion (Brugmann 2009, Glaeser 2011, Hollis 2013).
Yet Homo Urbanis was arrived at through a relatively slow development process
that gained considerable momentum post-WWII and flourished through the
market-driven economies of the Anglo-western world.
From the late twentieth century to the present, a neoliberal ideology has been
the catalyst supporting a free-market approach to achieve ‘desired’ outcomes,
with little to no thought in the varying national policy drivers and mechanisms
that have allowed this ideology to flourish (Robinson 2011). Hodson and Marvin
(2010) position this kind of ideology used to achieve city development-related
outcomes as ‘neoliberal urbanism’. In itself, neoliberal urbanism has come
to encapsulate an urban governance that highlights the market to distribute
resources and orchestrate public sentiment (Gleeson and Beza 2014: 1). This
market-driven approach to city development has been widely used by successive
governments to realise and manage various countries’ urban settings.
Amongst the many critiques of neoliberal urbanism, two issues are at the
forefront. First, outsourcing and ‘efficiencies’ created by streamlining urban
development operations mean that large populations of public servants have
lost, or never learned, the skills of designing and implementing collective
solutions as deregulated markets engender a plethora of problems (Gleeson
and Beza 2014: 3). Second, as Legacy (2014: 75) points out, deliberative plan
making under neoliberal urbanism has been reduced to ‘heavily stage managed
140 Beau B. Beza
“events”, hence reducing the depth and breadth of public deliberation’ over city
development matters.
Australia, amongst the many highly urbanised nations, has used ideology
and constructs of ‘truth’ to marginalise the public in urban matters (Hillier
2014). Such marginalisation of citizenry and public officials, who lack the
ability to collectively respond to urban issues, is alarming – especially given that
Australian’s contributed 16.9 metric tonnes of CO2 per capita, a figure second
only to the United States (World Bank 2015), in 2010. Equally alarming is
Australia’s 74 percent reliance on fossil fuels to meet its electricity needs (Origin
2015).
These figures and the country’s urban focus are not news to its citizenry and
public officials. As early as the 1950s, 77 percent of Australians lived in cities,
with the most recent (2010) figures showing Australia’s urban population at
88.7 percent, a figure that WHO (2012) predicts will increase to 90.1 percent by
2020. What is new is the significance of carbon emissions, the collective species
threat to Homo Urbanis (spp. Australis), to which much of its population seem
unmoved to respond.
In defence of the Australian public, Beck et al. (2002) suggest that the slow
progress or seeming insignificance of certain changes may hide their effects on
society. Their concept of ‘reflexive’ modernity describes citizenry awareness of
societal rules and reflexivity. This concept is a powerful tool to counter the central
neoliberal idea that citizens are utility-maximising beings whose individual
self-interest serves and drives profit and growth. Instead, applying reflexive
modernity asserts the importance of citizenry awareness and understanding of
projected and alternative urban outcomes.
Engaging sustainability citizenship

The battleground for environmental sustainability will be conducted in our
cities by sustainability citizens, the core of the urban experience. However,
conscious sustainability citizenship relies on at least three developments. First,
citizenry must be(come) aware of sustainability issues affecting them and the
wider urban population. Second, agents must believe that the task of achieving
sustainability (or change) can be realised. Third, there must be a build-up of
collective human agency to mobilise such action.
In this chapter, I introduce a simple ‘change agent’ approach that can be
used to develop and engage sustainability citizenship. The ‘Think–Plan–Do’
framework, discussed in greater detail below, developed out of a collaborative
urban renewal and redevelopment research project that I led in both Mexico
City (Mexico) and Melbourne (Australia) in 2013. In this project a series of
six common international approaches were used by the citizenry and public
officials in each respective urban setting, illustrating how social actors and
agency can effect change in cities at site-specific and precinct-related scales
(Beza et al. 2013).
Places for sustainability citizenship 141
Two other research projects are also referred to in this chapter to show how
sustainability citizenship in action can realise positive changes in urban settings.
Place-making investigations conducted during a Victorian government agency
supported research project (Moloney et al. 2012a, 2012b, 2012c) and an informal
settlement place-making investigation conducted in Bogotá (Colombia)
(Beza and Hernández-Garcia 2014) illustrate how deliberative planning and
an alternative approach to ‘traditional’ urban development practices can be
achieved, respectively.
The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how sustainability citizenship can
be supported using a simple framework to affect change through structural and
cultural socio-environmental transformation. This change agency Think–Plan–
Do framework provides agents with tools for:
• gathering and identifying data for decision-making that informs plans for
urban change
• participatory engagement in deliberative plan-making
• agency implemented by acting upon the actions and measures in the plan in
order to achieve a desired change or sustainability-related outcome.
An active and involved citizenry using some variation of the Think–Plan–

Do framework is key to building human agency in urban development and
governance process, i.e. operationalising sustainability citizenship. This chapter
shows how this Framework has been successfully applied in three cases
and concludes with a ‘road map’ to follow for achieving a range of desired
sustainability citizenship outcomes.
Building human agency

Sustainability citizenship relies on an active and involved citizenry to build
human agency into the urban development and governance process. Each
citizen is just one of a larger and interconnected urban dynamic that involves
a variety of agents from diverse backgrounds. Iveson and Fincher (2014)
explain this variety in terms of a ‘Just Diversity’, which is useful in accounting
for, and making one aware of, the heterogeneous social actors who comprise
‘sustainability citizenship’. These elements are similar to Agyeman’s (2013)
concept and practice of ‘just sustainabilities’ as relations structured around class,
race and inequality. Following Iveson and Fincher (2014), I have applied social
justice as a ‘higher order’ foundation to enacting place-making projects.
Furthermore, Iveson and Fincher (2014: 47) argue that to promote public
interest and account for the diversity of agents in any urban setting, one must
recognise and address three citizenry elements:
The first is the difference of rich and poor, whereby the characteristics of
the city exacerbate the fact that some people have more and some have
142 Beau B. Beza
fewer material resources and opportunities. The second is the difference

of status, whereby some people’s identities (and their associated ways of
inhabiting the city) are devalued in relation to others in the city. The third
is the difference of hybridity, whereby no individual can be reduced to
any one group identity, because each has a range of potential identities and
identifications that constitute their urban presence.
Their considerations help overcome, or at least address, an issue with ‘reflexive’

modernity, i.e. citizenry awareness, which can only be acted on with enabling
societal structures.
Sustainability citizenship can be operationalised using any number of urban
(re)development or renewal strategies that require and enact change in the
city. In particular, place-making can be used to great effect. Place-making is a
name only relatively recently given to a long-established process of deliberative
planning where inspiration for community outcomes is based in local citizenry
and revolves around their ‘assets, inspiration, and potential’ (Placemaking
Chicago 2011: 5).
Evolving from Whyte’s (1980) early work in New York, place-making has
gained considerable currency in the last two decades. Place-making begins
with open dialogue between parties where issues are fleshed out and a plan
and actions are put in place to realise community aspirations. Its application
is practised differently in countries that follow its community-driven process
and apply its tools (see Moloney et al. 2012a; PPS 2014a, 2014b, 2014c). In the
US, place-making is applied through a framework-driven approach that strives
to achieve ‘good’ public spaces by creating an image of an intended outcome
derived from understanding tangible and intangible qualities of a setting. In
Australia, place-making is achieved largely through the use of charters and/or
guidelines developed to influence perceptions of settings. The UK employs
criteria and/or benchmarks to re-establish or recognise interdependence of
urban/natural environments (Moloney et al. 2012a). These three examples
show that place-making commonly revolves around planning futures for urban
settings and its citizens by appreciating what each individual setting contributes
uniquely to the urban environment. Another commonality is that place-making
is interdisciplinary, involving a range of design professionals, public officials and
members of the public.
However, place-making is mainly an Anglo-western construct applied
in wealthy nations and in highly regulated urban planning processes. If
sustainability citizenship applies place-making tools to achieve change, care
must be taken to not rely on regulation or official ‘engines’ that might retard
intended change. In fact, the case must be made that in the process of collective
or societal self-reflection, sustainability citizenship initially stands outside
formal planning/regulatory processes in order to envisage real change and only
afterwards accounts for existing regulations and plans in considering how to
achieve the desired vision of the future.
Directing urban outcomes

Alternative approaches to the Anglo-western version and application of place-
making abound (as discussed in Chapter 11). In a place-making sense, informal
settlements might fall outside what many might consider an appropriate
setting for Homo Urbanis. Yet, despite limited resources, communities in
informal settlements in developing countries are resourceful in, for example,
reinventing themselves post-disaster. Moreover, in so doing, they establish

meaning in their urban setting. Regardless of ‘aesthetic’ (see Eagleton 1990)
and certain health concerns with such settlements, residents in the slums of
Buenos Aires use ‘words like beauty, enjoyment, fun and tranquillity’ (Janches
2012, 27) in reflecting on their self-realised private homes and public settings,
such as formal play areas. In some informal settings an extremely financially
disadvantaged yet highly sophisticated public-minded citizenry has moved
beyond the provision of homes to realising public spaces for themselves
(Urban-Think Tank 2013).
Caracoli
Caracoli, an informal settlement to the south of Colombia’s capital Bogotá, is
such an example of self-appropriation and realisation of public-minded urban
settings. Caracoli is part of the Ciudad Bolivar municipality of more than 700,000
inhabitants (DANE 2011), nearly 10 percent of Bogotá’s population. This
informal settlement was established by ‘decision rules’, by a ‘pirate developer’,
who sells inexpensive lots to rural people without public services, land title or
official documented property ownership (Gilbert et al. 1982, Gilbert and Ward
1985), and the barrio’s first settlers. Although formal rules may not exist in the
realisation and use of an informal settlement, total emersion and participation
in the urban development process has established codes and practices that
positively influence the citizenry and urban outcomes in this setting.
In Caracoli these codes are followed, applied and amended by a citizenry
that self-organised to form the Junta de Acción Comunal (JAC) (community
action group) led by Don Agustin (President) and community members. Once
their homes were built, one of JAC’s early self-realisation endeavours was to
acquire resources and gain interest from the municipality to construct a sports
facility and, shortly afterwards, a community facility building – both organised
and managed by the JAC. These public facilities gained currency and the JAC
was awarded grant funding from the municipality to renovate and improve
the sports field, associated park and land adjacent. This barrio’s residents
gained urban ‘legitimacy’ when areas of Caracoli were appropriated by Ciudad
Bolivar, becoming ‘formal’ parts of Bogotá. The success and legitimacy of
this urban setting and its spaces is demonstrated by politicians’ visits, albeit
during election time, and their electoral attention to address matters effecting
Caracoli’s residents.
144 Beau B. Beza
It is significant that the Caracoli community members perceive that they

‘own’ their homes and public spaces, blur boundaries between ‘private’ and
‘public’ space, collectively create places, and challenge influences from outside
and from within their informal settlement. This example of sustainability
citizenship shows that community organisation and action outside of formal
planning and decision rule processes can gain legitimacy and influence.
Redressing Iveson and Fincher’s (2014) social justice matter of accounting
for the diversity of agents in settings, Caracoli’s disadvantaged community is

recognised for their urban development endeavours and their contribution to
the urban environment.
Melbourne and Mexico City

While the Caracoli example illustrates a grass-roots level of achievement for
potential use in sustainability citizenship, sustainability citizenship has arisen
in a more regulatory-centred setting and at a larger precinct scale in Melbourne
and Mexico City. The comparison here shows a site-specific redevelopment
and a precinct-related renewal approach with sustainability citizenship aiding
the city’s transition to urban sustainability using a combination of thinking,
planning and doing.
In the late 1970s, Melbourne’s almost 2.5 km2 central business district (CBD)
was considered empty and useless (Day 1978) once all its automobiles and
workforce abandoned it every day at the close of business. Change towards a more
vibrant, citizenry-focused urban centre – desired by Melbourne’s planners and
community – was enacted through urban renewal at a precinct scale by planners.
After a 30-year urban transition, involving a strategy to effect change, the CBD
and surrounding City of Melbourne has been recognised internationally for its
renewal efforts and focus on providing places for its citizenry by the Economist
Intelligence Unit (EIU 2015), a unit that analyses facts and presents conclusions
about the liveability of urban settings. This unit awarded Melbourne the status
of the most liveable city for four years in a row (2011–2014). Melbourne’s urban
transition has shown a dynamic ongoing process as Melbournians continue to
strive for positive urban outcomes.
In a review of planning literature and interviews with city officials,
Melbourne’s transformation seems to have been achieved by:
• appointing a leader, champion and/or organisation to guide and support

change
• developing understandings of both the CBD’s urban settings and how
‘change’ might affect the space and surrounding areas, and by engaging in
deliberative planning
• developing a vision of desired urban outcomes, including goal setting,
identifying target areas for change, setting budgets and identifying challenges
to overcome
• organising, utilising and implementing tailored programs to achieve focused

outcomes
• developing and implementing policies and guidelines to provide for
consistent decision-making
• thinking of change in terms of a physical, cultural and social evolution in
the urban setting.
These six approaches are useful for encouraging and allowing for sustainability
citizenship when thinking about community-focused precinct-related change.
A similar approach enacting urban change at a site scale can be found by
investigating an urban redevelopment exercise in Mexico City’s inner suburban
area of La Condesa. This suburban area has had two distinct periods of being
known as a desirable place to live and becoming a national benchmark of
urban innovation: the urbanisation period ‘La Urbanización’ (1902–1985) and
the renaissance period ‘El Renacimiento’ (1995–). The ‘Despoblamiento y
La Reconstrucción’ (the out-migration and reconstruction stage, 1985–1995)
clearly separated these two development periods. Here, the focus is on the El
Renacimiento with brief reference to the other two stages.
The 1985 Mexico City earthquake – with a magnitude of 8.1 – devastated
La Condesa. It literally ruined a desirable inner suburban area, initiating the
Despoblamiento y La Reconstrucción period. This decade was characterised
by neglect by city officials. Then a range of young business entrepreneurs,
small families and artisans began to move into the area. They brought new
ideas on urban redevelopment, i.e. site-specific strategies, that were proposed
and eventually acted upon by district authorities and other residents. Change
began to occur through a coordinated government-initiated program focusing
redevelopment along designated investment and development corridors. Today,
once again, La Condesa is one of Mexico City’s most desirable places to live,
work and visit.
Pre-earthquake, La Condesa owed its initial high regard to La Urbanización,
during which the district’s layout was established through detailed design and
development plans and guidelines that became a new urban benchmark for the
city. An adjacent area, Roma, as well as La Condesa had been the first districts
in Mexico City to feature parks, footpaths/sidewalks, paved streets and mains
water (BLLC 1923). Besides physical and infrastructural elements that were
very modern for the early 1900s, La Condesa had a high level of social cohesion
brought about through various cultural activities (Carmona 2010).
In summary, the use of six other approaches used at a site scale transformed
La Condesa:
• having a driving force (‘fuerza motriz’) behind (re)development efforts

• commencing and sustaining a dialogue between residents and public
officials
• establishing social and cultural activities in the district
146 Beau B. Beza
• developing plans and guidelines to direct local growth

• re-inventing the district in a physical and cultural sense
• implementing land use regulation to direct development.
Despite Melbourne and La Condesa being in very different urban settings

and using different scales and kinds of intervention (i.e. urban renewal v. urban
redevelopment), they both show use of similar agents for change. In each
setting, change commenced in an existing urban centre and through a number of

considered approaches involving the appointing of a champion or organisation
to lead and drive planning and action. In each example the gathering of data
about the urban setting contributed to a deeper understanding and appreciation
of the potential of their communities.
Both settings included engagement and establishing dialogues between
citizenry and public officials working, living or experiencing their environments.
City officials and residents collaboratively established a joint vision of a desired
urban outcome, with La Condesa’s residents largely working outside the
‘system’ until noticed and then acted upon by the government. In both cases
regulations were made and implemented to support the intended vision. The
actors developed and adhered to plans, guidelines, policies and/or technical notes
that were designed to guide decision-making. Finally, the officials and citizenry
developed and implemented cultural programs to achieve specific outcomes.
In particular, they instigated a physical transformation. They acted and evolved
culturally, changing perceptions of their settings through their actions.
Ultimately, what this discussion highlights is that any change towards
urban sustainability relies on physical and cultural transformations of the built
environment organised and led by all those activities that we refer to when
we use the concept ‘sustainability citizenship’. Table 12.1 presents a simple
‘package’ of such sustainability citizenship activities for one to implement the
Think–Plan–Do framework. Table 12.1 divides the material discussed in the
three case studies into ‘higher order’ sustainability citizenship considerations,
which revolve around urban and citizenry reflection and awareness. The other
material has been positioned as a number of applied approaches to effect urban
change at varying scales and relate to collective change.
Conclusion
Key features of neo-liberal urbanism have been the marginalisation of the
citizenry in urban development matters and the production of large numbers
of public servants who lack the ability to respond to civic issues. This
marginalisation has been realised over decades by successive governments
through consistent application of market-driven approaches to city development.
As these approaches are now the norm and citizenry are often passive despite the
alarming urban-based contribution to climate change, to effect transformation
of the urban environment, two complementary courses of action are needed.
Table 12.1 Think–Plan–Do framework for sustainability citizenship in action
Think Higher order sustainability citizenship considerations

Reflect upon and acknowledge the threats facing citizenry.
Recognize and address the three citizenry elements of ‘just diversity’*:
• differences of rich and poor
• differences of status between people
• differences in ‘hybridity’ (no-one is reduced to a single group identity).

