This paper accepts Ecologism’s basic argument that sustainable existence implies radical change in our relationship with the nonhuman world and in our social and political lives, and seeks to ascertain what ecologism implies for the city. The social and political aspects involved in transitioning a city to sustainable patterns are analyzed by scrutinizing three facets of the relationship between cities and the natural environment. The paper concludes with an analysis of the political and normative implications of these relations and argues (...) that transitioning cities into sustainable patterns requires a more profound civic politics of urban sustainability. (shrink)

Volume 23, Issue 1, March 2020, Page 53-69.

Everyday life practices are one of the focuses of interest for so-called ‘sustainable transitions’. Efforts in making daily life more ecological have ranged from awareness-raising and behaviour change strategies to socio-technical innovations, but have produced limited results so far. In a present characterised by a prolonged and multifaceted crisis it is imperative that, as social scientists, we interrogate the (un)sustainability of everyday practices from a more critical angle, linking them to reflections about capitalism's ecological destructiveness. One fruitful way of doing (...) so is to interrogate the dimension of subjectivity as a space where collective discourses, practices and desires are embodied in concrete experience and actions. Drawing on ethnographic material on everyday energy use, I suggest that contemporary ways of living certainly contribute to the overall reproduction of capitalism and yet, in the (dis)juncture of the crisis, more sustainable livelihoods can be experimented with and prefigured. Subjectivity is one crucial dimension in which this process unravels. (shrink)