In recent years, the discourse of “sustainability” has moved decisively from the margins to the mainstream. Yet for all its ubiquity—and perhaps in part because of it—the underlying concept of sustainability is used in competing and often contradictory ways. As with other utopian projects, this futuristic ideal can inspire vital experiments and new collectivities, yet at the same time, lead to projects that are uncritical and exclusionary. And while the most commonly cited definition of sustainability, the balance between “ecology, economy, and equity,” from the United Nations’ Bruntland Report of 1987 —a.k.a. the “3 E’s”— has helped focus initiatives around the world, the politics of sustainable development has meant such balance is all too rarely achieved, with economic competitiveness and growth tending to take precedence over equity and ecology in cases across the global north and south. (See e.g. Bulkeley and Walker, 2006; Krueger and Gibbs, 2007; Mansfield, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2010; Agyeman, 2013; Chapple, 2014; Checker et al., 2015) Thus we must consider how and to what degree current sustainability projects offer answers to the urgent social, ecological, and economic issues of our day, and how the values immanent within the concept can and should be realized. Underlying these dilemmas are critical questions: What is to be sustained? For whom? And who gets to decide?
The San Francisco Bay Area, renowned for its progressive environmental policies and social movements (Walker, 2009), has long been at the center of struggles over the promise and perils of “sustainability.” From debates over the agro-ecology and inequalities underlying “organic” agriculture and “locavore” cuisine, to concern that “green urbanism” is pushing out low-income residents and exacerbating sprawl, to the recent controversy over the impact of tech industry shuttle buses on public mass transit, this region has been at the creative and contentious forefront of efforts to realize the dream of a sustainable future. (See e.g. Guthman, 2005; Mozingo, 2011; Henderson, 2013; Brahinsky, 2014; Dillon, 2014; Miller, 2014) For the last three years a research group in northern California, inspired by these debates, has been developing a core set of projects that employ what we call a “critical sustainabilities” framework to analyze emerging sustainability discourse and practice. We use a variety of critical methods in this analysis, taking seriously how questions of power, difference, place, and history shape our uses of the concept. The research team has produced a public-facing website that presents case studies in the form of geographic “sites” and conceptual “keywords” in and through which knowledge about sustainability has been produced and debates have played out. (See critical-sustainabilities.ucsc.edu, and Greenberg, 2013).
This research group hosted four AAG sessions to advance a broader field of “critical sustainability studies.” These panels both addressed the particularity of sustainability research in the Bay Area and California, taking advantage of the 2016 location of AAG, and moved beyond this region to take on a global and comparative focus. We addressed the following questions
- How might we narrate a genealogy of the “sustainability” concept, and of related fields such as “sustainable development” and “sustainable urbanism”?
- Might we say that there are multiple forms of sustainability in circulation, and if so what are these, and what are their distinct epistemologies?
- What are the challenges to maintaining balance between the “3 E’s”?
- What is the political economy and political ecology of sustainability? And to what degree do meta-theories, such as of neoliberalism or post-colonialism, help us make sense of its rise and contradictions?
- How does the term travel across particular spaces and times? How is it transformed in relation to particular projects, places, and networks?
- Is there a case to be made for privileging certain scales of analysis and action, such as the urban, regional, and/or planetary?
- Is there a case to be made for privileging certain moments, such as post crisis redevelopment, and the interface between sustainability and resiliency planning?
- How are geographic concepts generally—such as those of scale, territory, and uneven spatial development— relevant to our understanding of sustainability?
- How are temporal concepts generally—such as historical ruptures caused by crisis, epochal notions of the anthropocene, and/or futuricity and utopianism—relevant?
- How can we think comparatively about the uses of “sustainability” across the global North and South, and between cities and regions?
- How does “sustainability” get measured, by whom, and with what effects? Are alternative metrics or methods in order?
- What is the significance of the materiality of sustainability projects: e.g. their interaction with infrastructure, morphology, or urban metabolism?
- What is the significance of who is “at the table” when sustainability plans are imagined and implemented? How do race, class, gender, and other forms of social difference and inequality affect—and get affected by— the discourse, practice, and governance of sustainability?
- How have different scientific and cultural understandings of “nature,” both human and non-human, shaped approaches to sustainability?
- What has been the role of political and social movements or actors in the framing and implementation of sustainability projects, and/or in resistance to them?
- How might the radical, utopian promises of “sustainability” best be realized, or not?
For information on the AAG meeting, please see: http://www.aag.org/annualmeeting
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