Inform and/or make aware of threats confronting citizenry (i.e. reflexive
modernity).
Implementing urban change
Appoint a champion/organisation to lead efforts and/or be a driving force for
action.
Gather data and establish a dialogue between parties (e.g. between citizenry
and public officials).
Plan Create a desired urban vision and implement regulation to support the
desired outcome.
Develop and adhere to plans, guidelines, policies and/or technical notes to
aid consistent decision-making.
Do Develop and apply urban sustainability programs to achieve specific city
and citizenry outcomes by setting practical and collective benchmarks
to physically transform the urban setting, and by following these targets,
support a cultural and social transformation of the citizenry.
Source: *‘just diversity’ elements drawn from Iveson and Fincher (2014)
First, there must be a social and behavioural evolution towards collective

responsibility that actively contests and reverses the effects of neo-liberal
urbanism. Second, through vigorously applying a range of targeted approaches,
purposely developed to realise environmental sustainability, we can realise a
constructive physical transformation of urban settings.
At the heart of any urban transformation and progression towards sustainability
are people, i.e. engagement by the vast array of social actors and agency who make
up the urban setting. Agency and its progression to sustainability citizenship
must be built up and enabled to effect change. Citizens need to be made aware
of the sustainability issues affecting them through processes that encourage
‘reflexive’ thought. This acts as a trigger for research: data gathering that helps
in the production of alternative pathways to achieve sustainability.
These alternative pathways may need to be developed outside traditional
or formal planning processes, which have so often contributed to current path
dependencies. However, once ‘legitimacy’ – or recognition of some sort – for
such alternatives has been achieved, a return to and participation in the formal
process can enable appropriate regulation and the promise of sustained change.
In the process sustainability citizenship is realised.
148 Beau B. Beza
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13
An Indigenous perspective on
sustainability citizenship
David Jones and Beau B. Beza
Variations on aspirations to be good ‘environmental citizens’ depend on one’s

values and cultural perspectives. Such environmental concerns are common in
Western discourses and literature but, when turning to Indigenous perspectives,
the discourse is theoretically and philosophically more complex. This chapter
considers the position of ‘sustainability citizenship’ through the lens of
contemporary Australian Aboriginal communities, specifically the Wurundjeri
of Melbourne (Victoria) and the Yawuru of Broome (Western Australia). The
focus is on relationship with land, and how Aboriginal communities inherently
operationalise sustainability citizenship through their belief in ‘Country’.
Importantly, this chapter highlights the disconnect of conventional Western
land-use planning theory and ‘ownership’ with that of a people who do not
‘own’ land but rather are stewards of their country, or homelands. The concept
of Country is first explained to permit a wider discussion about Aboriginal
views toward land and how their attachment to it can be used as a key element
in active contemporary forms of sustainability citizenship. This is a critical point
to make given that Australian people of Aboriginal heritage only received the
vote – formal citizenship – in 1968 and, according to most recent (mid-2011)
estimates by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS 2013), only constitute 3
percent of the Australian population.
‘Country’
In Aboriginal law and cultural understanding, everything in the Australian
landscape is considered to be alive and everything is embodied in relationships,
whereby the past, present and future are one. Here, both the spiritual and
physical worlds meet through the interaction of Country. Thus, Country exists
An Indigenous perspective on sustainability citizenship 151
as a relationship in which an individual is based within and comes from an

interconnected system. An Aboriginal person is born to a specific Country and
is from that Country, where his or her identity is inextricably and eternally
linked. As such Rose (1996: 7) writes that:
In Aboriginal English, the word ‘Country’ is both a common noun and a

proper noun. People talk about Country in the same way that they would
talk about a person: they speak to Country, sing to Country, visit Country,
worry about Country, grieve for Country and long for Country. People say
that Country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, and feels sorry
or happy. Country is a living entity with a yesterday, a today and tomorrow,
with consciousness, action, and a will toward life. Because of this richness
of meaning, Country is home and peace: nourishment for body, mind and
spirit; and heart’s ease.
In Aboriginal culture, Indigenous knowledge systems are both integral

to, and an extension of, Country. Mailhot (1993: 11) describes Indigenous
knowledge systems as ‘the sum of the data and ideas acquired by a human group
on its environment as a result of the group’s use and occupation of a region
over very many generations’. Traditional knowledge includes knowledge about
traditional technologies, tools and techniques of subsistence, such as hunting
and agriculture; seasons and climate patterns; land management; ethnobotany;
ecological knowledge; celestial navigation; archaeoastronomy; and medicines.
This knowledge, based upon a generational accumulation of empirical
observations and interactions with the environment, is integral for subsistence
and survival in host landscapes.
Traditional ecological knowledge in Aboriginal cultures is derived from the
rules of community-based citizenship and custodial-based laws of ecological
management that prescribe a landscape management regime inherited from
over 60,000 years of practice. Their knowledge and application of it sustained
human and wildlife populations that co-existed in Country and was mediated by
Country for millennia. In support of this application of knowledge, Gammage
(2011) argues that Australian Aboriginals were attuned and sensitive land
managers who knew their landscapes’ maximum and minimum thresholds and
acted in precautionary ways, before damage to Country might occur.
‘Country’ and Western concepts of ‘sustainability’

Non-Aboriginal Australian communities have divergent and tenuous views on
sustainability and its definition, including multiple threads and interpretations
that intertwine with the environment. Many non-Aboriginal environmental
activists aspire to be good global citizens with environmental sustainability
a core feature of global citizenship in the twenty-first century. Notions of
citizenship are different for Aboriginal people who have a known relationship
152 David Jones and Beau B. Beza
in understanding and responsibility to Country separate from their troubled

history as citizens. Country is an expression of being and responsibility, and
does not lend itself to physical or discriminate embodiments commonly sought
in Anglo-Western traditions.
This ‘contrast of cultures’ featured in a recent example of Indigenous
cultural appropriation in the realisation of a landmark building in the city of
Melbourne (Victoria). This state has the lowest proportion of Aboriginal
residents in any Australian state or territory, 0.9 percent (ABS 2013). In early
2015, the Melbourne-based architectural firm Ashton Raggatt McDougall
(ARM) unveiled plans for a 31-storey Swanston Street apartment building in
central Melbourne to be positioned at the ‘head’ of the symbolic axial line from
the city’s Shrine of Remembrance along Swanston Street to what is the site of
the former Carlton & United Breweries. Etched into the façade of the proposed
building was to be a photographic portrait of former Wurundjeri Elder, Uncle
William Barak (c.1824–1903) (Dow 2015a: 1, 12–13).
The inspiration for this design came from the fact that Melbourne resides
on Country of the Wurundjeri, Boon Wurrung and Wadawurrung (or Wathaurung)
peoples. The Wurundjeri are the Traditional Owners and the Recognised
Aboriginal Party under the Victoria State Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 (Victoria
2006), although debates continue amongst the Wurundjeri and the Boon Wurrung
as to where their historical Country boundary lines occur and merge. This
vagary, in fact, mainly occurs in conflict with the firm boundaries of ‘private
property’; before the white invasion Aboriginal communities had negotiated
shared use-rights of lands for various purposes in complex relationships with
their environments in sharp contrast to the singular and sole characteristics of
private property regulated by a ‘state’.
Barak, who was an artist and social justice leader for the Wurundjeri in the late
1800s, is regarded by many Australians as a highly symbolic and emotive voice
for the Wurundjeri community. However, appropriating Australian Aboriginal
information, representations and imagery in contemporary contexts is a vexed
question without due consultation and approval. Thus, the architectural firm
ARM approached the Wurundjeri Elders for permission to portray a likeness of
Barak on the design of the planned building and discussed how they might
realise their idea. The Elders consulted were especially keen that they achieve ‘a
better likeness’ of Barak (Dow 2015b: 13) but the consultation in itself did not
necessarily confer agreement. They simply listened and gave advice on curating
aspects and values for their Country.
ARM curated an elite public design discourse about the building and
the image of Barak through mainstream mass, and architectural, media
celebrating the design as a ‘monument’. An oral and social media discourse
with much less visibility raised many social sustainability concerns.
MacKenzie (2015: 1) summarised such critical views by observing that the
ARM design and associated discourse reflected ‘the impoverished state of
public discussion about architecture and the degree to which anachronistic
Victorian [nineteenth‑century] attitudes prevail as to what constitutes a public

monument’ and lamented that such architecture sought ‘to dislocate itself from
its social and environmental sustainability obligations’ raised by critics.
Debates ran over a wide range of issues, including questions around
whether such Indigenous visual representation in building designs perpetuated
outmoded stereotypes of Aboriginal Australia for non-Indigenous audiences
(Kennedy 2015; MacKenzie 2015); the validity and ethics of the commercial
appropriation of an Elder’s image on a building (Hansen 2015a, b); whether

this type of design approach entertained an appropriate discourse for uniting
a city’s modern heritage with its deeper Aboriginal history (Hansen 2015a);
whether imagery and Aboriginal nomenclature can be used after an individual’s
death (Aikman 2013); the unresolved tensions of colonisation (Flanagan 2015;
Hansen 2015b; Kennedy 2015); how far this proposal constituted an exploitation
of Aboriginal culture and its communities, even if the designers had engaged
with and formerly consulted relevant Elders; whether a contemporary Western
photographic image was apt in conveying the potency of traditional Aboriginal
image and name protocols; who within the Wurundjeri community and clan
groups was entitled to ‘approve’ such an image appropriation (Hansen 2015a),
for instance whether a Wailwan/Gamillaraay man or a Palawa woman can openly
talk about cultural matters that are external to their Country (Carthy 2014;
Gammage 2011; Kennedy 2015); if genuine ‘approval’ had been forthcoming
or whether, instead, Elders had simply acknowledged the information received
from ARM (Grabasch 2015); conflicts over boundaries, such as whether an
image of a Wurundjeri Elder is geographically appropriate on Boon Wurrung
Country (Briggs 2015); whether architects should instead engage in ‘Indigenous
ways of knowing/doing as primary design principles’ (Kennedy 2015); and
whether principles of reconciliation and recognition of Indigenous peoples and
their communities could be reconciled within contemporary (non-Aboriginal)
Australian architectural and design representations and statements.
Despite these tensions involving social and cultural senses of citizenship, the
deliberation about whether the building and its representation of Barak would
proceed rested with the discretion of the ‘responsible authority’ under the
Planning & Environment Act 1987 of the City of Melbourne Council (Victoria
2015a). This Act provides for a decision by a ‘responsible authority’ based upon
a textually prescribed aesthetic evaluation (not social or cultural sustainability
arguments) as determined by provisions in the City of Melbourne Planning
Scheme. In the event, despite public disquiet, ‘responsible authority’ approval
was given and the building – with the controversial image – was constructed.
The challenges of marrying citizenship and sustainability

In Australia, operationalising the emerging concept of ‘sustainability citizenship’
seems to be predicated upon engaging with technocratic land-use planning
systems. Public involvement is seen as permitting various degrees of legitimate
engagement and participation to aid consensus building but bureaucrats struggle

to accommodate the kinds of engagement and participation that challenge
accepted and normative protocols and processes. To complicate the Barak case
in point, Aboriginal ‘citizenry’ as such involves a wide spectrum of community
participants who are often difficult to map, identify, categorise and assemble –
let alone offer the kind of consensual agreement firm approval might constitute.
A traditional Aboriginal sense of time and appropriate processes for decision-
making contrast with the immediate, ‘sign-here’, timeframe of a commercial

proposal, with planning approval and ready finance.
Delving more widely into communicative and collaborative planning theory,
Jacobs (1961), Davidoff (1965) and Sandercock (2000) discuss the complexity
of adapting planning practice to respond to diversities within contemporary
communities of citizens. The success of implementing planning policy is largely
dependent on acceptability in terms of the dominant communities living where
any urban transformation is targeted. This challenge actually requires local
authorities to develop novel democratic and adaptive processes – beyond the
scope of current legislated procedures – practices that can model development
interventions to inform community members of planning policy options and
outcomes.
In Australia, contemporary planning tools follow in the tradition of Western
land-use town planning instruments guiding and determining community
development. Despite a strong policy of ‘reconciliation’ by successive recent
Australian governments, planners have drawn little from Aboriginal generational
knowledge. When dealing with ‘Aboriginal cultural heritage’, land-use planners
default to archaeological-survey-biased inventories with place-anchors for
Indigenous knowledge. This approach lacks holistic and mixed tangible
and intangible information about ‘Dreaming’ trails, myths, environmental
management relationships because these are neither identified nor identifiable
to Western planners.
Similarly, evidence for claims to native (land) title – following the Native
Title Act 1993 – assumes tangible information, from a Western perspective,
to validate knowledge of ‘ownership’ and ‘occupancy’ irrespective of native
or foreign origins. This critical deficiency is highlighted by numerous
analysts, such as Bell and Jones (2011), Cosgrove and Kliger (1997), Jackson
(1997), Jones et al. (2013a); Lane and Williams (2008), Low Choy and Jones
(2013a, b), Low Choy et al. (2013a, b), Porter (2006, 2010), Porter and Barry
(2013), Sandercock (1998) and Smith (2012). Australian planners have
working perceptions of land ownership predicated on Eurocentric post-
colonial definitions of planning and land settlement that run counter to
many Indigenous perspectives of planning (Johnson 2010, 2015; Johnson
and Jones 2014; Jones et al. 2013b). This underlying mismatch in cultural
land interpretation presents a quandary that scholars, the Australian planning
profession and the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA 2002, 2010) have only
just started to address in concerted ways.
Currently, when Australian planners do consider Aboriginal knowledge

systems associated with land, they focus on inventories of artefact places (Byrne
et al. 2010; Hall 1989); contemporary post-colonial place profiles (Pieris et al.
2014); and, to a lesser extent, landscape management plans based on ancient
and historical practices (Bunya Mountains Elders Council and Burnett Mary
Regional Group 2010; Collard and Palmer 2008; YRNTBC 2011). These
enduring myopic lenses create a flawed perspective of Aboriginal knowledge
(Gammage 2011) and prompt calls for more inclusive, creative and insightful
approaches to land management (Jones 1993; Martin 2013).
Conducting community engagement

Community consultation is seen as one of the central mechanisms to raise levels of
citizen participation and to increase citizen capacity and social capital. Consultation
is just one element in a range of interactions that local government councils have
with constituents. A collective voice and values are harnessed through ‘community
engagement’ around specific plans, policies and projects. While some councils
define consultation loosely as ‘a two-way exchange of information prior to a
decision being made’ (Brackertz et al. 2005: 4), the process is value-laden, crosses
definitional boundaries and is frequently used to denote participatory practices
more generally, which can lead to confusion inside the consultation process and
hinder one of its desired outcomes, genuine ‘engagement’.
Reisacher (2013) has investigated how local government councils in
metropolitan Victoria choose to consult citizenry when preparing to amend
planning schemes. Her aim was to assess whether these councils engaged
‘effectively’ with communities during such processes, which revolve around
land and its use. The strategies to engage the community used by these councils
included convening a workshop, questionnaires, presentations at meetings to
local stakeholders, inviting individuals or groups to address the council, and
creating advisory committees. Reisacher was not able to identify a single council
demonstrating exemplary community engagement. Although more extensive
than required under Victoria’s planning law, during the informal comment
and formal exhibition stages all, instead, simply used communication methods
sufficient to engage with their community.
Reisacher (2013: 10) concluded that effective engagement relied ‘on how
engagement is interpreted’ and highlighted the ‘somewhat nebulous definition’
offered by the Department of Sustainability and Environment (Reisacher 2013:
4; Victoria 2015b), whereby:
‘engagement’ is used as a generic, inclusive term to describe the broad

range of interactions between people. It can include a variety of approaches,
such as one-way communication or information delivery, consultation,
involvement and collaboration in decision-making, and empowered
action in informal groups or formal partnerships.
The low level of expected engagement in ‘one-way communication or

information delivery’ reflects entrenched but tradable private property rights
and obligations. In contrast Aboriginal cultures display much deeper and
inalienable connections with the land, as Country.
For the last 60,000 years until white settlement, Indigenous people in the
continent we now call Australia created a sustained relationship with land, water
and sky, displaying a comprehensive knowledge of the resources and needs of all
its landscapes (Gammage 2011). Even current land management practices involve
complex techniques, predicated upon an extensive oral ‘library’ of knowledge (now
being validated by scientific ecological research), reflected and expressed in their
language, art and other facets of contemporary Australian life. To illustrate this point,
Rose (1996: 18) states that: ‘[t]here is no place [in Australia] without a history; there
is no place that has not been imaginatively grasped through song, dance and design,
no place where traditional owners cannot see the imprint of sacred creation’.
Country is integral to life and culture. Country not only shapes perceptions
of land but, by extension, is essential to one’s wellbeing. Such a view is ‘foreign’
to non-Aboriginal Australian governance systems and culture and has rarely
been successfully translated into land-use planning regimes. Yet, arguably, such
Aboriginal concepts and practices of land management are consistent with
principles in the emerging concept and practice of sustainability citizenship, read
as stewardship, active guardianship and care of the environment as well as an
entitlement to healthy living conditions.
Illustrating how ‘wellbeing’ and land are intertwined, Dodson (in YRNTBC
2011: 13) explains the source, and concomitant values, of existence as evolving in
one Western Australian Aboriginal cosmology, the Yawuru belief in ‘Bugarrigarra’
as: ‘the time before time, when the creative forces shaped and gave meaning and
form to the landscape, putting the languages to the people within those landscapes
and creating the protocol and laws for living within this environment’. Most
significantly, he continues:
Bugarrigarra is not an historic event that created our world at the beginning
of time. It is not detached from contemporary life. It continues to exist and
is the spiritual force that shapes our ongoing cultural values and practice,
our relationships with each other and the obligations and responsibilities
that we have to each other that form our Community. It requires respect at
the interface of change and development.
According to Dodson (in YRNTBC 2011: 13), there are three integral
components of the Yawuru’s active belief in Bugarrigarra: ‘Community’ as the way
‘Yawuru people relate to each other’; ‘Country’ being ‘how we use and occupy the
seas and lands on Yawuru Country’; and Liyan, being the Yawuru ‘people’s view of
their wellbeing’.
The application of Indigenous approaches has progressed in rural and remote
areas of Australia, where more than double the land size of the entire state of
Victoria exists in a fragmented way as Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs), i.e. 3

percent and 7.18 percent of the Australian continent respectively (Geoscience
Australia 2015). IPAs are owned and managed by Traditional Indigenous people
explicitly for conservation and cultural values, and only cost the Australian
government around A$50 per square kilometre to support in 2014. These areas
not only cover ‘some of the most biodiverse and ecologically intact part of
Australia’ and are estimated to absorb around 82 million tonnes of CO2, but also
employ hundreds of Indigenous rangers, who live in communities that report

health and schooling benefits (FoE Melbourne 2015: 2). Recently, the Yawuru
have initiated an IPA for their Country (around Broome).
Might a partial transition to a Country philosophy and approach enable
‘sustainability citizenship’ and more effective community engagement in non-
Aboriginal planning and practice in our cities? The Yawuru have a concept of
Walyjala-jala buru jayida jarringgun buru, ‘voice’, which refers to a plan and to a
philosophy to manage Country. The Yawuru Cultural Management Plan (YCMP)
(YRNTBC 2011) is a tangible example of achieving such voice. Importantly, it
is an engaged rather than authoritarian voice. Developing the YCMP involved
extensive discussions and community engagement, consultation and fieldwork.
The document drew directly upon words expressed in conversations and
discussions within the community, including expressions of Country, custodial
relationships as well as conventional Western land-use maps in order to provide
‘a comprehensive articulation of both the aspirations and responsibilities of the
community of Yawuru Native Title Holders’ (Edgar and Yu in YBCP 2015: 12).
Most significantly for non-Aboriginal Australians, it is central to Yawuru law
‘to make sure Country, Community and wellbeing … are protected, nurtured
and used to help non-Yawuru learn to live with Country and not ruin it’
(Dodson in YRNTBC 2011: 13). The YCMP is a living document, open to
appropriate amendment over time, providing cultural understandings about
the people and their values in managing country. The YCMP is inclusive and
holistic, expressing the ‘hope that through this plan, others will walk, work and
enjoy Yawuru Country with respect for Yawuru people, Country and our future’
(YRNTBC 2011: 4).
An enlightened citizenry
While contemporary land-use planning and management discourse and practice
tends to be centred on economic sustainability arguments to articulate the
‘greater good’, Aboriginal views toward the management and planning of the
land are equally concerned about environmental and cultural sustainability
and wellbeing. The Aboriginal perspective revolves around a holistic and
living concept of Country with tangible, intangible and sustained custodial
obligations to land management and planning. They believe that an individual
is based within, and comes from, Country, a concept of nature that offers the
‘sustainability citizen’ a different set of individual and community-based values.
To operationalise Aboriginal knowledge of the environment, non-Aboriginal

Australians and their institutions need to incorporate listening and negotiating
skills as genuine engagement on sustainability. The sustainability citizen may
begin to think ‘outside of the box’, to effect change through behavioural and
attitudinal shifts, linking visions of city futures with everyday life and culture in
a given area. Finding a collective ‘voice’ and effective forms of engagement to
develop appropriate values for sustainable urban futures is a challenge.
If the Barak case highlighted at the start of this chapter indicates the massive
gaps and failing of engagement in Australia’s current planning system, the cultural
management plan of the Yawuru offers a model of connections with, potentially,
deep and abiding engagement embedded in traditional Aboriginal ways of being
and doing. Instead of the cursory one-way information serving that counts as
community engagement in many Australian government planning processes at
present, national and local governments would do well to incorporate the deeply
material-cum-cultural perspectives of Indigenous peoples in holistic plans for
our cities.
These circumstances and future challenges are not restricted to large cities
in Australia but are readily transferable to most countries where similarly
bureaucratic and technocratic governance act as a barrier to the development of
appropriate and effective engagement for sustainability citizenship.
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Part IV
Citizen participation

14
Communicating
sustainability in the city
Cathy Greenfield
Writing in a pamphlet for the Socialist Environmental and Resources

Association in 1982, Welsh historian of communication and culture Raymond
Williams noted how, from the middle of the nineteenth century, the socialist
response to the ecological challenge of industrial capitalism was stymied by a
reductive assumption underpinned by a pervasive metaphor. This reduction
was that ‘the central problem of modern society was poverty, and that the
solution to poverty was production, and more production’ (Williams 1982:
6). The pervasive metaphor was conquest, communicated in the ubiquitous
phrases ‘conquest of nature’ and ‘mastery of nature’. These attitudes were
associated ‘not just with mastering the earth, or natural substances, or
making water do what you wanted, but with pushing other people around,
with going wherever there were things which you wanted, and subjugating
and conquering’ (Williams 1982: 7). The result, Williams implies, was the
circulation of a disposition towards intensified industrial production as a
generalised good and a disposition towards conquest.
I have begun with Williams’ point about the connection of established practices
of communication with dominant, consequential dispositions to establish my
approach to communication and why it matters in working towards ecological
sustainability. Communication plays a formative role in the policies and actions
that produce environmental degradation; communication will play a formative
role in any measures to secure sustainability. In this chapter I will elaborate this
argument about communication, in the materialist terms of rhetorical power,
and how this is a needed step in thinking about how to promote sustainability
citizenship. First, I will consider a more familiar approach to communicating
sustainability.
166 Cathy Greenfield
A communication problem
Williams’ attention to the forms of representation linked to the socially and
politically urgent concern of environment is rare. The more usual way of
linking communication to sustainability has taken the form of identifying and
confronting a ‘communications problem’ that demands a communication
solution and perhaps a consultant to deliver it. Certainly this might seem the
obvious way to approach communicating sustainability to urban populations.

