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Time and space for social-ecological transformation: care-full commoning in and beyond the ecofeminist city
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Using an (eco-)feminist Marxist-Polanyian theoretical lens, this article explores the diverse relations between contemporary care-crisis symptoms in Western Europe and its generative structures. It investigates the potential of three possible responses to the crisis to transform rather than reproduce these structures: (un)conditional cash transfers, universal basic services, and time politics. Drawing upon critical realism and the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention, we seek to make sense of the dynamic between competing crisis construals and their effects on actuality. To answer our research question What are the transformative potentials of different responses to the contemporary care crisis in Western Europe?, we move from meta-theoretical abstractions to a theoretically grounded, concrete application of critical realism in the social sciences. We conclude that a symbiosis of time politics and universal basic services together with a universal, but not unconditional, guaranteed (minimum) income offers substantial transformative potentials.
This article explores the structural conservatism of mainstream environmental politics, which systematically avoids problematising 'forms-of-life' (normative practices and routines), and develops a conceptual alternative: eco-social politics. This concept positions itself in a quest to change the grammar of environmental politics by embedding it in the lived materiality of everyday life, but differs from prefigurative movement-oriented strategies by prioritising the integration of majority populations and by acknowledging the role of political rule-setting, i.e. coercion. Building on a multi-level integral state project, eco-social politics resides in particular strategies, procedures, and institutions to collectively (re)negotiate common sense, with the aim to partially and pragmatically suture social relations to find transformative answers to contemporary eco-social crises. Here, I explore potentials for stronger dialectical links between deliberative and representative democratic institutions.
Empirical researchers of environmental alternative action organizations (EAAOs) have called for grounding two eco-political theories: David Schlosberg's sustainable materialism (SM) and Ingolfur Blühdorn's simulative politics (SP). In this article, I discuss results of an ethnographic study on a library of things, a cloth swapping initiative, and a community garden in the City of Vienna, Austria. Regarding SM, participants indeed suffer from a lack of substantive eco-political actions by liberal democratic institutions and themselves personally, however they barely convey a new materialist ontology. Regarding SP, participants indeed show an ambivalence towards consumer capitalism and ecological commitments, yet they tend to be highly critical and reflexive on the matter. Both theories are unable to detect that the EAAOs fill an eco-political lacuna in Vienna's foundational economy: Via positive framing and flexible participation virtually everyone-the crowd-is invited to co-create sustainable routines. As such, they represent rudimentary infrastructures of green everyday life.
The building of the Lobau Autobahn was cancelled after 20 years of preparations and disputes. It should be the last part of Vienna's new 203 km long bypass. The Lobau Autobahn includes the Lobau tunnel under the Danube and the Donau-Auen National Park. The analysis of reports on this project and some press materials shows that the cancellation of the project results from the rescheduled relations between further development of the road network, the compact city concept, and environmental protection. Reports were prepared by the Expert Group and by TU Wien. The first suggests the necessity to build the Lobau Autobahn for further development of Vienna. The climate targets should be fulfilled by introducing other measures than stopping building new car roads. The second report postulates cancelling the plan to build the Lobau Autobahn. According to this report, the project is incompatible with the climate targets and the compact city concept. Additionally, the organisation 'Science for Future' supports the position expressed in the report prepared by TU Wien. The presented differences have a reason in different assumptions adopted by the authors of the reports, not in the incorrectness of one of the reports.
This article considers the potential of Public-Common Partnerships (PCPs) to act as a new muni-cipalist intervention against the privatisation and financialisation of land in the UK. In previous publications, we have presented PCPs in abstract terms as a municipalist organisational form that could help communities eschew the disciplinary effects of finance capital to pursue alternative democratic forms of urban development. Here, we start to examine what this process looks like in practice. The article draws from ongoing participatory action research in two contrasting case studies, Wards Corner in Haringey and Union Street in Plymouth. We find that by establishing enduring organisational structures where collective decisions can be made about who owns and manages land and assets, PCPs could bolster already existing efforts to democratise urban development in both cities. As an organisational form, PCPs reframe the 'local' as a politics of proximity , decentre and reimagine the role of municipal institutions and foreground a politics of the common. This makes them an archetypal new municipalist strategy, well-suited to contesting the enclosure of urban landscapes. The article concludes by considering the development of PCPs within the broader new municipalist tendency.
