Reconceptualising urban justice and sustainability

Alternative conceptual framings are a feature of many and diverse approaches to urban sustainability and/or justice, and in particular their intersections. Arguments in their favour range from the ethical to the instrumental: the moral right of all those living in cities to contribute to shaping their future, to the practical importance of diverse outlooks, ideas and capabilities in working towards sustainability and justice.

Why Reconceptualise Urban Justice and Sustainability?

The UrbanA project characterises both sustainability and justice in broad terms. It recognises that the concepts of sustainability and justice are both highly contested, and may be defined, understood and acted upon in many different ways. Particularly when sustainability and justice are considered together, this can challenge dominant notions of sustainability.

UrbanA considers sustainability as an intergenerational and multi-level phenomenon with multiple dimensions (social-cultural, economic, ecological). Sustainability may be understood and achieved in very different ways, depending on which of these are taken into account or given emphasis.

UrbanA understoods justice to include distribution of costs and benefits of sustainability interventions, patterns of participation and exclusion in decision-making and execution, and the extent to which action on sustainability accomodates diverse needs and expectations, particularly in relation to often-marginalised groups such as ethnic minorities, low income groups, the elderly, women and gender non-conforming people. Accomodating such diversity often involves challenging the tendency of certain powerful actors to dominate discussion and action on urban sustainability. This often leads to understandings of sustainability, and courses of action, very different from those promoted by such powerful incubments.

Shapes, Sizes and Applications

Many different academic fields and forms of practical action towards urban sustainability and justice call for, and in many cases offer, new conceptualisations of sustainability and/or justice.

Examples of academic reconceptualisations include:

• The observation from Energy Systems Studies that decarbonising energy systems is not simply a process of substituting fossil fuels with renewable energy technologies, but also requires dismantling social and political systems that 'lock in' dependence on fossil fuels.
• The recognition within Sustainability Science of the incompatibility between sustainability and dominant mindsets, and need for a paradigm shift in cultural outlook.
• Calls in Alternative Economics for new economic models that question the primacy of GDP growth as a macro-economic indicator and call for new approaches that seek to achieve societal welfare within sustainable limits.
• The establishment within Organisational and Management Studies of new approaches to collective planning that emphasise the need to question and move beyond established ways of thinking and acting.
• The emergence within Design Studies of the new field of Transition Design, which takes its lead from the 'pluriverse' of collaborative and place-based action for alternative futures, rooted in strong values of sustainability and justice.

The EU-funded ENTITLE Project (a training network within the Marie Curie action of FP7, 2012-2016) trained a cohort of 18 early career researchers in the academic field of Political Ecology. Political Ecology emphasises that environmental issues have inseparable social and political dimensions, and can neither be understood nor addressed without taking into account the uneven distribution of costs and benefits of environmental change across differences of class, race, ethnicity and gender, and the power imbalances these both reflect and engender.

The concept of Convergence was the central focus of the EU-funded CONVERGE project (FP7, 2009-2013). It is an extension of Aubrey Meyer's concept of Contraction and Convergence, created by the Global Commons Institute in the 1990s as a tool to promote equity in relation to climate change mitigation. Contraction referred to the reduction of global levels of greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels, Convergence to the equitable per capita distribution of rights to emit these emissions. CONVERGE extended this concept to areas such as access to natural resources, energy, governance, trade and human well-being, as an integrative framework for reconciling equity and respect for global environmental limits.

In terms of practical action, the TRANSIT project (FP7, 2013-2016), examined initiatives and networks involved in Transformative Social Innovation (TSI). TSI actors, which include many urban social change initiatives, adopt and enact values, practices and forms of social relations radically different from those of wider society.

• Ecovillages
• Transition towns
• Urban commons

• Examination of experiences of transport poverty among diverse groups, including children, migrants, women, elderly people, people with reduced mobility, inhabitants of rural or deprived areas and low income and/or unemployed people, revealed diverse expectations concerning mobility and transportation needs, requiring diverse technical and organisation approaches to transport provision.

• Urban displacment in southern European cities resulting from the post-2008 economic crisis has been a source of various anti-gentrification practices undertaken by affected, including action against eviction, privatization, speculation and austerity, that radically reshape understandings of urban exclusion and justice, the courses of action available to city authorities, and the consequences of these.