Given that finding a way to sustainable city futures relies on increasing resource-
efficiency, bio-diverse cities, climate neutrality, resilient communities, greening
the infrastructure, transitioning to green urban economies, and establishing
healthy and happy communities – that is, the goals of ICLEI – Local Governments
for Sustainability (2011: 1) – surely we need tools to change people’s behaviour
and to reshape all of our practices?
Seen as a communications problem, communicating sustainability typically
revolves around the instrumental provision of information to individuals
to achieve an immediate change in their behaviour. Potter and Oster (2008:
118) point to the ‘prominent books, films and television programs’ that either
incorporate or are wholly organised around such a strategy of communication,
such as An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore (2006). Particular assumptions underpin
this approach: that change happens immediately or in the short-term and at the
level of the individual; that people are best understood as rational autonomous
individuals; and that communication can be equated with information.
Referring to the ubiquity of an information technology framework, Latour
(2003: 146, 161) has called this ‘double-click communication’ – the reduction
to bare information, context-less data, and assumed automatic effects, of the
contingency and plurality involved in all production of meaning and knowledge
and its cultural communication. The resulting information-deficit model,
centred around the figure of an abstracted normative individual who requires
only the right information to effect change in their behaviour, is commonplace
across the spectrum of communication regarding environmental issues such as
climate change – from public policy initiatives and green business advertising
through to fossil-fuel lobby publicity.
By way of an example, agencies (such as NewGen Coal 2015) seeking
change or seeking to manage change, address people using fossil-fuel generated
electricity as if they are simply individual consumers who respond to market
signals and change, and assume that, once these people are ‘informed’ about
the facts of climate change and the role of coal-fired power stations, they
will alter their purchase choices. If information does not produce the desired
behaviour change, then such failure is generally interpreted in psychological
terms: the individuals are not behaving rationally, that is, not acting always in
alignment with their own (predominantly financially defined) interests. From
a psychological diagnosis springs a psychological solution. The successful UK-
based sustainability communications agency Futerra, working with the UN
Communicating sustainability in the city 167
Environment Programme, lists the notion of the rational individual as one

of a number of myths encountered in sustainability communication (UNEP
2005: 13). Replacing this misconception with the insights of psychology and
marketing, they cite emotional engagement and relationship building, which
have been developed by branding experts, as the more effective tactics for
sustainability communication aimed at behaviour change.
While Futerra’s caution against starting with the notion of rational
individuals is welcome, acknowledging the more complex psychology of

the targets of sustainability communication may be useful in improving the
effectiveness of communication campaigns without removing the risk of
locating change primarily at the level of individuals and their social interactions.
In doing so, communication campaigns can contribute to a ‘governance of
climate change [that] has been largely “privatized”, both in terms of access
to decision-making and in terms of the onus of action’ (Carvalho 2005: 3).
Such communication strategies have been part and parcel of a response to
climate change abatement that has routed decision-making through market
mechanisms and narrowed people’s input to their calculations of economic
self-interest. In such scenarios, people have been invited and incited to a role
in achieving sustainability as rational, autonomous individuals acting always
for their financial benefit.
Dobson (2011) has argued that conceptualising people in this way, as the
utility maximisers of orthodox economics who respond only to fiscal incentives,
is depoliticising and de-democratising. Policies and action based on fiscal
incentives alone rather than ‘ethics, norms and values’ is not consonant with
sustainability, which has its basis in justice. ‘Ethics, norms and values are not an
optional extra in sustainability – they are constitutive of it’ (Dobson 2011: 9).
Dobson’s argument is that action for sustainability must be lodged in a different
model for decision-making action, that of sustainability citizenship.
So, what role does communication play in displacing homo economicus, or
political science’s rational choice actor (Hay 2004), and enabling sustainability
citizenship?
Displacing the rational autonomous individual

For a start, we need to leave behind the limiting, functionalist view – Latour’s
‘double-click information’. The more useful understanding of communication
is as a formative material practice – socially organised, culturally and historically
formed, politically charged. The material practices, technologies, institutions,
and actors involved in sense-making and its circulation contribute to the making
and on-going maintenance and re-making of social relations and social realities
rather than simply reflecting an always already existing world or expressing one
autonomous mind exchanging a message with other autonomous minds. Latour
(2003: 148) builds on this view of communication as formative, describing the
particular genre of ‘talking politically’ (banal, tautological and inclusive speech
not confined to elected politicians) as ‘lass[ooing] people into new relations’

and, indeed, ‘assembl[ing] a public’ ‘as a temporarily defined totality’.
Recent sustained instances of such political talk in Australia have seen an allied
mining lobby, Federal Opposition Leader, right-wing think tanks and media
personalities build anti-taxation publics for the defeat of a proposed ‘resource
super-profits tax’ and the repeal of a ‘carbon tax’ or emissions trading scheme
(Greenfield and Williams 2014). In contrast, spectacularly, multiple publics
formed for People’s Climate Marches in cities around the world before the
September 2014 United Nations-hosted summit to discuss carbon emissions.
This forming of publics required ‘talking politically’ on all kinds of scales and
through all kinds of means.
The integral role of communication in forming social groups and their
members means that communicating sustainability matters – because it
contributes to making what Gilbert has called ‘potent collectivities’ (2014).
In coining this phrase, Gilbert is talking more broadly of groups ‘capable of
actually getting things done together’, an envisaged social democratic answer
to late twentieth-century dismantling of public institutions organised around
rationales of social justice and equity.
There is a clear resemblance between Gilbert’s potent collectivities and
the sustainability citizenship envisaged by Dobson. Both eschew the hyper-
individualism, economism and competitive ethos they commonly diagnose as
shaping the twenty-first century. Both see values of reciprocity and cooperation
as desirable and as actually existing in historical and current practices. Both
direct us to an integrative form of agency for creating sustainable futures for the
planet, its peoples and wider species. Both writers envisage effective agency in an
inclusive democracy. Agency to deal with collective problems requires decisions
and actions by many people, not just leaders. Similarly, Stewart (2013: 15)
points to the failings of ‘network governance’ whereby scientists, economists,
environmentalists and politicians see people simply as ‘self-regarding, curious,
information rich, analysts like themselves [and not as] interest groups’ organising
democratically to deal with climate change.
But how does agency oriented to potent collectivities and sustainable
citizenship rise? Timothy Mitchell (2009), a recent chronicler of the complex
political, material, economic entanglements that have produced carbon
economies and carbon democracy, has asked: ‘How is it that at certain key times
people are able to build themselves into effective political forces that are able to
engage in processes of democratisation?’ (Mitchell in POMEPS 2012). In other
words, how do people build themselves into effective forces able to intervene
in current arrangements and shift those arrangements to environmentally
and socially sustainable ones? For our purposes, the question is: What makes
sustainability citizenship possible? How can it be brought into being?
There are practical examples of recruiting people to sustainability citizenship
(Van Poeck and Vandenabeele 2013). Eco-feminist critiques of ‘rational
economic man’ help by persuasively undoing the naturalisation of economic
actors through empirical examples of women’s care for others. Yet engendering
sustainability citizens cannot rest on a strategy of critique of rational economic
man and neoliberal consumerism as theoretical fallacies or policies found
wanting. This is the point made by Thompson (2011: 484–5) on the post global
financial crisis period:
in terms of reconstructing subjectivities [neoliberalism’s] legacy threatens

to linger for a long time yet. People will not give up the idea (and practice)
of ‘choice’ for instance …This has all been so thoroughly institutionalized
that it has become part of our accepted daily practice and common sense.
And, finally, neo-liberalism was in large part responsible for instilling a
long-term suspicion of politics and of politicians into the popular political
imagination…Thus, although the period of strict market fundamentalism
and market hegemony may be over, market discipline may not be so
readily dispatched. We live in a period of resigned, resentful and disaffected
consent to market disciplining, I suspect, and will continue to do so for a
long time yet.
If Thompson is right, the dispositions of rational self-interest that

sustainability citizenship needs to dislodge, to instate an agency turned towards
fairness (Dobson 2011: 10), are deeply ingrained and unlikely to simply fade as
the risks of financialised capitalism are laid bare – constituting a considerable
political challenge.
However, as Hay (2004) establishes, neoliberal doctrine is ‘rationalised’
or justified not by empirical evidence but through the circular means of
accepting its rationalist assumptions. The power of neoliberal argument lies
not in its descriptive adequacy but in the cascading, pervasive reiteration of its
inscriptions of the rational economic actor, the empowerment of individual
choice, the efficiency of the market, the desirability of global free trade and
capital mobility, and benefits for all of economic growth. These inscriptions
governing so much of public and private, formal and informal organisational
policy for the last four decades of accelerating consumption and exacerbating
fossil-fuel use are ‘mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable
with one another’ to use Latour’s terms (1990: 26, emphasis in the original).
Usable for many and varied audiences, Latour (1990: 24) argues that these
inscriptions have allowed ‘the mustering, the presentation, the increase, the
effective alignment, or ensuring the fidelity of new allies’. They have allowed
‘conscription’ (Latour 1990: 50). They are how ‘someone convinces someone
else to take up a statement, to pass it along, to make it more of a fact’ (Latour
1990: 24).
While this description of effectively rhetorical power might seem a detour,
it is made with the purpose of drawing attention to the materials and material
practices – habitual or calculated deployment of inscriptions, in all kinds of
media and all genres of communication – important to us here because they
enable politicians, environmentalists and other actors (working for or against

sustainability) to find credible allies and to conscript people to their policies.
Thus constituencies are formed and populations shaped. For example, the
population of ‘new economic subjects’ formed in late 1970s Argentina, as
individual consumers and investors shorn of the political orientations, language
of rights and class associations of their previous formation as workers (Fridman
2010: 275). In the case of Argentina, an explicit government ‘orientation and
education campaign’ complemented the development and circulation of financial

journalism (and accompanying regulatory and financial actions). Rather than an
inescapable fact of human nature, the utility maximising economic actor has
been assembled in neoliberal regimes by communicative techniques though
never without resistance nor uniformly effective.
Other examples of public formation predate the neoliberal period and run
counter to its doctrines. Amin and Thrift (2013: 24, 27) outline the concerted
efforts that produced the ‘welfare utopia’ of Swedish social democracy and
transformed a ‘conservative, rural, and fragmented society’ by relentlessly
engineering hope around a program of welfare universalism and by imagining
for this program a vanguard subject: ‘the responsible, disciplined, socialised,
and industrious worker – as the nemesis of the idle, superstitious, ignorant, and
wretched worker or peasant’.
The key points are that communicating sustainability needs to avoid
delivering initiatives in the limited terrains of free-market environmentalism
(Sairinen 2001) and ecological modernisation (Carvalho 2005); sustainability
citizenship and the potent collectivities it can entail are beyond the rational
economic actor and neoliberal policies targeting sectors as rational economic
actors; and historical lessons of large populations and publics are being formed
and equipped with those traits called for in sustainability citizenship, such as
social justice and participatory democracy.
Thus, I make the case for the integral role that communicative work has to
play in assembling the kinds of publics and underpinning citizenries required
for ecologically sustainable futures. A variety of examples follows showing
the responsibility of the communication professions and those who educate
them. They are prefaced by some further remarks about how communicated
rationalities lie at the heart of agency.
Communicative work for sustainability citizens

Sustainability citizenship, as outlined by Dobson (2011), has been envisaged
as a kind of ecological civic republicanism, augmented by a cosmopolitanism
that takes citizenship beyond national territorial borders and a feminism that
stretches citizenship into the ‘private’ domains of personal life and household
care and labour. It is an active participatory citizenship, marked by pro-
sustainability behaviour and ‘driven by a belief in fairness of the distribution of
environmental goods’ (Dobson 2011: 10).
Barry (2006: 27) elaborates the significance of drawing on the civic

republicanism tradition, establishing that citizenship is something to be learned,
‘rather than something that comes naturally to members of society’. This is
not far from Hindess’ salutary reminder that ‘[c]itizenship has always been a
matter of being governed, at least as much as it has been one of participating in
the work of governing’ (2004: 314) – especially if we understand ‘government’
in the older, broader sense of a ubiquitous and formative shaping of the
conduct of each and all (instead of the now dominant and narrow liberal sense
of government as top-down rule of free-standing individuals through agencies
of the state).
For the kind of agency envisaged in sustainability citizenship, one which
is not simply virtuous about energy use and recycling but results in ‘the co-
creation of sustainability policy’ (Dobson 2011: 10), people need to ‘learn’
or acquire rationalities which enable their own sense-making activity around
urban sustainability. It is only by using the rationalities or material discursive
resources available to them that people can assess their situations, formulate
their interests, take decisions and, depending on the forms of action available
to them, conduct themselves in particular ways, say to produce sustainability.
A ‘rationalities approach’ breaks with the portfolio or rational choice model
of agency to assume that rationalities are not underpinned by a universal
and singular rationality or reason, thus foregrounding the importance of the
discursive means available to actors (Hindess 1989).
What rationalities concerning sustainability are available to people and in wide
circulation? In the case of Australia, the 2007 federal ‘climate change’ election,
in which environmental concerns were key political polling issues, helped
shape the available frameworks with consequences that are still being reaped. A
near year-long campaign delivered months of media attention to sustainability
questions, relaying to audiences, day after day, the diverse and contesting sets of
assumptions and techniques involved in ecological ‘governing’ (Sairinen 2001;
Carvalho 2005). Party political and loosely allied actors put concerted effort into
the formative and re-formative work of persuading, shaping and guiding the
dispositions of the national population.
The ecological rationalities on constant show and offer, as it were, for this
population to acquire and use, were, first, a Prime Minister’s free-market
environmentalism – a reluctant and strategic admission of climate change, policy
instruments which inhibited market efficient behaviour as little as possible and
a wholly economically defined sustainability; second, the Opposition Leader’s
ecological modernisation – a wholehearted acknowledgment of climate change,
a preference for market facilitated remedies and an assumption of ‘win-win’
scenarios where environmental problems become economic opportunities
through techno-scientific solutions; third, the minor party of the Australian
Greens’ low-growth ecological sustainability – adopting broad ecological and
social justice priorities and a commitment to major change; and fourth, various
politicians’, lobbyists’ and commentators’ climate change denial.
While that election returned an Australian Labor Party Government

determined to fight climate change on ecological modernising grounds, free-
market environmentalism had been established as a familiar rationality. It was
easy to mobilise thereafter in order to make sense of the only kind of change to
current arrangements able to be countenanced, change of the most limited kind
and commitment to environmental priorities. But free-market environmental
rationality doesn’t hold the floor alone. It is constantly ‘answering back’ to
ecological modernisation, while the consensual, integrative nature of ecological

modernisation and its ‘win-win’ rhetoric displaces more radical environmental
discourses and mobilisations, such as low-growth ecological sustainability
(Carvalho 2005: 10). The more specific messages of communication campaigns
around sustainability issues need to be located within these contestations to
guard against the tactical mistake of assuming that what ‘sustainability’ means
is a settled matter.
Seeing the agency of sustainability citizenship in terms of an acquired
rationality, a rationality presented and circulating always within a contested
field of making sense and formulating interests, shifts us some distance from
conceiving of communicating sustainability as a functional challenge of getting
a message through to more, or less, rational citizens. Communication seen
as sense making and constitutive is as much about the formation of interests,
problems and policies (at the personal and household and informal level as well
as at the formal, organisational and public policy level) as it is about informing
audiences about interests, problems and policies.
This perspective requires that we pay attention to the materiality and
weight of the cultural practices and inscriptions within which certain forms
of behaviour make sense, are thinkable or unthinkable. Cottle (2009: 509), for
instance, has studied the use of a visual environmental rhetoric across the news
landscape: ‘visually arresting’ images of the globe connoting a shared planet and
providing resources for the formation of a cosmopolitan citizenship. And Carter
(n. d.) has considered the ‘great democratic resource [that] public space offers’
with plans for a London-based sculpture ‘Hamlet’s Mill’ that incorporates an
explicit strategy of communication that ‘renders human … terrifying facts and
transforms them into sources of collective energy and civic purpose’.
Described in Potter and Oster (2008), the strategy behind Hamlet’s Mill is
calculated to bring into being a public for sustainability. Two floats or buoys
would ride the waters of the Thames, deriving data from local, regional and
global sea-level change monitoring agencies. Hamlet’s Mill would, thereby,
provide a visualisation of scientific data, complemented by an interactive
website for exchange of information and views about climate change. Even
though not yet realised, Carter’s design is notable for its calculated contribution
to forming a public, rather than privatised, agency. While addressing individuals,
it proposes an orientation of individuals to public matters, rather than to simply
privatised, domestic consumer or lifestyle concerns. Furthermore, rather than
presenting climate change as something ‘out there’, in a separate natural world,
to be represented to us, rising sea levels of warming oceans are shown as matters
of concern in which we are already entangled.
Another example, FutureBristol, is an interactive website that allows users to
explore participative scenarios for decarbonising Bristol (UK). Research into the
city’s carbon management underpinned and generated ‘two broadly consensual
narrative “visions” for the Bristol city region in 2050’, one emphasising ‘global
connectivity, economic growth, and technology’, the other ‘relocalisation, self-
sufficiency, and resilience’ (Bailey 2012). The visualisations of the two future
Bristols allows users to click on various aspects, such as buildings, spaces and
transport, to read how they might operate in 2050 and with what benefits and
what problems. Users are invited to comment and vote on these aspects. A linked
site provides all users’ comments and aggregated votes and the opportunity to
submit ideas.
Interactive digital sites like FutureBristol demonstrate a ‘turn to experience’
in communication sustainability (Bendor 2013: 185). Bendor (2013: 120)
attributes the persuasiveness of interactive environments to ‘the procedural
coupling of the digital environment to its “source” world, and the availability
of user actions within the digital environment’. Different techniques produce
different effects of meaning: a bird’s-eye-view helps the user produce analytical
meaning while an immersive technique – situating users within the streets,
parks and factories – helps produce meaning that resonates with users’ personal
experiences (Bendor 2013: 173). His ‘procedural rhetoric’ approach – much
like the argument of this chapter – treats media not as ‘tools for environmental
citizenship’ but as ‘mediations of environmental citizenship’ (Bendor 2013: 35,
120).
But whatever the medium or genre of communication – ubiquitous news
through all channels, electoral campaigning and coverage, public art or online
interactive sites – the abiding condition that the communicator must grapple
with is what audiences will make of what is being communicated. This is not
a matter of general psychology but of being well versed in the various, often
incommensurable, rationalities about sustainability that a particular audience
on a particular occasion is likely to utilise. This must be part of knowing how
to address particular audiences in ways that get their attention and with the
‘affective force’ (Hawkins 2012: 539) needed to lasso them up into a public for
sustainability.
Earlier in the chapter, I quoted Latour on ‘talking politically’. Communicating
urban sustainability requires all those concerned with making sustainable
futures to engage in ‘political talk’, relentlessly and in the strategic ways
indicated above. Communication is political because it is world making.
Communication plays a formative role in the dispositions, policies and actions
that produce environmental degradation, and the use of its rhetorical power will
play a formative role in any measures to secure sustainability. Communicating
urban sustainability needs to have much in common with ‘arts of the political’
– with their ‘ability to generate publics, bring them together, and make them
see and long for a different future’ and ‘[the ability] to produce atmospheres of
momentum and commitment’ (Amin and Thrift 2013: 10–11). Those tasked
with, and those interested in, communicating sustainability – not only formally
and concertedly (the environment reporter, the sustainability officer, the media
adviser) but also informally and incidentally (the neighbour, the friend, the
shopper) – will all need to be engaged in this political labour. In this way citizens
imbued with a full, rather than straitened, sense of sustainability can be made.
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15
The learning city for
sustainability
Bruce Wilson
A crucial dimension of sustainability citizenship is the tension between the

individual and the collective, on the one hand, and between the role of the state
and citizen initiative, on the other. It was suggested at the outset of this volume
(in Chapter 1) that action to achieve sustainability depends heavily on individual
agency yet also reflects the importance of collective impact. While neoliberalism
has undermined the leadership of governments, global intergovernmental
treaty-making is a central focus of the campaign to address climate change.
While more and more people are living in urban settings, the diversity of
cities, and their relationships with their surrounding regions, is very significant.
The mega-cities with tens of millions of inhabitants are very different from the
typical city-region with under one million, or perhaps only tens of thousands,
of citizens. Yet in all types of cities, local communities continue to thrive and
provide a place-based focus for citizens, in their connections with schools, local
businesses and neighbourhood associations. In this context, local government
becomes the focus of action. Many local authorities have been at the frontline
of confronting the difficulties of urban life, and have recognised the importance
of mobilising members of their community in shared learning, as a means of
addressing those challenges. Under the rubric of ‘learning cities’, local authorities
can contribute significantly to the growth of sustainability citizenship.
This chapter reflects these tensions in exploring the relevance of
collaborative learning in urban contexts, and the importance of collaborative
learning in developing citizens’ individual and shared engagement in place-
based development. More specifically, it explores the potential contribution of
the ‘learning city’ to the practices and ideas of sustainability citizenship. What
do the ‘methodologies’ of learning cities add to the approaches for enabling
sustainability citizenship? What various existing and likely outcomes can be
The learning city for sustainability 177
identified? How do learning cities facilitate and encourage citizens to participate

in urban sustainability, as an integral part of wider economic, cultural and
political processes?
Learning and place

In an age characterised by the importance of knowledge (as in ‘knowledge
economies’), it is not surprising that high priority is placed on ‘learning’ as

an integral aspect of policies addressing many different kinds of issues. The
meaning of this learning, however, has not always been clear, nor how the
impact of learning might be recognised or experienced. There are different
views about the relative importance of cognitive and non-cognitive knowledge,
and the balance between formal and informal learning. Yet underlying the
ambiguity about structures and processes, institutions and competence, there is
widespread acceptance that enhancing the capability of citizens has had import
not only for them as individuals but also for broader collective engagement with
politics, economy, culture and environment.
Over the past twenty years, there have been various initiatives that link this
broad idea of learning with place: the learning ‘community’, ‘region’ and, of
course, ‘city’. Promoted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), in the 1990s in particular, with its program on Learning
Regions, the link with place became a means to articulating governance and
accountability, focus and process, program and participation that gave shape to
the power of learning to bring about change, even transformation. In the case
of the OECD, this was seen to be a valuable strategy for enabling a region to
regenerate itself in the wake of industrial decline, or similar crisis.
After 20 years of experience, and continued evolution of the knowledge
economy, the learning city idea has a number of threads that overlap with
and add value to urban sustainability, and to the development of sustainability
citizenship. Typically, the learning city has been inclusive, linked with social
justice and understood as being an integral part of a longer-term change strategy.
It encapsulates opportunities for individuals to gain relevant knowledge and
skills, but also to engage actively with others on specific campaigns for change.
The emphasis on learning matters because it promotes both individual capacity
and collective power to understand challenges and develop new forms of
intervention that can improve people’s lives.
‘Learning’ in cities
While Osborne et al. (2013) suggest that the idea of the learning city can be traced
through the centuries, its more contemporary manifestation appeared with the
work of Hutchins (1970), in his ‘learning society’. He observed that as the rate
of growth in knowledge increased, formal educational institutions would be
unable to keep up, so that learning would become a much more comprehensive
178 Bruce Wilson
and ongoing societal responsibility. This gained institutional support when the
United Nations Organisation for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO)
published, in 1972, the Faure Report – Learning to Be: The World of Education
Today and Tomorrow. This and the subsequent UNESCO Report, Learning: The
Treasure Within (Delors 1996), not only promoted the importance of ‘lifelong
learning’, but also proposed that all organisations shared the responsibility for
offering many, varied opportunities for learning:
more collaboration and partnerships, with families, industry and businesses,

voluntary associations and people active in cultural life are needed. In
order to build a learning society and make lifelong learning a reality, it is
important to embrace and connect all learning stages, types and places.
(Osborne et al. 2013: 410)
In practice, these partnerships occur in more geographically bounded settings:

community, region or city. In the 1990s, alongside UNESCO, the OECD and
then the European Union (EU) would link learning with place. The OECD
interest has taken various iterations, beginning with work led by the Centre
for Educational Research and Innovation on lifelong learning and learning
regions, which culminated in a conference in Melbourne, in 2002, followed
by the Institute for Management of Higher Learning, which conducted three
iterations of its ‘Higher education in regional and city development’ project,
exploring how universities contribute to regional development (EDUIMHE
2005–2012). More recently, Public Governance and Territorial Development
has detailed analyses suggesting that regions should support their own growth,
seeing human capability and learning as a key part of this strategy (OECD 2009).
The EU, in turn, has sponsored a series of projects such as TELS (Towards a
European Learning Society, 1998–2001), PALLACE (Promoting Active Lifelong
Learning Links between Australia, Canada, China and Europe, 2003–2005)
and LILARA (Learning in Local and Regional Authorities, 2005–2007), each
exploring how inter-organisational and individual learning in place occurs,
and trying to understand the kinds of leadership, infrastructure and resources
necessary to deliver the anticipated benefits. These programs have encouraged
learning cities to share their experience and to articulate the techniques,
instruments and arrangements that have been helpful. These projects developed
relatively prescriptive guidelines for local (city-regional) authorities in relation
to structures and responsibilities that would encourage agencies to promote
plans, develop strategies, collaborate and evaluate learning initiatives. Typically,
such initiatives went beyond educational institutions, say to encompass work-
based activity, professional development, or community-based events, such as
learning ‘festivals’ (Longworth 2006).
Continuing interest in the importance of knowledge and the opportunities
arising from new technologies has driven innovative initiatives, sometimes
more specifically focused than the broader emphasis on lifelong learning.
Considerable work has focused on the application of learning processes of

one kind or another in pursuit of solving major urban and regional problems
(Duke et al. 2013). In Europe in particular, the concept of ‘smart’ cities has
become common. The recent ‘Initiative on Smart Cities’ is aiming at using new
technologies to better implement more efficient energy and transport systems
and, not surprisingly perhaps, IBM registered ‘smarter cities’ as a trademark in
2011 (Söderström et al. 2014).
The various threads in perspectives on learning processes and place have

been brought together recently by Tim Campbell. Drawing on a range of case
studies, Campbell has summarised much of the thinking about learning in an
organisational, city and regional context. He draws the clear conclusion that
cities where collective learning occurs effectively benefit from a planned and
institutionalised approach, which supports collaborative spaces and networks.
He explores varying learning styles developed in different cities and how they
have emerged under specific conditions. The intent of Campbell (2012: 183)
was:
to bring this learning side of urban development into the open …

Proactive learning cities have a much thicker and better-connected
institutional character. Gathering and managing new knowledge in this
way is an important aspect of urban development which has been largely
overlooked.
He concluded that, while new technologies are deeply enabling in terms

of their capacity to understand city-region processes, effective city-regional
learning depends on a social milieu that facilitates cross-sector networking and
collaboration.
Over the decades, various cities have designated themselves as ‘Learning
Cities’, initially in Europe and more recently in Asia. An interesting aspect of
this phenomenon has been the growth and apparent decline in many European
Learning Cities, as more than 50 cities that had described themselves as
learning cities no longer did so a decade later (Yarnit 2011). However, national
government support in Korea has prompted more than 100 cities to identify as
Learning Cities, while there is strong interest in Japan, Taiwan and China (Han
and Makino 2013). Further initiatives have emerged in Africa and Latin America
(Osborne et al. 2013).
Several international organisations came together to host a conference on
local communities, learning and sustainability in Hong Kong in November
2013. Here it was acknowledged that to ‘solve huge fast-changing needs and
problems’ not only would government agencies need to collaborate but also
they would need to incorporate:
the efforts of active citizens as partners and co-producers of knowledge

and solutions … Indeed, grasping the meaning of ‘learning city’, as a
180 Bruce Wilson
place that itself learns and gets better at problem-solving and governance –
that can learn from its own and others’ experience and then do better
– is a challenge that we seem for ever to avoid. So often, learning city
or neighbourhood means no more than a place where different kinds of
supported learning are encouraged and supported … We may hope to
subsume this and go beyond it, in Cities Learning Together.
(Duke 2013: 8, 11)
The different approaches to learning city development in Europe and Asia

prompted fruitful exchange not only about learning city strategies in different
kinds of urban contexts, but also about the similarity of the approaches
promoted as ‘green cities’, or the World Health Organisation’s ‘healthy cities’.
It seemed that a comprehensive approach to learning and urban sustainability
would resonate with cities with varied agendas in all parts of the world (Kearns
2013). Another important conversation explored the importance of non-
formal (structured) learning and ‘informal’ learning. In Laos, for example,
non-formal education is an important part of public policy for improving
economic and social capability, while informal experiential learning is a central
part of adult education throughout Asia and Pacific countries (Duke and
Hinzen 2014).
UNESCO and the Learning City

The discussions in Hong Kong followed a major intergovernmental conference
convened by UNESCO in Beijing in October 2013, entitled the first
International Conference on Learning Cities. Attending the conference were
more than 550 delegates from 102 countries, including mayors, city education
executives, education experts and representatives of UN agencies, regional
organisations, non-governmental associations and international corporations.
The conference was the outcome of work by the UNESCO Institute of Lifelong
Learning (UIL). UIL (2014) reported the conference aim as ‘to mobilize cities
to promote lifelong learning for all as a vector of equality and social justice,
social cohesion and sustainable prosperity’ with the objectives of adopting
‘the Beijing Declaration on Building Learning Cities and the Key Features of
Learning Cities’ as well as the ‘exchange of best practices in building learning
cities in the international community’.
Furthermore, UIL aimed to build an international network along with clear
measures of the benefits of learning city strategies. The conference adopted the
Beijing Declaration on Building Learning Cities to record commitments to
build learning cities made by conference delegates. UIL (2014: 13) also saw the
conference as:
a reference point, and a clarion call to develop fully fledged learning cities.
It calls upon city authorities to promote inclusive learning; to facilitate
family, community, and workplace learning; to extend the use of learning

technologies; to enhance learning quality; and to foster a lifelong learning
culture to transform the cities into more inclusive and sustainable
communities.
The Declaration included a definition of the ‘learning city’ that called on ‘all
sectors’ to support inclusive education for all, build excellence and foster a
culture of learning to ‘create and reinforce individual empowerment and social

cohesion, economic and cultural prosperity, and sustainable development’ (UIL
2014: 27).
The Conference adopted a statement on ‘Key Features of Learning Cities’,
described as a tool to assist cities in identifying appropriate strategies, measuring
progress, and facilitating sharing amongst cities in the network. The features
were represented visually as a version of the UNESCO logo, and encompassed
the ‘broad benefits’ of sustainable development by empowering citizens, gaining
social cohesion, and matching economic growth with ‘cultural prosperity’;
‘conditions’ of will, commitment, inclusion, and resource mobilisation; using
the ‘building blocks’ of lifelong learning across educational systems, workplaces,
within family and neighbourhood, using contemporary learning technology,
developing learning cultures (UIL 2014: 28).
The emphasis on measurement is very clear, with many examples where
city data (on GDP per capita, for example) would be available readily. Other
measures depend on survey data or experts’ review, which may not be quite
so readily available. Nevertheless, UIL continued to develop the network with
a second International Conference on Learning Cities in Mexico City (28–30
September 2015: GNLC 2015).
Learning: how and, for whom?

Despite such formal and weighty international promotion, it is apparent that the
effort to encourage the adoption of Learning City features and to measure their
impact does not have universal support. Both the key concepts, ‘learning’ and
‘place’ have been called into question. Some difficulties arise in relation to the
language used to discuss learning in cities.
Rutten and Boekema (2012) draw attention to a number of these questions
in their introduction to a special issue of Regional Studies. They argue that the
early promise that the concept of ‘learning regions’ might support a useful
theory of regional development has been undermined by an ongoing confusion
between its use as a policy program and as an analytical research concept. These
difficulties have been exacerbated by a fundamental shift in the nature of the
‘knowledge economy’ between the early 1990s and the circumstances in which
we now find ourselves, typified by integrated web-based communication, and
economic liberalisation which underpin a more complex relationship between
‘place’ and global economic, social and cultural processes.
182 Bruce Wilson
Drawing on other papers in the special issue, Rutten and Boekema offer four
insights into how the idea of the learning ‘city-region’ might be rethought. First,
they note the fuzziness arising from two divergent views on the learning region,
either as a new form of regional innovation policy, which forges linkages to
share local knowledge so as to drive innovation; or, as a focus on research on
the workings of regional innovation networks of firms and knowledge centres:
Both views of the learning region share a focus on intra-regional learning

as the principal means of developing innovations from indigenous
knowledge in order to strengthen competitiveness. However, the existence
of two different views on the learning region has prevented consensus-
building on the seemingly innocent question: what is a learning region?
(Rutten and Boekema 2012: 985)
Furthermore, one might ask, with an emphasis on ‘city’: what is a learning

city-region?
Second, the challenge of industry restructuring in Western Europe and
North America led to regional innovation policy aimed at building improved
knowledge-based economic performance. Policy development was supported
by case studies of regions in which knowledge and learning had been exploited
successfully. Rutten and Boekema argue that the focus on case studies provided
evidence that learning networks were embedded in cities and regions that
experienced productive change, leading to the unwarranted presumption that
certain learning practices would inevitably generate that kind of change in other
places. However, this neglected other forces, the importance of context, and of
global connections including knowledge exchange.
Third, previous explanations had suggested that the importance of regional
learning lay in its emphasis on localised assets and interpersonal networks in
close proximity that enabled informal sharing of ‘tacit’ knowledge. However,
Rutten and Boekema suggest that regional learning might or might not
develop specifically within a geographic area, given the growing significance of
communication technologies.
Fourth, even though much of the learning city-regions work has emphasised
the importance of shared values and cultural practices, Rutten and Boekema
suggest that actions and interactions, how they are structured and power is
exercised, should be the focus of consideration, rather than place alone. Yet
they still recognise that place (space) will continue to shape economic and social
relations.
Put simply, the Rutten–Boekema critique acknowledges the importance of
both learning and place, but argues that the ambiguity in both concepts has
undermined both our understanding of the critical elements of learning cities,
and the capacity to make good policy. Indeed, the rush to promulgate policy to
solve problems, and to adopt the ‘feel-good’ language of learning, has impeded
the effectiveness of both analysis and action. To be useful, initiatives to promote
learning cities need to be as specific as possible about their purposes, processes

and governance. Clearly, the development of sustainability citizenship can be
assisted where learning cities are inclusive, encouraging individuals to pursue
knowledge and skills which strengthen their collaboration with others, and
engagement in community decision-making. Equally, sustainability citizenship
can offer learning cities a specificity of purpose, and point to suitable measures
of their outcomes.
Participatory processes and conflict in interests

This examination of contemporary thinking about the idea of learning cities
does suggest that urban sustainability will benefit from widespread adoption by
local (city-regional) government authorities of the intent and principles outlined
by UNESCO. Sustainability citizens will constantly face new circumstances
that require different insights and capacity for application of learning, both as
individuals and collectively.
Yet the scale and diversity of urban settings mean that implementing the
principles and resources proposed by UNESCO will be a significant challenge.
Remarkable things are happening in this respect. In some of the larger Chinese
cities, the ambition is to create street-level structures to support shared learning,
and mobilisation of citizens around specific issues. Online resources now
abound on all kinds of topics, dramatically increasing access to information and
enhancing opportunities for communication within and across communities,
in linked or scattered places (Kearns et al. 2013). Other chapters in this book
explore opportunities for new forms of organising and for communication that
contribute to sustainability citizenship.
The learning city agenda will provide opportunities for people to learn
more about participatory processes that can engage citizens from different
starting points, with varied interests and personal capacity. Wonderful activities,
such as bilingual storytelling in public libraries, are engaging people whose
previous experience of structured learning might have been very limited, even
dysfunctional. These activities not only add to the quality of early learning for
children, but also enable their parents or adult carers to find ways of engaging
with other members of their local community and even reconnect themselves
with formal learning processes. Tammy Wong Hulbert shows, in Chapter 16,
how art can be used to encourage a community focus on householders growing
food; and Ferne Edwards shows, in Chapter 4, other kinds of public and private
initiatives for self-provisioning. Indeed, all kinds of circumstances can prompt
individuals and communities to take on new challenges, build capability and
enhance sustainable outcomes for their ‘place’.
Yet learning projects or initiatives can be difficult to maintain over extended
periods of time. Competing demands on either people’s time or on public
resources means that both authorities and individuals make choices which
undermine or even inhibit learning, especially that which builds collaborative
184 Bruce Wilson
commitment around local issues. Jones (2013) has drawn attention

particularly to organisational circumstances in which inequalities of power and
discrimination impede rational policy formation and implementation. While
her analysis focuses particularly on local government, its implications clearly
extend to other settings, especially those which involve marketised processes
now found in so many areas of business, community and employment services.
Dobson (2011: 13) has asked a question which could well be directed to local
government:
Is it the hands-tied agent of the market’s bidding, or is it the catalyst for

democratic change originating in civil society? Sustainability citizenship
invites government to recover its nerve, to govern once again, to engage
citizens in the cut-and-thrust of ethical and normative debate, to resist the
temptation to bypass politics in the name of an easy life.
Similar questions can be asked of other key resources for learning city
development, such as universities. Many face the growing challenges of funding
both their student learning programs and research. They are more and more
focused on the business foundation of their activities with only limited scope
for partnership and collaboration with communities and networks struggling
for resources (Duke et al. 2013).
Indeed, when increased social polarisation and division is affecting so many
countries in Europe, and other OECD members, some might question whether
the learning city idea has any potential at all, given its apparent reliance on
shared good will and common interests. Does this apply also to sustainability
citizenship? Part of a positive response to this question can be found in the
work with community learning in countries as diverse as Colombia, Poland and
South Africa, where adult learning programs are confronting the challenge of
building people’s confidence. These initiatives build on people’s tangible and
intangible resources and focus on learning that develops the agency of people
themselves as a means of gaining power, rather than waiting for others to offer
opportunities.
In enabling people to gain this kind of awareness about themselves and their
circumstances, two key questions arise: Who makes the decisions around here?
In whose interests are those decisions made? Unless these questions are asked, it
becomes very difficult for people living in poverty or discrimination to recognise
and engage with the economic, social and political processes and structures
which lead to continued inequality and marginalisation. The politics, formalities
and resource issues associated with local government scarcely lend themselves
to encouraging citizens to ask those two core questions, about decision-making
and interests, at the heart of building local confidence and collective agency.
This suggests that the idea of sustainability citizenship has something to offer
to the learning city idea. Whereas sustainability citizenship has quite specifically
grown from citizen learning and action, responsibility for learning city-regional
development is typically ascribed to local government authorities. This suggests

a deep contradiction in the assumptions underpinning the principles and
processes of learning cities. The practice, in many parts of the world, has indeed
been for local government to play a critical role in identifying the potential
and establishing the foundations for the vision-setting, the governance and
the resourcing which are necessary for extending the scope of learning beyond
educational agencies to encompass other stakeholders and citizens. Yet perhaps
also, the very formality and institutional restraint of local government also
precludes the phase of development where citizens begin to engage with issues
and processes disrupting established power relations.
This returns us to the ambiguity of language exposed by Rutten and Boekema
(2012). The learning valued by proponents of learning cities does indeed
encompass acquisition of new knowledge, not only that of formal curricula, but
also especially knowledge about local circumstances, individual and community
issues and challenges, economic and cultural processes, and how to bring about
change. It also presumes the skill of collaboration, of knowledge in practice that
can effect change of one kind of another. The kind of learning which enhances
these outcomes is not only formal, for credit, but also non-formal and informal,
in support of collective as well as individual action. Local government authorities
can take this only so far (Jones 2013).
Conclusion
In conclusion, it seems that the idea of learning cities has much to offer urban
sustainability. Its emphasis on a comprehensive approach to learning and on
collaborative processes is central to building the kind of participatory capability
on which sustainability citizenship will depend. At the same time, the current
elaboration of international policy and promotion of learning cities, with its
heavy dependence on local government, suggests it can take the process of
developing urban sustainability only so far. Local government does indeed have
an important role to play, but at some stage, the community-driven agenda of
sustainability citizenship has to take the participatory process to a further stage,
and engage with difficult questions about power and interests.
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16
Curating the city
Encouraging sustainability
Tammy Wong Hulbert
The Flavours of Glenroy (FoG) project (2014) in the suburb of Glenroy (Victoria,
Australia) shows how contemporary artists can work with communities to
encourage sustainable citizenship. FoG brought people together through art and
gardening to provide a platform for enhancing communication and encouraging
recognition of collective cultural habits. Through mobile garden spaces that
presented and connected themes of nature, society and community, the project
provided an expressive and reflective space for locals. Increased community
connectivity is necessary for sustainable urban cultural development, providing
ways for empowering individuals through gaining meaningful connections to
local people and places.
Approaches to enabling communities