• Protest movements against toxic waste dumping in Naples matured into people'a assemblies that took power in municipal elections in 2016,

• In Barcelona, housing rights campaigner Ada Colau was elected mayor in 2015, part of a wave of popular protest movements to have come to power as part of the 'new municipalist' movement worldwide Alternative conceptual framings thus range across a broad spectrum of maturity, from isolated and tentative experiments to capture of dominant institutions.

Relation to UrbanA themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice

(Emphasize how important alternative thinking is to make cities more just & sustainability. I would propose an additional reflection on the importance of CONNECTING social justice and ecological sustainability. While there are many discourses on either one or the other, the linkages between the two are the real challenge.

Alternative conceptual framings also exhibit diversity in their conceptual maturity. An interview with Marilyn Hamilton of Integral City emphasised the importance of the integral approach, which integrates multiple perspectives within a meta-framework recognising that all phenomena have both interior/exterior and individual/collective dimensions, and develop and evolve in each of these. Approaches to sustainability and justice tend to emphasise exterior dimensions of phenomena, and in particular to overlook the caring qualities prominent in inner dimensions and essential for justice. Inclusion is another important feature of an integral approach, which honours pluralism and recognises that all perspectives express some degree of relative truth and bring valid insights into complex problems. Locating different perspectives on the integral map allows each to be honoured in its own terms, and enables collaboration towards inclusive action.

Alternative conceptual framings may arise in both urban and non-urban settings. Their establishment and maturity often benefits from a degree of cultural isolation perhaps most readily available in intentional communities, but also available in temporary or permanent alternative spaces in urban settings. Their co-existence has certainly been documented in cities, and may be evident at multiple scales from city-wide down, including 'frontier areas' where widely marked differences in affluence, and hence understandings and experiences of the city, may be evident among geographically close neighbours.

Narrative of change

(elaborate a bit more on a few concepts/approaches/perspective, clarifying what are the narratives of change behind them. Ideally provide 2-3 inspiring quotes from projects/publications that illustrate the narratives of change.)

The diverse approaches here aggregated as alternative conceptual framings have in common a critique of dominant framings as either failing to address sustainability and justice, or even incorporating unsustainability and injustice as direct and inherent outcomes. An explicit political ecology of this type characterises the degrowth and postgrowth movements, which assert that commitment to GDP growth as a structural condition for macro-economic stability is fundamentally incompatible with sustainability, often generates and exacerbates injustice, and undermines democracy by excluding alternatives from serious consideration. While explicit in this case, such a critique may be implicit or even absent in others, which simply seek to recognise, make visible and empower marginalised and excluded perspectives. The latter may limit themselves simply to asserting the ethical case for pluralism, particularly in urban populations that might be highly heterogenous; others might additionally assert that diversity of perspective is, in addition, a necessary resource for achieving justice and sustainability, and overcoming apparent tensions or incompatibilities between the two.

Transformative potential

(Explain how the concepts here differ from dominant/mainstream thinking about e.g. urban planning, and also addressing some differences and points of contestation (e.g. degrowth vs. growth).)

The inherently counter-hegemonic nature of these approaches tends to marginalise them in relation to established institutions and dominant modes of thought and action, with mixed consequences in terms of their effectiveness and maturity. Some, such as squatters on Barcelona's urban periphery, deliberately distance themselves from accepted discourse and practice and operate as 'uncivil' initiatives, contravening laws perceived to be unjust and cultivating popular legitimacy through socially responsible action in their immediate neighbourhoods. Others have found mixed success in seeking compromise with incumbent regimes. Community-based initiatives that constitute as officially recognised organisations often find themselves subject to a phenomenon known as coercive isomorphism, where the need to sustain the chosen legal form creates pressures that are at odds with their basic premises and preferred ways of operating. Such effects can be exacerbated by participation in funding schemes that assume or favour particular organisational models, framing concepts and modes of action.</ref> Such tensions create risks of co-option by the very dominant framings they seek to challenge, limiting or even directly contradicting their stated goals.