Generally, there are two favoured approaches to cultural development in the
suburbs of Australian cities with contrasting emphases on ‘hard’ and ‘soft’
infrastructure. The first focuses on investment in hard infrastructure, such as
building arts centres, to attract participants and audiences to these locations. This
approach is often employed by local and state government authorities to provide
physical evidence of community involvement through the built environment.
The second approach concentrates more on building the capacity of the local
community or soft infrastructure. This chapter focuses on the benefits of
this second approach and how building soft arts infrastructure can contribute
sustainability citizenship. FoG was a pilot project of the larger Artists Incubator:
Glenroy (2014–2015) research framework, still in development. FoG showed
how cultural enablers contribute to embedding a sense of empowerment crucial
to a broader spirit of sustainability citizenship.
188 Tammy Wong Hulbert
Figure 16.1 Mobile Edible Gardens developed for the Flavours of Glenroy project
(May 2015)
The FoG visual arts project aimed to find common ground with the Glenroy
community through a platform for community connection around the theme
of growing food (see Figure 16.1). The project has shown the relationship
between contemporary visual arts and suburban environments and how a ‘soft
infrastructure’, a collaborative community approach to the artistic process,
can encourage the vital skills necessary for navigating a more globalised
and intercultural urban society. By implication, sustainability citizenship is
encouraged and modelled in these arts-enabling contexts.
Access to culture, including the arts, is an urban human right; in 2010, the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO
2010: para. 1) stated that the ‘World Charter for Human Rights to the City’
– inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s (1968) Le Droit a la Ville (The right to the
city) – would ‘contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of poverty,
sustainable development and intercultural dialogue through education, the
sciences, culture, communication and information … fostering cultural
diversity, intercultural dialogue and a culture of peace’. This charter led to the
formation of the United Nations and Local Government organisation for cities.
This framework developed an action plan for a sustainable urban development,
‘Agenda 21’, with a particular focus on the role of culture in cities in Chicago
April 2010 leading on to culture as the ‘fourth pillar’ of sustainable development
(UCLG 2010). To promote the cultural rights identified in this UN charter, the
FoG (2014) project purposively created access to an arts project in a suburban
environment not usually associated with arts and cultural activity.
Curating the city 189
The ‘Artists Incubator: Glenroy’ research framework aimed to investigate

ways in which suburban public-based artistic activity – here principally focused
in the ‘North of Bell Street’ precinct of Melbourne – could impact on community
relationships. This area is traditionally considered the northern periphery of
the city. Bell Street runs through diverse suburbs, including Pascoe Vale South,
Coburg, Preston, Heidelberg West and Heidelberg Heights. Pentridge Prison
(1850–1997), which housed short- and long-term prisoners, was located near
Bell Street in Coburg, so the area developed a dangerous reputation. Since

Pentridge’s closure, some of its grounds have been redeveloped for housing
as the population of Coburg and the rest of the northern suburbs has steadily
grown.
The project research focused on exploring and assessing how locating
artists to work with a targeted community could lead to the formation of
new relationships, creative goals and, perhaps, a rethinking of perceptions of
neighbourhood. Shane Hulbert and the author of this chapter, Tammy Wong
Hulbert, both researchers in the RMIT University Centre for Art, Society
and Transformation, initiated this project in partnership with Moreland City
Council (MCC), the local government authority.
The FoG project employed action research methods appropriate for art
practitioner–researchers situating their research in and with a suburban
community. Here action research consisted of a reflective ‘processes of inquiry
… based on … professional practice’ (Stringer 2007: xv) following Australian
academic Ernest T. Stringer, who advocates an appropriate and critical analytical
method for practitioners to understand the complex processes of working with
community groups. The action research was conducted out of an artist-in-
residence incubating space established in partnership with MCC in the Glenroy
community’s Wheatsheaf Hub. Funding supported a small team of artists to
work in the studio for six months to develop art projects that engaged the local
community and focused on public outcomes.
The Flavours of Glenroy project

Glenroy, 13 km north of Melbourne’s central business district, was once
a farming community. This limited early settlement is evidenced by the few
remaining heritage listed grand Victorian dwellings. Between the wars, there
was little activity in the area. By the end of World War II it was re-imagined
as a postwar suburb, particularly as a site for housing returned soldiers and
their growing families. Today, Glenroy is a culturally diverse dormitory suburb
lacking meaningful arts activity and, perhaps, could even be considered a
culturally dormant suburb.
FoG used food, and the process of growing food, as a central unifying
theme with a community-based, participatory Mobile Edible Garden (MEG)
installation – see Figure 16.2 – in the bustling Glenroy Post Office Place
shopping site to explore ways in which a socially engaged art project might
Figure 16.2 Tammy Wong Hulbert setting up gardens for the event (May 2015)
activate relationships across multiple local groups. The MEGs were designed to
enhance communication and a sense of urban sustainability in an increasingly
dense city, necessary for empowering community members with skills for
dealing with future population growth.
Edible plants and gardening attracted wide appeal. Edible plants encouraged
locals to reflect on where their food originated. The collaborating team built a
series of six transportable garden beds created from materials sourced from local
businesses in a strategy to build on local community relationships. The project
team partnered with the Glenroy branch of Scope, a national organisation
providing services for people with disabilities. Scope held gardening workshops
for participants to grow and prepare edible plants for use in the project.
The project held a one-day event in Glenroy in May 2015. An existing local
choir, the Glenroy Harmonisers, performed during the event and sang songs
with a gardening theme. Participation was sought from the passing public by
giving out edible plants in exchange for answering the question: ‘What will you
cook with these herbs?’ – an opening line for dialogue with locals discussing
their culinary and gardening interests (see Figure 16.3). Out of these dialogues,
we found that local residents enjoyed sharing their passion for private gardening
in a public environment. Local participants learned that regular gardening
showed that they were already engaged in sustainability citizenship practices
and that such activities had wider social implications for a sense of community
and social health.
Figure 16.3 Project team at Glenroy Post Office Place speaking to locals (Saturday
17 May 2015)
Many places within a place

The main outcome of this project was to bring the community together through
these re-imagined gardens acting as a central platform for dialoguing with local
people about culinary and gardening habits, normally a private endeavour. The
project allowed locals to voice diverse interests in tending their gardens and
reflect on contrasting cultural influences informed by social circles, migrations
and travel experiences (see Figure 16.4). The diversity of dialogue showed the
richness of global cultural influences within those kinds of Australian suburbs
that have been built up by subsequent waves of diverse migration from all parts
of the world – revealing Glenroy as ‘many places within a place’.
In considering the concept of place within a globalising urban society,
geographer Doreen Massey (2013: 156) suggests that the contemporary urban
place has a character that:
can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond. A

progressive sense of place would recognise that, without being threatened
by it. What we need, it seems to me, is a global sense of the local, a global
sense of place.
Massey analyses experiences of place, offering a lens to view Glenroy. Hybrid

cultural layers link Glenroy to global places beyond. A Glenroy outing may
consist of having lunch at the Vietnamese diner, shopping for groceries at the
Figure 16.4 After discussions with the FoG team, two participants leave with
edible plants
Assyrian ‘Hassoon’ market or even accidentally attending a Nepali ‘holi’ festival,

to experience the performance of a purportedly famous Nepalese rock star (as
did this author). These are the hybrid cultural layers, linking Glenroy to global
places beyond.
As an observing action-researcher-cum-urban-stroller, I found a
combination of diverse transcultural urban practices visible in Glenroy, some of
which I understood, some I did not, some were appealing, some unappealing.
As a child of immigrant Chinese parents, being in a space between cultures
is familiar territory. It can be simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable,
as one is constantly trying to read (and sometimes misreads) various contexts.
The context of this project gave me an opportunity to consider these complex
cultural aspects of the Australian suburbs.
Walking through the neighbourhood of Glenroy with a camera, I attempted
to capture the diverse visible cultural influences of the local surrounds as part
of a conscious process of forming the project in response to the local site. I
visited the Umm Hajar Hijab store in Post Office Place and was met by Dewi,
the owner, a migrant from Indonesia, who enthusiastically explained to me
the concept for her business – to represent the diverse international styles of
the hijab from the vast expanse of Islamic nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia,
Turkey, Lebanon and others throughout the Middle East. This encounter made
me consider our close physical proximity to Islamic nations in the Asian region,
juxtaposed to recent tensions between Australian non-Islamic and Islamic
communities, due to the discourse around terrorism and national security. In
Dewi’s store, a sign above the counter read ‘Eid Mubarak’, which she explained
was an Arabic greeting meaning ‘blessed eating’, a term used after fasting. I told
her about the FoG project and how it focused on the universal act of growing
and eating food and it was here, in the rituals of eating, that we found common
ground.
Socially engaged arts practices

The encounter of finding what is common rather than different aided in the
formation of the project’s central ambitions of developing conceptual themes
for the project that were universal – themes of eating and growing food – which
related to many people; working with local community groups to participate in
the development of the project and its public presentation, in order to enhance
communication between the artists and local people; and sourcing resources
locally when possible, to include local businesses and communities.
Geographer Chris Gibson (2006: 192) has observed that a successful
creative community is the product of a significant number of different levels
of artistic skill combined with access to affordable accommodation required
for living and working. This means that amateur and semi-amateur people are
able to combine work and artistic pursuits and even collaborate with the wider
community. Through arts projects, participants can build their creative and
artistic capacity.
We structured our project on a ‘socially engaged’ model of contemporary
art practice that has been influenced by different schools of thought, including
community art practices with underlying philosophies originating in the
1960s, reflecting new communal social attitudes orientated towards post-war
healing (Kelly 1984: 2) and the Situationist International, an organisation of
politicised avant-garde artists who used artistic forms to critique the impact of
capitalist activity in urban environments (Debord 1977). French curator Nicolas
Bourriaud (1998: 14–15) has become well known for his views on socially
engaged participatory practices and coined ‘relational aesthetics’ to refer to ‘an
art that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and
its social context’. We focused on making human interactions and connectivity
core to the work, providing us with a platform for the kinds of community
engagement necessary for creating a sense of urban sustainability.
Socially engaged contemporary art practices shift the emphasis away from the
material outcome (such as a painting or sculpture) and towards art processes as
the core activity. This transition reflects a shift from a modernist ideal towards
a contemporary practice that is concerned with original concepts, engagement
with individuals and a globalised cultural outlook. Terry Smith (2011: 8) claims
that contemporary art ‘comes from the whole world, and frequently tries to
imagine the world as a differentiated yet inevitably connected whole’ and that
diversity ‘is the key characteristic of contemporary art, as it is of contemporary
life, in the world today’. This differentiated yet holistic character and relational
approach to contemporary art practice makes it an appropriate vehicle for

community engagement, reflecting the globally connected and culturally diverse
nature of our suburban community art project.
Suburbs: urban laboratories

As action researchers, we considered the suburb of Glenroy as an ‘urban
laboratory’, following the early twentieth-century Chicago School of urban

sociologists who viewed targeted marginalised urban communities and sites as
‘laboratories’ for study (Hubbard 2006: 24). Furthermore, this approach was
consistent with the local government authority’s goal to engage new populations
and create a sense of identity of place that unified the different community
groups within the area.
In modernist Australia, suburbs were viewed as the space between city and
country, lacking their own identity. Today, re-purposed inner-city industrial
sites are being converted to houses for growing populations, evidence of a city
undergoing post-industrialisation. As a researcher interested in the urban as an
interconnected ecology, I have taken the perspective that the suburban should be
viewed as a part of the entire urban landscape, also subject to global conditions.
In Australia, the presentation of arts and cultural activity is predominantly
located in the geographical centres of cities, but cultural production is generally
elsewhere. As populations increase and the value of central urban space increases,
the location of culture is challenged and rethought. This is recognised in the
capital cities of Sydney and Melbourne, where there are strategies in place to
guide urban growth in non-central environments, leading to polycentric cities
containing several activity districts. Examples include the Creative City strategy
(City of Parramatta 2010) in Sydney’s west, the moving of the Powerhouse
Museum from Sydney’s central business district to Parramatta (ABC 2015), and
the Transit Cities Strategy (State Government of Victoria 2005) focusing on
Melbourne’s suburbs, such as Dandenong. These strategies highlight investment
in local arts and cultural infrastructure to stimulate more sustainability-engaged
communities, including art centres, artists’ studios and the commissioning of
public art projects. These planning initiatives focus on placing arts and cultural
activity in the suburbs, thus blurring the distinction between the central city
environment and the suburbs.
Such strategic planning in areas such as Parramatta and Dandenong indicate
that suburbs are still often seen as lacking cultural activity and as placeless
‘nowheres’. Public art initiatives attempt to plan and include cultural activities to
give suburban communities tools to strengthen local relationships. Art historian
Chris McCauliffe’s Art and Suburbia (1996) argues that the suburbs are a source
of reflection and expression for Australian artists, despite a traditional lack of
cultural infrastructure to support these activities. The suburbs have become part
of artists’ urban experiences, influencing their perception of cities. McCauliffe
captures a contradictory ‘love-hate’ relationship with the suburbs and proposes
that artists have moved beyond this tension in the way they depict suburbia in
their work.
Today, the focus is on a supportive environment where locals can proactively
participate in collaborative processes with local government support, as in
the Moreland City Council’s ‘Arts and Culture Strategy 2011–2016’ (MCC
2011), aimed at supporting the ‘capacity of the community to develop arts
and culture initiatives’ (MCC 2011: 4). This approach focuses on creating
‘soft infrastructure’ where the community is encouraged to initiate projects to

build cultural capacity. This process builds local relationships and encourages
reflection on identity as a community and as a community within communities.
Traditionally, the main physical structure of the suburbs is housing-
dominated, suggesting culture as an internal private endeavour. This structure
is inherited from the dominant modernist planning paradigm of an earlier
generation, lacking a provision for public expression except by add-ons. With
this in mind, our project focused on creating a public outcome beyond a specific
location, such as a gallery, but in the site itself. Lack of artistic infrastructure
creates opportunities for alternative strategies for artistic engagement.
This positioning is familiar territory to me, a witness to the emergence of
Beijing’s contemporary art community in the early 2000s, when Chinese artists
lacking institutional outlets created alternative conditions and locations for the
expression of art. This prompted them to consider site-specific public urban
projects. Recently, site-specific practices have become popular as a contemporary
public art strategy, a reaction against the modernist ‘plonk’ style public art,
dominating since the 1960s. Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another: Site Specific
Art and Locational Identity (2002, 8) proposes that artists use site-specific strategies
as a way of ‘belonging in transience’, a reflection of increased migration patterns
in globalising cities and a way for artists to take ownership and engage with sites
in which their relationship may be temporary and fleeting.
From ‘Australian Dream’ to the transnational suburb

Our project, indeed sustainability citizenship as a project, needed to grapple
with urban settings that incorporate the past as well as indications of the forming
of futures. Projects are always parts of wider processes.
Massey (2013, 137) argues for place to ‘be conceptualised as processes’,
implying ‘place’ as constantly in transition. Furthermore, in his award-winning
series The Glenroy Novels, Stephen Carroll (2001, the first in the series) depicted
inconspicuous Glenroy – where he grew up – as an example of a post-World War
II ‘Australian Dream’ suburb, describing its agricultural past and evolution into
a frontier suburb. Yet, by 2015 Glenroy had become an established suburb, no
longer considered a new growth area or on the fringe of the city, demonstrating
processes of transition.
At the same time, as a suburb of a capital city, Glenroy has been subject
to the demands of population growth. In a global network of capitalist cities,
Melbournians are increasingly subjected to the compression of time and space

(Harvey 1989). Planners have favoured urban density as a solution to alleviate
congestion caused by sprawling cities. Low-density apartments are quickly
replacing single dwellings on a quarter-acre block. A site formerly housing a
single family may now contain a ‘six pack’ of homes.
Middle and outer-ring suburbs have often been criticised as culturally
anonymous spaces, a legacy that survives from when architect Robin Boyd
wrote The Australian Ugliness (1960) critiquing the crudity of aesthetics of the
Australian suburbs. Instead, as we investigated Glenroy, we found a suburb
comprising a combination of cultural activities past and present, an accumulation
of layered cultural narratives, creating a uniquely Australian concept of place in
a globalising society. Discussions of cultural diversity in urban planning suggest
that the nature of any particular suburb has been dictated by the modernist
planning paradigm of English-speaking countries such as the UK, the US,
Australia and New Zealand.
Australian Leonie Sandercock, Professor of Urban Planning at the University
of British Columbia and author of Towards Cosmopolis (1998), analyses modernist
planning ideals as seeking to recreate cities under a new social order – distinct
from the immense political and military upheaval of the first half of the twentieth
century that left the city with hard infrastructure of an earlier generation with
gendered social values. Then, the central city was traditionally designated for
masculine ‘bread winning’ employment activities, and the suburbs as the realm
of the feminine, for care of the family. Sandercock argues that urban populations
of the twenty-first century are globally orientated and urban planning requires
radical rethinking to become more considerate of diverse community needs,
necessary for sustainable growth.
Seeing through an intercultural lens

As a society made up of subsequent waves of migration, Australian cities – like
so many in every part of the world today – have moved beyond a ‘multicultural’
society as the urban fabric becomes increasingly intercultural and interracial.
Why does the intercultural lens matter? Urbanist Charles Landry (2008)
argues that perceiving the world through an intercultural lens is an advantage,
advocating the importance of intercultural skills in a globalising urban society.
As he argues, intercultural skills build bridges between disparate communities,
help to foster cohesion and conciliation, and potentially offer the ability to create
new hybrid forms of expression by a shared community.
The FoG project became a platform for gaining further insight into how
participation in a community arts project could create a process that results in
bridges of connection and understanding between diverse communities of the
Australian suburbs, and thus create more engaged local relationships through
an increased sense of belonging. We designed this project to create a framework
that could initiate a discussion of the intercultural, intergenerational and multi-
layered nature of the community in Glenroy, and create a point where locals
felt connected, recognising that they were part of a culturally rich transnational
community.
Furthermore, the FoG recognised that, as sustainability citizens, we need to
appreciate the common experiences that connect us and our cultural differences
that make a community and a place both diverse and dynamic. It is crucial to have
outlets to express this unique urban character as a value to the future growth of a
suburban community and to empower citizens to embrace sustainable practices

around food sources, and to be concerned about water and energy sustainability
while thinking about food preparation and cooking, and community issues of
food security.
Hugh Mackay (2009) suggests that being more engaged by encouraging
collaborative creativity through participation in the arts improves social and
mental wellbeing in urban communities, thus contributing to the social
cohesiveness necessary for sustainability citizenship. Participation in the arts
addresses criticisms that suburban communities suffer from cultural alienation.
Participation in a collaborative community-based arts project can develop skills of
appreciating the increasingly intercultural and transcultural nature of our urban
communities, through shared processes of conceptualisation, creation, problem-
solving, collaborating, building relationships, reflection and expression. Locating
an arts project such as the FoG within a community context provides access
to culture and mobilises collective responsibility in the socio-environmental
transformation of cities. This aligns with the UNESCO (2010) ‘World Charter
for Human Rights to the City’ mission for sustainable urban development to
occur through intercultural dialogue, expressed through access to culture.
Global places within local places

FoG was an action research, community-based arts project investigating how ‘soft
infrastructure’ – the building of community relationships between individual
people through a common creative goal – can have a positive impact on the
collective ideals of sustainable urban citizenship. The project highlighted urban,
especially suburban, transformation in cultural identification and sustainability
citizenship. Urban populations are increasingly made up of migratory cultural
layers, creating new local communities that are outward looking, creating global
places within local suburbs. Participation in an arts project can lead to expression,
connection and reflection on the intercultural nature of our urban society and
thus potentially give participants an opportunity to gain the intercultural skills
necessary for urban wellbeing, which can lead to a more sustainable outlook
toward urban citizenship.
Most significantly for urban sustainability, FoG showed that nature, society
and community are interrelated, and can act as a bridge to connect members of
a diverse local community to contribute towards a sustainable urban cultural
environment.
References
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under Coalition plan’, ABC News, 26 February 2015, accessed 12 March 2015 – http://
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Cambridge, MA.
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strategy%202011-2016.pdf
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Resources and the Environment (department), accessed 1 February 2015 – http://
www.nre.vic.gov.au/melbourne2030online/content/implementation_plans/05b_
action4.html
Stringer E.T. (2007) Action Research, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks (CA).
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Scientific and Cultural Organisation), accessed 4 February 2015 – http://www.unesco.
org/new/en/unesco/about-us/whoweare/introducing-unesco
17
Ethical consumers and
sustainability citizenship
Tania Lewis
‘The rise of the ethical consumer’ read the banner on the front cover of a Time
magazine that reported the findings of a poll of 1003 Time readers: ‘[n]early 40%
said they purchased a product in 2009 because they liked the social or political
values of the company that produced it’ (Stengle 2009: 24). Time’s positioning
of the ethical consumer as a new social actor marked a key moment, when the
world of ‘affirmative shopping’ and ‘conscience consumption’ was no longer
purely associated with fringe politics or hippie lifestyles, but was becoming, for
better or for worse, a part of mainstream consumer culture – all this in the
context of the growth of consumer citizenship and corporate citizenship as
‘subsets of neoliberal citizenship’ since the 1990s (Cao 2014: 63).
From ‘guilt free’ Fair Trade chocolate to No-Sweat fashion and palm-oil-free
products, during the past decade the notion of ‘ethical consumption’ has gained
increasing prominence in wealthy capitalist nations around the world as a critical
concept, market category and diverse set of everyday practices (Lewis and Potter
2011, Harrison et al. 2005, Crocker and Linden 1998, Littler 2009, Shaw and
Newholm 2002, Barnett et al. 2011). Though the term may have entered into
mainstream parlance in recent years, as Littler (2011) and Humphery (2011) point
out, ‘ethical consumption’ doesn’t refer to a clearly defined set of practices but
rather can be seen as a convenient catch-all expression for a range of tendencies
within contemporary consumer economies. The phrase potentially embraces a
myriad of concerns in relation to commodity production and provenance, from
animal welfare, labour standards, Fair Trade and human rights to health and
wellbeing, and environmental and community sustainability.
Ethical consumption suggests an equally wide range of stances toward
consumer culture. On the one hand, the rise of ‘eco-chic’ and the proliferation
of ‘green’ products operate largely within the logics of consumer culture,
200 Tania Lewis
forging and colonising ever new and untapped markets rather than challenging
consumption as usual. On the other hand, the rise of alternative and anti-
consumerist movements and practices such as voluntary simplicity, Buy Nothing
Day, the Sharehood, Freeganism and waste picking, can be seen as interventions
into the space of personal and domestic consumption, opening up the notion of
ethical consumption to questions of ethical living more broadly.
This chapter examines the mainstreaming of ethical consumption – from
consumer-based to anti-consumerist stances to ethical consumption and

lifestyles – and considers its relationship to sustainability citizenship. Here
consumption is defined broadly and includes not only commodity consumption
but also broader questions of energy, food and water consumption. If the
excessive consumption of commodities is seen as a major contributing factor
to anthropogenic climate change, then the very notion that one can shop or
consume one’s way to a better or greener world would seem to fundamentally
contradict forms of sustainability citizenship. However, if we understand the
ethical turn as opening the way to a more fundamental critique of consumption
– not only in terms of commodity capitalism but in terms of the carbon-
intensive lifestyles and consumption practices associated with late modernity
more broadly – then sustainability citizenship might usefully draw some lessons
from the rise of ethical consumption.
Therefore, in discussing the mainstreaming of consumer ethics, this chapter
is concerned primarily with its implications for conceptions of citizenship
and sustainability. Here my focus is not so much on top-down, rights-based
conceptions of citizenship but rather seeks to build upon a more grassroots
civic tradition of conceptualising green citizenship. If the field of ethical
consumption is diverse in terms of the concerns it encompasses, one point of
commonality is the emphasis placed on the politicisation of everyday lifestyle
practices, particularly in relation to sustainability. As this chapter argues, this
shift has seen questions of political and sustainable consumerism no longer
limited to the classical sphere of the polis, as defined in contrast to the oikos or
household, but broadened to the everyday lives of ‘ordinary’ consumers (Lewis
and Potter 2011). Here ethical modes of household-based consumption can be
seen as part and parcel of a broader grassroots engagement with environmental
issues marked by the emergence of forms of everyday civics or ‘lifestyle politics’
in which suburban backyards, streets, houses and curb sides are becoming sites
for experimentation with sustainable lifestyle practices (Lewis 2015).
In examining some of the implications of this shift for sustainability
citizenship, first, I outline how we might understand ethical consumption
as a mode of lifestyle-based civic engagement or lifestyle politics. Secondly, I
give a brief overview of some of the key research that has been done on ethical
consumer practices. Finally, I conclude by discussing the political limits and
potential of ethical consumption. How might this ethical turn suggest new ways
of thinking about green civics and citizenship? What are the potential limits of
choice-based consumption and lifestyle practices? Does the ethical consumer’s
Ethical consumers and sustainability citizenship 201
focus on questions of lifestyle and the ‘good life’ – concerns deeply intertwined
with global and local environmental responsibilities – offer the potential for
re-imagining our social and economic systems? Or, does a focus on ethical
consumption merely privatise issues that are global and structural in nature?
Ethical consumption, participation and citizenship

In academic scholarship and popular debate alike, suburban neighbourhoods

and homes are often caricatured as sites of selfish individualism, hyper-
consumption and political apathy (Lewis 2012). The continued popularity of
Robert Putnam’s jeremiad on the decline of community in America, Bowling
Alone (2000), for instance, speaks to the widespread currency of pessimistic
accounts of contemporary civil society where ‘engaged’ modes of citizenship
are often seen as having been weakened by media and technology, materialism
and individualisation (Putnam 2000). Yet – as discussed in other chapters in this
book – a central feature of the focus in neoliberal societies on self-regulation
is the displacement of questions of social responsibility from the state onto
individuals and their lifestyle and consumer ‘choices’, marking what some see
as the displacement of emancipatory politics by a personalised ‘life politics’
(Giddens 1991). The centre of political life, according to these arguments,
has shifted towards the private sphere with citizenship increasingly seen as
‘produced by personal acts and values’, a shift that Lauren Berlant (1997: 5) sees
as ‘[d]ownsizing citizenship to a mode of voluntarism’.
Instead of reading this shift towards life politics in terms of a decline in
engagement within households, neighbourhoods and communities, scholars
such as US political scientist Lance Bennett (1998) have argued that we are
seeing the emergence of civic culture by other means. In particular, he contends
that ordinary people are increasingly engaged ‘in various forms of lifestyle
politics’ linked to networks rather than fixed organisational structures, and
organised around specific issues and ‘lifestyle coalitions’ (Bennett 1998: 745).
Bennett’s account of a shift to a more micro-political account of civic agency
and citizenship dovetails in a number of ways with a growing body of work
concerned with examining consumption as a site through which ordinary people
invest in ethical, social and civic concerns, from organised consumer-based and
anti-consumerist movements to the more everyday social relations produced
in and around consumer and lifestyle choices and practices (Carty 2002, Lewis
and Potter 2011, Micheletti 2003b, Littler 2009, Soper et al. 2009, Humphery
2010, Lewis 2015). Thus, while many leftist cultural critics are rightly critical
of the blurring of the boundaries between consumer and citizen – a process
that often dovetails all too neatly with the corporatist concerns of neo-liberal
political culture (Miller 2007) – at the same time there is a growing recognition
of the ways in which popular consumer and media culture is marked by complex
ideological struggles that do not necessarily represent a simple rapprochement
to neoliberal values (Hermes 2005, Lewis 2008).
202 Tania Lewis
In their extensive research on ethical consumption in the UK, Clive Barnett

et al. (2005: 45), for instance, have foregrounded the way in which ‘solidarity
and collective concern’ can be manifested through processes of consumption.
Discussing the concept of ethical consumption, they suggest that the rise of
a ‘choice’ based mode of political action or life politics is not necessarily
synonymous with selfish individualism and ‘decollectivisation’. Instead they
contend that people often engage in processes of consumption as wider social
practices that are often interpersonal or communal (Barnett et al. 2005: 46).
Likewise, in Political Virtue and Shopping, Swedish political scientist Michelle
Micheletti (2003b) argues that, in what she terms a ‘post-political’ space, we
have seen a broad refiguring of politics away from more conventional forms
of civic engagement to new modes of collectivism where concerns around
environmentalism and animal welfare, for instance, have become tied to
personal decisions about lifestyle and consumption.
Such arguments suggest that rather than seeing the ‘ethical turn’ purely in
terms of a privatisation of politics it should also be seen as heralding a wider
reconfiguration of the relationship between personal actions and practices
around lifestyle and consumption and questions of the common and global
good.
Ethical consumption in practice

How then might these purported shifts in ethical engagement and citizenship
manifest in people’s everyday lives? And, what might be the limits and
contradictions of engaging in ‘ethical’ consumer and lifestyle practices at an
everyday household level?
In recent years there has been a growing number of empirical studies
examining ethical consumption from a wide range of perspectives, including
large-scale marketing surveys, many of which focus on the beliefs and
motivations rather than the actual practices of ethical consumers. For instance, a
poll by Global Market Insite (2005) across 17 countries found that 54 percent of
online consumers would be prepared to pay more for organic, environmentally
friendly, or fair trade products while, in a large survey of British consumers,
Cowe and Williams (2000) identified 23 percent of their sample as falling into
what they saw as two key ethical consumer segments, which they termed Global
Watchdogs and Conscientious Consumers.
Such survey-driven data tends to offer up a rather static narrow conception
of the ‘ethical consumer’ as a self-contained and self-knowing subject belonging
to a fixed market demographic, telling us little about the messiness of people’s
actual practices in relation to consumption, or about the everyday contexts in
which consumption occurs and the larger role of retail environments, access
and infrastructure, institutional actors and global commodity chains in shaping
the landscape of consumer ‘choice’. However, a number of large qualitative
studies on ethical consumption have begun to emerge, offering a more complex
picture that moves beyond a focus on markets, demographics and commodity

consumption. For instance, Micheletti (2003a, 2003b), Micheletti and Follesdal
(2007) and Micheletti and Stolle (2007) have conducted extensive research on
‘virtuous’ shopping as a form of political participation in Scandinavia.
While the focus of Micheletti (2003b: xiii) is on shopping rather than
consumption more broadly, her research on green consumption in the context
of Sweden and women’s roles as political consumers suggests that everyday,
self-interested modes of ethical consumerism work to mobilise consumers

politically, building rather than undermining forms of ‘new social capital and
broad societal trust’.
In the US, Carfagna et al. (2014) have conducted large-scale mixed methods
research in order to examine how questions of class and cultural capital might
shape ethical consumption, focusing on a broader conception of ethical
consuming and living. They combined findings from a large survey of self-
identified conscious consumers with a range of broader case studies on climate
change, food swaps, participants in a time bank (where people trade services),
and people using eco-products in their home. The study found that the ethical
consumers in their sample, characterised by a significantly higher proportion of
white, high-income and tertiary educated individuals, exhibited a kind of ‘eco-
habitus’ marked by a focus on the materiality or ‘physicality of goods and their
connection to the earth’, a preference for consumption practices embedded in
the local, and a valuing of artisanal skills (Carfagna et al. 2014: 175). However,
their research – like Micheletti’s research – challenges the assumption that such
practices are purely forms of depoliticised, neoliberal individualism, arguing
that participants often saw themselves as contributing to a collective social
movement. They conclude that the emergence of new forms of ‘ecological
habitus’ may prove an important pathway towards embedding ‘sustainable ways
of living’ (Carfagna et al. 2014: 175).
Alongside such large-scale studies, numerous in-depth qualitative studies
have emerged which examine specific consumer practices related to political
or ethical consumerism, including research on anti-consumerism (Humphery
2010, Bettany and Kerrane 2011); production-engaged consumers (Moraes et
al. 2010); responsible consumption cooperatives (Papaoikonomou et al. 2014);
voluntary simplicity (Zamwel et al. 2014); green consumption (Connolly and
Prothero 2008); food nutrition and sustainability (Dixon and Isaacs 2013);
everyday domestic consumer ethics (Hall 2011); organic food consumption
(Lockie et al. 2002); and fair trade (Varul 2009, Esperanza 2008, Dolan 2008).
Research that I (Lewis et al. 2014, Lewis 2015) conducted with colleagues
on domestic ‘hard waste’ reuse and curb-side ‘gleaning’ likewise highlights the
growing ‘ethicalisation’ of everyday personal conduct around consumption
and lifestyle ‘choices’ (Rose 1989), while illustrating the complexities and
contradictions of everyday decision-making and habitual practices around
attempts to consume and live more sustainably at a household level. The
curb-side placement, reuse and repurposing of ‘hard rubbish’ items, such as
204 Tania Lewis
furniture, is common practice in many Australian cities. A previous survey

indicated that 35–40 percent of respondents gleaned items from hard rubbish
for household reuse (Lane et al. 2009). In our in-depth video-based study of
15 socio-economically diverse households in outer suburban and inner urban
Melbourne, we examined informal household practices and economies around
thrift and reuse.
Most of the householders in our study were active gleaners of hard rubbish
and often purchased much of their furniture and clothing from ‘alternative’
shopping spaces such as ‘opportunity’ shops and garage sales. While questions
of thrift often arose, most participants’ motivations were far from purely
economic or utilitarian, and characterised by a complex range of interests.
Many participants saw their hard rubbish practices as a form of political or
ethical consumption, often linking their practices to a broader interest in self-
sufficiency, anti-consumerism, environmentalism and waste minimisation, as
well as to issues of social justice.
Participants’ ethical practices were often embedded in interpersonal and
social relations, involving networks of reciprocal sharing and caring with local
community, familial and friendship groups. Furthermore, the drive to consume
differently and reuse material items was frequently tied to questions of pleasure
and aesthetics, with people often describing the ‘thrill’ of ‘discovering’ sought-
after items on the curb side and taking them home, a finding that gels with
the argument of Kate Soper (2008) regarding the rise of ‘alternative hedonism’
where material simplicity is seen as enriching rather than impoverishing.
In our study, the embedded nature of consumer practices in people’s
everyday lives and their connection to a range of values and habits meant that,
despite ethical and political motivations, such practices were often marked
by complexity and contradiction. As Evans and Abrahamse (2009: 500) note
in relation to their qualitative study of Londoners concerned with conducting
‘sustainable lifestyles’, the realities of green lifestyles and consumption on the
ground are much more complex than the rhetoric might suggest:
instead of conceiving of (sustainable) lifestyles as fixed, we suggest that they

need to be understood as a process which in turn implies that individuals
have – and move between – multiple bundles of social practices such
that they have more than one lifestyle and these are not necessarily all
conducive to a reduction in environmental impact.
The contradictions and tensions involved in negotiating sustainable living

in the context of the pressures of daily living was highlighted by a number of
participants in our hard rubbish study, particularly those with children, with
householders often emphasising the significant time and labour involved in
consuming ethically. While they often expended large amounts of time and effort
in consuming sustainably, they also reported purchasing new items at times in
their lives (such as when they had small children) when doing so was quicker
and easier. Householders with homes furnished largely with second-hand and
gleaned items, then, would often point guiltily to their one Ikea purchase as a
highly conspicuous symbol of time-pressured lives and the convenience of one-
stop shopping, highlighting the problematic nature of privatising responsibility
for sustainable consumption.
The politics of consuming ethically

What are the implications of such research findings for thinking through both
the limits and potential of ethical consumption for building effective models
of sustainability citizenship? The gap, highlighted in much research on ethical
consumption, between people’s professed values and beliefs and the realities of
their everyday life routines and habits points to the limitations of placing too
much emphasis on individual ethical purchases and lifestyle ‘transformations’
as a panacea for over-consumption. As numerous critics have pointed out, one
of the central problems is that a focus on ethical consumption and lifestyles at
a solely personalised level tends to displace responsibility from governments
and corporations to individuals while effacing the political, social and material
determinants that structure people’s daily lifestyle ‘choices’.
In this context, making lifestyle choices more ethical can be seen to reinforce
a ‘doctrine of personal responsibility’ (Miller 2007: 120), an ethos that dovetails
with dominant neoliberal trends towards devolved and deregulated governance
and trade. Others have pointed to the socio-economic dimensions of ethical
consumption and the need to recognise that not all consumers have access to
the symbolic and economic resources required to shop virtuously. For Jo Littler
(2009), for instance, acts of conscious consumption, such as buying organic
food and/or fair trade products, are marked by a concern with performing social
distinction, with ‘green’ products acquiring a degree of social cachet amongst
a growing urban class of ‘bourgeois bohemians’. As the study by Evans and
Abrahamse (2009) of households concerned with consuming and living more
sustainably suggests, however, such highly motivated citizens are often driven
by far more than a concern with status consumption. Frequently critical of the
limitations of individualised approaches to lifestyle change, ‘they all stressed the
need for government and industry to assume responsibilities and make changes’
(Evans and Abrahamse 2009: 501), a finding replicated in our research on hard
rubbish reuse.
Given these constraints, what might be the progressive potential of the
turn to ethical consumption and ‘lifestyle politics’? There is a growing sense
of the inadequacy of purely top-down approaches to environmentalism and
a mounting recognition of the need for multi-faceted approaches to policies
of sustainability that take into account a range of ‘scales’ of action from the
global to the national and the household level (Gibson et al. 2011). In a study of
UK grassroots activism, geographers Chatterton and Pickerill (2010: 475) have
argued that: ‘it is through its everyday rhythms that meaning is given to post-
206 Tania Lewis
capitalism and it is this re-conceptualisation that makes post-capitalist practice

mundane, but at the same time also accessible, exciting, feasible and powerful’.
As we have noted, clearly there are major limitations to a model of
‘sustainable’ or ethical consumption premised purely upon extending the reach
of commodity capital to new forms of commoditisation. However, the broader
practices of ethical and conscious consumption foregrounded by authors such
as Carfagna et al. (2014), Lewis (2015) and Evans and Abrahamse (2009) –
from backyard permaculture to neighbourhood food swaps and time banks –

suggest an emergent array of alternative economies around not only practices of
consumption but also production.
As argued elsewhere (Lewis 2015), taking a more holistic, multi-scalar
approach to sustainability means taking the role of households seriously, not just
as sites of passive consumption or ‘responsibilisation’ but as spaces of increasing
ethical engagement and experimentation with new ways of living. What might
the various ad hoc sustainability initiatives that are emerging in urban and
suburban neighbourhoods in the Global North offer for thinking through
sustainability politics and policy? One lesson to be learned from the rise and
popularity of forms of ‘lifestyle politics’ is the benefit of linking citizenship and
civic agency to the sensory, material and embodied dimensions of everyday life.
The success of localised ethical and green movements such as Permablitz (an
Australian grassroots initiative where self-help groups ‘make over’ home gardens
into productive spaces) points to the need to place conviviality, aesthetics,
community connectedness and the corporeal at the foreground of strategies for
challenging and changing normative social practices (Lewis 2015).
While the oft-made critique of these kinds of ‘localised’ green practices is that
they represent a form of fiddling while Rome burns or act as a distraction from
the realpolitik of large-scale environmental reform, I would suggest that this kind
of critique tends to be premised on a rather narrow conception of political action
and citizenship – and that such practices should be seen as complementing rather
than displacing broader levels of engagement. Indeed, rather than being viewed in
privatised, local or micro-scale terms, ethical consumer and lifestyle movements
offer an important opportunity to energise and broaden the base of legitimacy of
political environmentalism and to frame people’s ordinary lifestyles as intrinsic to
a broader ecology of sustainable economies, cultures and practices.
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18
Futures for sustainability
citizenship
Anitra Nelson, Ralph Horne, Beau B. Beza and

John Fien
We opened this collection by stating that the emerging manifestations of urban

sustainability citizenship shape, and are shaped by, built infrastructure, economic
relations and socio-environmental conditions in cities. Furthermore, we argued
that the practice of sustainability citizenship will be a potent source of necessary,
conscious and conscientious change in the built and social environments of
our increasingly densely-populated global cities over the next decades. The
contributors have shown evidence of these propositions in a range of areas, from
housing to digital practices and ethical consumption.
Yet, in reality, we are only in a position to report on the beginnings of
a transformation, the future of which is still uncertain. We have emphasised
that sustainability citizenship is a work-in-progress. Amongst a range of other
references and priorities yet to emerge, future research will reflect and develop
on and around the kinds of arguments and conclusions found here and, more
significantly, monitor and analyse such developments.
Contributors have elaborated on various aspects of sustainability citizenship
including five defining characteristics, namely, the turn from a purely social
contract to the centrality of the ecological; a ‘glocal’ instead of national structure;
the focus on collective duties rather than individual rights; the movement to
participatory democracy; and the extension of an empowerment model within
the realms of politics and the market, for instance movements against waste and
overconsumption as well as for fair trade and ethical consumption.
Future directions in urban sustainability citizenship in policy and community
activism will reflect the existing preoccupations of current disciplines and
fields such as sustainability, sociology, the environment in general and climate
change in particular, media and communications, urban management, design
and planning. As contributors to this collection have explored aspects of the
210 Anitra Nelson, Ralph Horne, Beau B. Beza and John Fien
defining characteristics of sustainability citizenship and beyond, a range of

topics has emerged and deserves reflection and summation. Discussion of
certain significant angles follows.
Learning
Certain characteristics of urban sustainability citizenship – perhaps most
clearly seen in the chapters dealing with communication and learning – centre
on connectedness, networks and enablement, spanning a range of areas, such
as learning skills for environmentally and socially ethical decision-making
when various factors are unpredictable. We have seen that co-working and
digital innovations propel new forms of work, knowledge and skill sharing,
indicating the extent to which sustainability can be built from the ground up.
Similarly, the risks and potential of media communication in the hands of elites
with the power to frame economic and political matters central for (and against)
sustainability citizenship have been discussed. Here critical and rhetorical skills
remain central.
A diverse range of activities and forms of learning are required to develop
sustainability citizenship. Cultural engagement on sustainability issues has
started – and attracted people to – sustainability conversations in public forums
and actions. Meanwhile the concerted formal movement for ‘learning cities’
worldwide, from United Nations to local government efforts to improve
lifelong and whole-of-life learning, is ideal for incorporating sustainability
citizenship skills and knowledge. Similarly, all kinds and forms of connectedness
through networking and collaboration can be applied but all require on-the-job
and shared learning of sophisticated skills likely to inform growing areas for
research activity.
Holism
Contributors have acknowledged that ‘change here’ relies on ‘change there’,
for instance that women need to be fully integrated – need to have their rights
recognised and met in practice – in order to make their contributions visible
and enable further participation, especially in decision-making and leadership.
Although there has been a global effort to increase literacy (2000–2015),
according to UNESCO (2015), two-thirds of illiterate people aged 15 years or
more are still women and the gap is almost the same amongst those less than 15
years old.
Sustainability citizenship relies on empowerment, the basic building blocks
of which are literacy and numeracy skills to absorb and convey information
and contribute to communal decision-making. Women are simply exemplars
of other groups disadvantaged and marginalised by economic status, ethnic
or religious background or, say, senior age. Sustainability citizenship seeks to
encompass all and, therefore, represent the interests of all. The ways in which
Futures for sustainability citizenship 211
distinct groups perceive and respond to the challenges of sustainability will

require ongoing investigation, elaboration, analyses and monitoring.
The holism demanded by environmental sustainability challenges current
ways of thinking. Indigenous perceptions of landscapes and social relationships
offer traditional non-western ways of appreciating sustainability citizenship.
Ideas from both non-western and non-neoliberal traditions have been
highlighted through concepts of Pachamama (Mother Earth) and buen vivir (good
living) in the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia. These holistic perspectives

situate sustainability citizenship in a communal identity that encompasses
ancestors and future generations (Santiesteban and Helfrich 2013). Discourses
on the philosophies of sustainability citizenship will only deepen and broaden
over the next couple of decades.
Beyond neoliberalism
This collection has contextualised the rise of urban sustainability citizenship
within predominantly neoliberal contexts, supporting critiques of the
encroachment of the market. We posit sustainability citizenship in juxtaposition
to the rise of corporate social responsibility and the framing of the firm as
citizen par excellence. Here, we become aware of the room of mirrors in which
concepts and movements can become their opposite or simply hollow echoes.
In the context of neoliberalism within which urban sustainability citizenship has
grown, contradiction and compromise come to the fore.
As this collection goes to press the neoliberal period is being challenged
by grassroots anti-austerity parties that have grown in recent years in Europe,
specifically Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. In Latin America, neoliberal
currents were already being confronted by popular governments in the 2000s
(Silva 2009). Similarly, the persistence and successes of Green parties and
environmental movements – such as action on climate change – right across the
globe continues apace. All such political pressures suggest that the ethical values
at the basis of sustainability citizenship – and attendant research – will have
more favourable contexts within which to grow in future.
Operationalising urban sustainability citizenship

An institutional examination of the contested terrain of access to sustainable,
affordable housing has illustrated the complexities of interacting forces from
the market, the already built environment and policy. How urban sustainability
citizenship might take hold and displace unsustainable practice is, of course, a
many-faceted question. Just as tendencies that act to ‘lock in’ current regimes
are pertinent here, so are tendencies that might ‘lock in’ urban sustainability
citizenship, such as mass retrofit of solar panels coupled with battery storage
systems. It is clear that responses and selection, or success, of initiatives will
differ across fields and practices. Discussions in this collection on ways of
improving the sustainability of housing and householders have illustrated the

complexities of both ‘lock in’ and policy resolutions centring on local through
to national governments.
Questions over and concerns with change are likely to be operational in
nature. Contributors have suggested that common forms of operationalising
policies and projects – engagement, decision-making and framing – are limited
and contorted by western thinking. At the same time, other contributors have
pointed out that operational complexities evolve from simple ‘materialities’,

such as the implications of urban housing stock and infrastructural services (e.g.
energy provision) that is constructed, and generally requires to be reconstructed,
over long periods of time. Undoubtedly, policy will remain central in the wicked
problems of operationalising sustainability citizenship.
Structure and agency

Structure and agency – central to theories and discourses across the social
sciences – are paramount in any analyses of sustainability citizenship.
Governance and structuring are very much in evidence as means by which
sustainability citizenship might be constrained as well as prompted and enabled.
Through practising sustainability citizenship, the boundaries of governance and
control can be (con)tested and dynamic. Future research will scope, speculate
and monitor such developments across various socio-political and economic
landscapes.
Indeed, any focus on operationalising will necessarily take a systemic approach
to take account of unique and specific contexts. While certain contributors
have focused on bottom-up initiatives, significant policy often appears in top-
down ways, even with extensive consultation, relying for instance on a political
‘champion’ alongside community leaders. Certainly, financing generally comes
with strings attached from ‘above’. Therefore, analyses of ways of integrating
bottom-up energy and decision-making with top-down access to resources and
capacities to network will absorb the necessarily interdisciplinary attention of
more researchers.
Sustainability citizenship is about ways of living. While, on the one
hand, political and financial structures limit and enable, on the other hand,
sustainability cultures, caring and awareness-raising highlight the strength of
this peculiarly community- and neighbourhood-based movement. While much
has been made about the rise of the urban as a space of residence and work,
cities do not even cover 2 percent of the globe (UN-Habitat 2015). The ways
that sustainability citizenship play out in rural and, specifically, rural–urban
relations, will be crucial to confronting sustainability challenges of resource and
energy use. Similarly, inter- and intra-relations between and within the Global
North and South will be equally important.
Technology
Contributors have referred to the ways in which powerful computing and
communication capabilities of mobile devices are influencing citizen engagement
in innovative forms of urban care, including climate change adaptation and social
cohesion, two key challenges of urban sustainability. Undoubtedly, a central focus
of future research will be technology, especially its appropriateness to context.
Innovation is also a core theme in our understanding of sustainability citizenship,

whether practised through post-fossil homes, post-digital sustainability activism,
or post-industrial co-working communities.
From handy mobile apps to social media, communities are bringing their
ingenuity to sort out hitherto thorny urban issues such as congestion, car parking
and potholes. Community-based sustainability activism harnesses the internet
and wi-fi where national governments have failed to act, such as on climate
change, protecting natural heritage from mining exploitation and even as a force
for social inclusion. This optimistic view of the internet as a force for good is of
course tempered by the dominance of huge corporates which control both the
physical infrastructure and mine the myriad of information flows for the purposes
of profit.
Even as new and overwhelming issues such as climate change evolve,
contributors have discussed and analysed sustainability citizenship developments
within traditional social science concerns, say with ‘community’. For instance,
while co-working groups commonly claim to offer spaces in which sustainability
citizens can work collectively independent of existing institutions, it has been
pointed out that – with the exponential growth and mainstreaming of co-working
– co-workers find it hard to avoid a tension between their community idealism and
shared purposes and the organisational realities of being entrepreneurial identities.
Here, then, we see the interplay of technology with economic structures.
The system of labour relations that underpins conventional work in capitalist
economies, typified by a growing ‘precariat’ (Standing 2009), drives the
development of models, such as co-working, within which sustainability
citizenship plays out. In marginal spaces, ‘in between’ capitalist enterprises and
other aspects of the informal economy, some entrepreneurs strive to operate
within self-imposed sustainability paradigms. Furthermore, emerging forms of
urban social innovation provide demonstrations of sustainability ethics that attract
the attention of people disaffected with the unsustainable efforts of government
and the market, and appeal to a particular cultural milieu seeking to engage with
notions of sustainability citizenship. Aligned ideas include co-management, novel
partnerships and collaboration.
Engagement
Engagement is a wellspring for the kinds of exploration and experimentation
that lead to the implementation and trials of practices in research done by us
all as part and parcel of everyday life. The complementary thematic leitmotifs
of collaboration and mutual sufficiency have been highlighted in terms of food
self-provisioning and analyses of informal settlements and place-making where
basic needs are paramount and met in cooperative and community-based,
rather than individualistic, ways. A glocal perspective reveals that sustainability
citizenship has distinctive characteristics according to context, including
improving standards of living in places of disadvantage while advocating for
degrowth and then steady-state economies where privileged indulgence has led
to damaging socio-environmental consequences.
Self-provisioning, mutual support and collective action are realised by
informal settlers as central elements of sustainability citizenship. Here
engaged citizenry and collective individual interventions contribute to urban
sustainability through socio-spatial changes that contribute to the development
of communal ethics. Chapter 11 points out that barrio residents do not follow
any manifesto, i.e. clear unified concepts of sustainability in either local or
eco-global terms, but rather respond to pressing everyday circumstances in
political and organisational ways by mobilising, developing private and public
partnerships and urban governance agendas in particular settings. Ethnographic
and statistical research of all such grounded developments, in various settings
involving people of diverse backgrounds, will only enrich the area of urban
sustainability citizenship.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, models of sustainability citizenship will grow and develop.
Consequently, much future research in all areas where sustainability challenges
face us will centre on learning from case studies, especially where change has
been enabled by innovative approaches to seemingly intractable problems or
intransigent conflicts.
This chapter has highlighted some key themes that are emerging in urban
sustainability citizenship, as explored in this collection. Future research will
variously explore, intersect with and expand on these themes. For example, an
urbanist will inevitably take the city as the unit of study. Neil Brenner (2015)
frames his work in city spaces in terms of urban scales and configurations,
altering roles of the state and resulting patterns of reorganisation. In contrast,
network theory founder Manuel Castells (Conill et al. 2012a, 2012b) has turned
his attention to the ways people threatened with poverty and austerity measures
have resorted to developing and extending anti-market social and solidarity
economies. Using different kinds of perspectives, we appreciate in new ways
that sustainability citizenship is an emergent, mediated, insecure and potent
source and form for change – the kind of change demanded by contemporary
environmental, economic and urban crises.
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INDEX
Aboriginal cultures 10, 150–8 Aurora 72–8

Abrahamse, W. 204–6 austerity 2–3, 211, 214
action research 189, 192, 194, 197 Austin 94–6
adaptation 35 Australia 3–4, 140, 142, 204; Aboriginal
adult learning 183–4 150–8; co-working 94, 97–100;
aesthetics 98, 143, 193, 204 communication 168, 171–2; food
Africa 111, 119 41–3, 46–8; housing 71–9, 83, 85,
African-Americans 32–3 89–90; resilience 30, 34
agency 80, 133, 140–1, 147, 212; Australian Dream 195
communication 168, 171–2 Australian Ugliness 196
Agenda-21 18, 118, 188 automobiles 32
agriculture 40–1, 44–5, 48, see also autonomy 47–9
gardening; growing
Aguas Claras 132, 134 Bangkok 34
Agyeman, J. 20, 141 Bangladeshis 125
Ahmedabad 59–61 Bansal, N. 59
air conditioning 73, 77–8 Barak, W. 152–4, 158
Alfano, G. 108 Barcelona 3, 25
alternative food networks (AFNs) 40–9 Barnett, C. 202
alternative hedonism 204 barrios 129–37, 143–4, 214
Amin, A. 170 Barry, J. 20, 23–4, 56, 171
La Andrea 132 Bauman, Z. 101
Antunes, A. 109 Beck, U. 140
apps 107 Beijing 195
architecture 152–3 Beijing Declaration 180–1
Arepera Socialista Nutritiva 46–7 being, vs. having 25
Argentina 170 Bell, D. 20
Art and Suburbia 194 Bendor, R. 173
Artists Incubator 187, 199 Bennett, L. 201
arts 187–9, 193–7 Berlant, L. 201
Ashton Raggatt McDougall (ARM) 152–3 beruf 96, 98
Asia 119, 179–80 Beza, B.B. 6, 10, 139–61
aspiration 131 Bharti, M. 59
Index 217
Bicentenario 45 Chaparro, J. 131

Boardman, B. 86 Chatterton, P. 205
Boekema, F. 181–2, 185 Chávez, H. 44–5, 49
Bogotá 129–36, 141, 143 Chicago 188
Bolivarians 44, 47–9 Chicago School 194
Bolivia 23, 211 children 118, 121–3, 183, 204
Bondi, L. 117 China 59, 71, 179, 183, 195
Bonetto, D. 42, 46 cities 61, 176, 214; gender 117, 119, 121,
Boon Wurrung 152–3 123; innovation 105, 107; learning 11,
Boschma, R. 32 176–85; resilience 29–37, see also local

Bourdieu, P. 69, 98 government
Bourriaud, N. 193 citizenship 3, 19–22, 56–7, 110, see also
Bowling Alone 201 participation; sustainability citizenship
Boyd, R. 196 Ciudad Bolivar 143
Bradshaw, S. 119 civic republicanism 20, 170–1
Brand, F.S. 30 climate change 2, 108–9, 111;
Brandao, Z. 129 communication 166–7, 171–2
Brenner, N. 214 Climate CoLab 109
Bristol 173 co-working 9, 93–102, 213
Broome 150, 157 coal 71
Brown, A. 34 Coburg 189
Buenos Aires 143 Cohen, A.P. 102
Bugarrigarra 156 Colombia 129–36, 141, 143
building back better 33–4 communication 11, 165–74, 183; co-
Buildings Performance Institute Europe working 95–6; futures 210, 213; social
(BPIE) 84 innovation 104, 106–12
bushfires 30 community 213; arts 187–91, 193–4, 196–
Butcher, T. 9, 93–103 7; co-working 93–102; Indigenous
perspective 155–7; informal
California 84, 88 settlements 132–4, 137; innovation
Campanella, T.J. 34 108, 110
Campbell, T. 179 competences 54–5
Cao, B. 20, 24–5 complexity 58–9
capabilities 36 La Condesa 145–6
capital 122, 124–5 Connelly, J. 20
capitalism 18, 213; co-working 93–4, 101; conquest 165
food 40–1, 49 consultation 155
Caracas Slum Upgrading Project consumption 11–12, 56, 111, 199–206,
(CAMEBA) 121 209
Caracazo riots 44 contraception 123
Caracoli 136, 143–4 cooperatives 3
carbon emissions 80, 89–90, 140, 168 cosmopolitan citizenship 22
Carfagna, L.B. 203, 206 Cottle, S. 172
Carmona, M.D.S. 133–4 Country 150–3, 156–7
Carroll, S. 195 Cowe, R. 202
Carson, R. 18 Creative Spaces 108
Carter, P. 172 cultural appropriation 152–3
Castells, M. 111, 214 culture 187–9, 191–6
catalysts 99 Curry, P. 20
Cattaneo, C. 47
cell phones 104–5, 107–8, 110–11, 122 Dalton, T. 8, 80–92
Centre for Educational Research and Dandenong 194
Innovation 178 Danubio 132, 134
change agency see agency Davidoff, P. 154
Chant, S. 119 De Freitas, J. 135
218 Index
Dean, M. 69 Evans, D. 204–6

Death and Life of Great American Cities 3 evolutionary resilience 31
democracy 24–5, 36, 56, 168 exclusivity 31–2, 47, 98; gender 119, 124
demographics 119–20
Detroit 32–4, 37 Facebook 110
developers: green housing 72, 75–7; facilitation 62–3
informal settlements 132, 134, 136, Fainstein, S. 5
143 Fair Trade 199
development 36, 118, 188; regional 181–2 Fairphone 111
disasters 108–9, 111, 145 Faure Report 178

diversity 64 feminisation of labour 121
DIY 109 feminism 119, 168, see also gender
Dobson, A. 20, 167–8, 170, 184 fertility 122–3
Dork, M. 107 fibre 108
dress 125 financing 212
Dreyfus, A. 52 Fincher, E. 136, 141, 144
drought 34 Fiori, J. 129
dualism 1–2 firm 105, 211
dumpster divers 43, 47, 49 Flavours of Glenroy (FoG) 187–9, 192–3,
Durkheim, E. 105 196–7
Dutch Disease 44 Follesdal, A. 203
food 40–1, 46–50; gardening 190, 193,
Earth citizenship 19, see also sustainability 197; Sydney 41–3; Venezuela 44–6
citizenship Food Within 43, 47, 49
ecological modernisation 171–2 foraging see gleaning
ecology 21, 30 Foucault, M. 69
economics 167–70 Fox, M. 58
Economist Intelligence Unit 144 framing 6–8
economy 44, 181, 213 freegans 43, 200
ecosystem services 59–61 freelancers 93–7
ecotourism 24 Fundación CIARA 45
Ecuador 23, 124, 211 Futerra 166–7
education 58–9, 122–3, 177–8, 180–1, 185 Future We Want 118
Edwards, F. 6–7, 40–51, 183 FutureBristol 173
efficiency 34, 82–90, 121, 139
Egypt 111 Gambia 122
Ehrlich, P. & A. 18 Gammage, B. 151
emergencies 108–9, 111, 145 gardening 49, 187–91, 193, 206, see also
employment 93–4, 96, 100, 121–2 growing
empowerment 118–19, 121–4, 187, 210 Geels, F.W. 69
energy 3–4, 70–5, 80, 82–90 gender 9–10, 117–21, 126–7, 134–5,
Energy Performance of Buildings 210; capital 122–5; division of labour
Directive (EPBD) 88 121–2; mobility/violence 125–6;
engagement 155–7, 213–14, see also participation 169, 196
participation Gender Education Unit 122
engineering 30 Germany 81
entrepreneurialism 93–6, 98–102, 106, Gibbs, D. 21
145, 213 Gibson, C. 193
Environmental Justice Organisations, Gibson, R. 58
Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT) 25 Giddens, A. 5, 35, 69, 110
equity 9–10, 36–7, 120–2 gifting 42–5, 47–8
ethical consumerism 199–206 Gilbert, A. 168
Eurocentrism 154 gleaning 42, 44–6, 48–9, 203–5
Europe 70–1, 88–9, 179–80, 211 Gleeson, B. 139
European Union (EU) 83–4, 119, 178 Glenroy 187–92, 194–7
Index 219
Glenroy Novels 195 Humphery, K. 199

global financial crisis 2, 12, 71 Hurricane Katrina 35, 109
Global Footprint Network 18 Hurricane Sandy 31, 109, 111
Global Market Insite 202 Hutchins, R.M. 177
Global North 7, 82, 84–5, 136–7
Global South 7, 119 IBM 179
glocal 4, 18, 22–3, 214 ICLEI 166
Goa 123 identity 94, 98, 101
Google 42, 108 ideology 139–40
Gore, A. 166 #illridewithyou 110

Gough, A. 9–10, 117–28 incentives 83, 88–9
governance 75–6 inclusion 109–10, 126–7, 155, 180–1
government 2, 23–4, 48, 171; housing Inconvenient Truth 166
policy 87–90, see also local government India 59–61, 123–4
governmentality 69 Indigenous perspectives 10, 23, 150–8,
Gran Mission AgroVenezuela 45 211
grassroots 24 Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) 157
Great Recession 12 Indignados 25
Greece 2, 25 individualism 19, 56, 157, 176, 201;
Greenfield, C. 11, 165–75 co-working 96, 99; communicating
greenhouse gases 80, 89–90, 140, 168 166–7
Greens 171, 211 Indonesia 192
growing 42–6, 48–9, see also gardening inequality 9–10, 36–7, 120–2
Gunderson, L.H. 31 informal settlements 60, 129–37, 143–4,
214; gender 119, 122–3, 125–6
habitus 69, 94, 98–101, 203 information & communication
hacking 107 technology (ICT) 95–6, 104, 106–8,
Hall, P. 108 110–12, 213
Hamlet’s Mill 172 information-deficit model 166
hard rubbish 203–5 infrastructure 107, 109, 111, 187–8,
Harvey, D. 5 195–7
Hay, C. 169 inheritance rights 124
health 41, 47, 58, 125–6, 180 innovation 8–9, 104–7, 109, 111, 213
heat island effect 108 Institute for Management of Higher
Hernandez Bonilla, M. 131 Learning 178
Hernández-García, J. 6, 10, 129–38 Inter-Agency Network on Women and
heteronormativity 123 Gender Equality 124
higher education 59, 178, 184 intercultural lens 196–7
hijab 192 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Hindess, B. 171 Change 53
Hodson, M. 139 International Energy Agency 71
holism 210–11 Internet see information &
Holling, C.S. 31 communication technology
Hong Kong 111, 179–80 investment 89
Horne, R. 8, 69–79, 89 investor-user problem 83, 88–9
housing & households 3, 8, 69–71, 80–1, Iran 111
90–1, 212; Australia 71–9; ethical Islam 110, 192
consumers 200, 203–6; gender 124; Iveson, K. 136, 141, 144
informal 129–37; policy 87–90; stock
84–7; tenure 81–4 Jacobs, J. 3, 154
Huckle, J. 52 Japan 179
Hulbert, S. 189 Jax, K. 30
Hulbert, T.W. 11, 183, 187–98 Jenness, V. 21
human capital 122 Jerusalem 125
human rights 22, 125, 188 Jews 125
220 Index
Jickling, B. 52 McCauliffe, C. 194

Jones, D. 10, 150–61 McIlwaine, C. 119
Jones, H. 184 Mackay, H. 197
Junta de Acción Comunal (JAC) 132–4, MacKenzie, A. 152
136, 143 McShane, I. 9, 104–14
justice 141, 144 Madrid 3
Mailhot, J. 151
Kansas City 108 market 2, 139, 169, 171–2, 211; and state
Kanter, R.M. 100 25–6
Kellett, P. 129, 131–2 marketing 202

Kelman, I. 35 Marshall, T.H. 110
knowledge 52–4, 151, 177–9, 181–3, 185 Martin, A. 43
Kolkata 123 Marvin, S. 139
Korea 179 Masschelein, J. 59
Kronlid, D. 36 Massey, D. 191, 195
Kwon, M. 195 materialities 8, 212
mateship 97
Labor Party (Australia) 172 media 168–9, 171, 173
labour 93–4, 96, 100, 121–2 Melbourne 34, 178, 204; Aboriginal 150,
land 44–5, 124, 150, 152–7 152–3; arts 189, 194, 196; change
landlords 81–5, 87–90, 124 agency 140, 144, 146; co-working 94,
Landry, C. 196 99–100; housing 71–3
Laos 180 Mercal 45–6
Latin America 6, 44, 129, 134–5, 211 Mesías, R. 129
Latour, B. 11, 166–7, 169, 173 Mexico 131, 140, 144–6
Lawrence, D.L. 133 Micheletti, M. 202–3
learning 7–8, 35–6, 52, 56–65, 210 migration 119, 192, 195–7
learning cities 11, 176–85 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
learning cycle 60, 62 118, 122, 125
learning society 177 Mitchell, T. 168
Learning to Be 178 mobile devices 104–5, 107–8, 110–11, 122
Lee Dong-Hoo 110 Mobile Edible Garden (MEG) 188–90
Lefebvre, H. 3, 133, 188 mobility 125–6, 132
Legacy, C. 139 modernism 195–6
legitimacy 136–7, 143–4, 147 modernity 140, 142
Leichenko, R. 30 Monrovia 122
Lenglet, F. 7, 52–66 Monteyne, D. 107
lesbians 123–4 Moore, T. 8, 80–92
Lewis, T. 11–12, 199–208 Moreland City Council (MCC) 189, 195
Leydet, D. 19–20, 24 Moulaert, F. 105–6
liberalism 19–20, 24 Mulgan, G. 106
Liberia 122 Mumford, M. 105
lifelong learning 178 municipality 134
lifestyle politics 200–2, 204–6 Muslims 110, 192
LILARA (Learning in Local and Regional
Authorities) 178 National Day of Civic Hacking 107
literacy 210 Native Title Act 154
Littler, J. 199, 205 nature 1, 23, 165
local, and global 4, 18, 22–3, 214 Nelson, A. 6–7, 17–28
Local Agenda-21 18 neoliberalism 1–4, 22–3, 211; agency
local government 107, 176, 178, 184–5, 139–40, 146–7; co-working 94, 96,
189, 195 102; communicating 169–70; ethical
London 85, 94, 98–9, 125, 172, 204 consumers 201, 205
Low, S.M. 133 net neutrality 112
New Orleans 35
Index 221
New York 31 politics 48–9; lifestyle 200–2, 204–6

Niño, C. 131 popular settlements see informal
nutrition 46 settlements
Porto 107
Occupy 22, 25 post-capitalism 18, 23, 205–6
oil 44, 48 potent collectivities 168
One Place After Another 195 Potter, E. 166, 172
Ontiveros, T. 135 poverty 32, 61, 165; food 44, 47; gendered
operational questions 211–12 118–19
organisation 93–102, 132–4, 137 power relations 81, 134, see also
Organisation for Economic Cooperation empowerment
and Development (OECD) 80, 177–8 practical approach 5–6
Osborn, D. 1 praxis 17
Osborne, M. 177 principal–agent problem 83, 88–9
Oster, C. 166, 172 privacy 111
Our Say 100 privatisation 108
outsourcing 139 procedural rhetoric 173
overshoot 18 property 44–5, 150, 152, 154; gender 119,
own space 133 124
owner-occupiers 70, 81–2, 86, 89–90 property market 108
ownership see property property rights 81, 87, 156
Oxford University 106 prosperity 119
OzHarvest 43, 49 prostitution 123
psychology 30, 166–7
PALLACE 178 Public Governance and Territorial
Panarchy Model 31 Development 178
Parkinson, G. 4 public spaces 131–6, 142–4
parks 132–4, 136 Punto Fijo Pact 44
Parramatta 194 Putnam, R. 201
participation 10–12, 126, 201; arts 193,
197; engagement 155–7, 213–14; Quito 124
learning 183–4
participative democracy 24–5, 36 racism 32–3, 110, 125–6
passive design 72, 74 rationalities 166–7, 169, 171–2
PDVAL 45 rebounding 30–1, 35
Pelling, M. 35 redevelopment 145–6
Permablitz 206 redundancy 33–4
permaculture 24 reflexive modernity 140, 142
Peru 124 regional development 181–2
petroleum 44, 48 Reisacher, C. 155
Pfeiffer, U. 108 relational aesthetics 193
Phills, J. 105 Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) 89
photovoltaic (PV) see solar energy renting 81–5, 87–90, 124
Pickerill, J. 205 reproductive tax 121, 125
place 9–10, 191, 194–6; -making 135–6, republicanism 19–20, 23–4, 170–1
141–4; learning and 177–8, 180–3 resilience 7, 29–37
Places Victoria 72, 75 restaurants 42–3, 46, 48
planning 139, 141–2, 146–7, 154–8, 196 retrofitting 3, 83, 211
Planning Institute of Australia 154 reuse 203–4
Podemos 25, 211 rhetoric 93, 100–2, 169, 172–3
policy 5–6; housing 87–90 Riaño, Y. 135
polis 200 Rio de Janeiro 119
political talk 167–8, 173 riots 33, 44
Political Virtue and Shopping 202 Romero, G. 129
politicians 134, 143, 168–70 Rosa, E.A. 21
222 Index
Rose, D.B. 151, 156 solidarity 24, 214

Rotterdam 35–6 Soper, K. 204
Rueda Garcia, N. 129 space heating & cooling 73, 77–8, 82, 88
Ruef, M. 96 spaces 108, 129, 131–6, 142–4; design
Ruonavaara, H. 86 57–8, 64; gender 125–6; virtual/
rural–urban relations 212 physical 110
Rutten, R. 181–2, 185 Spain 71
Spinuzzi, C. 94–5
safe failure 33–4 splintered urbanism 33, 76
safety 125–6 sports 131, 143

Said College of Business 106 squatters 124–5, 137
Sáiz, A.V. 20 Standing, G. 101
San Francisco 95 Stanford University 106
Sandercock, L. 154, 196 state 2, 23–6, 48, 171; housing policy
sanitation 125 87–90
Santa Marta 132 State of Women in Cities 118–19
Scannell, P. 110 Sterling, S. 52
Scerri, A. 20 Stewart, R. 168
School Feeding Program 46 Stolle, D. 203
schools 122–3 street lighting 125–6
Schumpeter, J. 96, 105–6 Stringer, E.T. 189
Scope 190 structure 212
Sen, A. 36 subsidies 89
Sen, R. 123 suburbs 189, 194–6, 201
Sennett, R. 96 supermarkets 41–3, 45–6
sex workers 123 Supporting Urban Sustainability Program
sexuality 123–4 60–1
Sharda, B. 123 surveillance 111
Shiva, V. 127 sustainability 3, 18–19, 188; competence
shocks 30–3 54–5; resilience 36–7; responsibilities/
shopping 202–3 values 23–4; social learning 52–4, 63–4
Shove, E. 70 sustainability citizenship 1–12; arts
Simons, M. 59 197; co-working 93–4, 100–2;
site-specific practice 195 communicating 165–74; ethical
Situationists 193 consumption 200; futures 209–14;
SLIM project 59 gender 122, 126–7; glocal/national 21–
slums see informal settlements 3; housing 70, 78–9; Indigenous 151,
smart cities 179 153–4, 156–8; informal settlements
Smith, T. 193 130, 132, 135–7; learning cities 183–5;
SMS 122 place-making 140–2, 146–7; praxis
social change 50 17–21, 26, 29; social learning 56–8,
social entrepreneurship 93 64–5
social housing 81–4 Sweden 119, 170, 203
social inclusion 109, 213 Swedish International Centre
social innovation (SI) 8–9, 104–7, 109, of Education for Sustainable
111 Development 60–1
social justice 141, 144 Sydney 109–10, 194; co-workers 94, 97–8;
social learning 7–8, 35–6, 56–65 food 41–3, 46
social movements 106, 111
social networking 110 Taiwan 179
social practice theory 70 talking politically 167–8, 173
socialism 44–7, 165 Tanque Laguna 134
socially engaged practice 193 tax 89, 168
socio-ecological systems 31 technology 8, 213; co-working 95–7;
solar energy 3–4, 70–3, 79, 89 green housing 70–6, 78; learning cities
Index 223
178–9; social innovation 104, 106–8, Valentine, G. 123

110–12 values 23–4, 34–6, 47–8, 74, 135–6
TELS (Towards a European Learning Venezuela 47–9, 121, 135
Society) 178 Veniam 107
tenure 81–4, 86–7, 90 La Vía Campesina 24
Texas 94–6 Victoria (Australia) 155–7, 187–92,
Think–Plan–Do 140–1, 146–7 194–7, see also Melbourne
Thompson, G. 169 VicUrban 72, 75
Thrift, N. 170
Vienna 126
Tibaijuka, A. 126 Vietnam 124–5
Time magazine 199 violence 126
Toderi, M. 59 voice 157–8
Towards Cosmopolis 196 vulnerability 35
Trade at Hand 122
trafficking 123 Wallstrom, M. 119
transformative resilience 30–1, 35 Wals, A. 7, 52–66
transport 125–6 waste 49, 111, 125, 203–4
Trundle, A. 6–7
water 31, 59–60, 70, 72–6, 125
Twitter 110
Weber, M. 96, 105, 108
Weichselgartner, J. 35
UK 94, 106, 142; communication 172–3;
welfare 170
housing 84–5, 88–9
UN 118–19 WestWyck 72–4, 76–8
UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) 122 wetlands 59
UN Environment Programme 166–7 Whyte, W.H. 142
UN-Habitat 119, 121–2, 124, 126 wi-fi 107, 109, 213
uncertainty 53 wicked issues 58–9
UNESCO 178, 180–1, 183, 188, 197 wicked triangle 117, 119, 124, 126–7
UNESCO Institute of Lifelong Williams, R. 165–6
Learning (UIL) 180 Williams, S. 202
universities 59, 178, 184 Wilson, B. 11, 176–86
unknown sustainability 52–4 women see gender
urban care 104 work 93–4, 96, 100, 122
urban laboratories 194 World Bank 121
urban sustainability citizenship World Health Organisation 180
3–12, 209–14, see also cities; social Wurundjeri 150, 152–3
innovation; sustainability citizenship
urbanisation 139, 145 Yawuru 150, 156–7
urbanism 3; neoliberal 139–40, 146–7; Yawuru Cultural Management Plan
splintered 33, 76 (YCMP) 157
USA 32–3, 36, 94, 111, 142 York, R. 21
Vale, L.J. 34 Zittrain, J. 112


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“This edited collection is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the

Australia and author of Environment and Citizenship (2015)

“Achieving voluntary behaviour change to sustainable forms of living and

“Sustainability citizenship is a concept which can constructively move

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Urban sustainability citizenship situates citizens as social change agents with

Ralph Horne is Professor of Geography, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT

John Fien, formerly Professor of Sustainability in RMIT University’s Innovation

Beau B. Beza is Senior Lecturer in the Planning and Landscape Architecture

Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice

Sustainability Citizenship in Cities

Edited by Ralph Horne, John Fien, Beau B. Beza

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2016 selection and editorial matter, Ralph Horne, John Fien,

The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-138-93362-0 (hbk)

1 Sustainability citizenship in cities 1

2 The praxis of sustainability citizenship 17

3 Urban resilience for sustainability 29

4 Urban food security and alternative economic practices 40

5 Sustainability citizens: collaborative and disruptive social

6 Green housing developments: sustainability pathway or

7 Structuring housing provision for urban sustainability 80

8 Co-working communities: sustainability citizenship at work 93

9 Urban social innovation: mobilising sustainability citizenship 104

10 The gendered city 117

11 Informal settlements: sustainability citizenship in action 129

12 Places for sustainability citizenship 139

13 An Indigenous perspective on sustainability citizenship 150

14 Communicating sustainability in the city 165

15 The learning city for sustainability 176

16 Curating the city: encouraging sustainability 187

17 Ethical consumers and sustainability citizenship 199

18 Futures for sustainability citizenship 209

Beau B. Beza is Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Built

Tim Butcher is Senior Lecturer in the School of Management, RMIT University

Ferne Edwards is a cultural anthropologist specialising in sustainable cities,

John Fien is Executive Director of the Swinburne University Leadership

Annette Gough is Research Professor Emerita in the School of Education

Cathy Greenfield is Associate Professor of Communication at RMIT

Jaime Hernández-García is Associate Professor of the School of Architecture

settlements, low income housing, public space, people–place studies, community

Ralph Horne is Professor of Geography and Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor,

David Jones is Director of Planning and Landscape Architecture Programs in the

Ellis Judson is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Global Cities Research Institute

interactions between people, technology and the environment. She has conducted

Frans Lenglet received his doctorate in International Development Education

Tania Lewis – School of Media and Communication, RMIT University

Trivess Moore is a Research Fellow in the Beyond Behaviour Change group

Alexei Trundle is a Research Associate in the Global Cities Research Institute’s

Arjen E. J. Wals is a UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable

Bruce Wilson is Professor and Director of the EU-funded European Union

between RMIT University, University of Melbourne and the Government of

ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics

GCRI Global Cities Research Institute

IEA International Energy Agency

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Ralph Horne, John Fien, Beau B. Beza and