Different critical perspectives have long insisted on the need for systemic change. Today we must recognize that change is already underway. Now the urgent question is to find ways to govern that change with justice and equity. This text contributes to the horizontal dialogue between these critical perspectives from a particular site of
enunciation. This site is notably situated in the zones of accumulation throughout the globe—in this fortress called Europe, even if in its internal peripheries (the Spanish state, one of the “PIGS”: Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain)—from which it articulates a collaborative work with Abya Yala. Through “emancipatory feminist economics,” we hope to contribute partial truths to our common understanding, as part of a search for collective cartographies with which to guide
the ecosocial transition in which we are immersed.
The Working Group III (WG III) contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) assesses literature on the scientific, technological, environmental, economic and social aspects of mitigation of climate change. The report reflects new findings in the relevant literature and builds on previous IPCC reports, including the WG III contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), the WG I and WG II contributions to AR6 and the three Special Reports in the Sixth Assessment cycle, as well as other UN assessments. Some of the main developments relevant for this report include an evolving international landscape, increasing diversity of actors and approaches to mitigation, close linkages between climate change mitigation, adaptation and development pathways, and increasing diversity of analytic frameworks from multiple disciplines including social sciences. Strengthened collaboration between IPCC Working Groups is reflected in Cross-Working Group boxes that integrate physical science, climate risks and adaptation, and the mitigation of climate change. The Summary for Policymakers (SPM), the Technical Summary and the entire report is available from: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/
This theoretical paper synthesises research on the foundational economy and its contribution to a social-ecological transformation. While foundational thinking offers rich concepts and policies to transition towards such transformation, it fails to grasp the systematic non-sustainability of capitalism. This weakness can be overcome by enriching contemporary foundational thinking with feminist and ecological economics. Whereas the feminist critique problematises foundational think-ing's focus on paid labour, the ecological critique targets Sen's capability approach as a key inspiration of foundational thinking, arguing that a theory of human needs is better suited to conceptualise wellbeing within planetary boundaries. Based on this, we outline a novel schema of economic zones and discuss their differentiated contributions to the satisfaction of human needs. By privileging need satisfaction, such broadened foundational thinking demotes the tradable sector and rentier economy, thereby revaluating unpaid work as well as respecting ecological imperatives. This empowers new articulations of social and ecological struggles to improve living conditions in the short run, while having the potential in the long run to undermine capitalism from within.
Energy infrastructure conflicts often reflect fundamental disagreements which cannot be resolved by merely designing better governance processes. They pose complex systemic questions related to justice and do so often with a global reach. This article discusses how social movements using civil disobedience challenge democratic procedures related to energy transitions. We concentrate on justifications of civil disobedience through a case study of Ende Gelände – a climate justice alliance operating mainly in Germany – and its contestation of coal mining. The results reflect the tension between the right to resistance, the demands of liberal democracy and other aspects of democratic legitimation.
1.5 °C scenarios reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rely on combinations of controversial negative emissions and unprecedented technological change, while assuming continued growth in gross domestic product (GDP). Thus far, the integrated assessment modelling community and the IPCC have neglected to consider degrowth scenarios, where economic output declines due to stringent climate mitigation. Hence, their potential to avoid reliance on negative emissions and speculative rates of technological change remains unexplored. As a first step to address this gap, this paper compares 1.5 °C degrowth scenarios with IPCC archetype scenarios, using a simplified quantitative representation of the fuel-energy-emissions nexus. Here we find that the degrowth scenarios minimize many key risks for feasibility and sustainability compared to technology-driven pathways, such as the reliance on high energy-GDP decoupling, large-scale carbon dioxide removal and large-scale and high-speed renewable energy transformation. However, substantial challenges remain regarding political feasibility. Nevertheless, degrowth pathways should be thoroughly considered.
This paper contributes an intersectional feminist analysis and methodological approach to debates about commoning and social enterprise. Through a narrative description of feminist social enterprise projects based on action research with the Kinning Park Complex, a social centre with a radical history in Glasgow’s South Side, I demonstrate how contemporary community economic development models can entrench intersectional exclusion. Specifically, I show how market‐oriented social enterprise models reproduce precarious work, hinder cooperative ethics, and promote depoliticised notions of difference. However, I also investigate the ways that community organisers and activists at KPC are re‐working these neoliberal models to carve out spaces for feminist commoning. Through these acts, women‐identifying and non‐binary activists, artists, and community organisers grapple with the classed, raced, and gendered politics of community organising and foster solidarities across difference.
Based on a Polanyi-inspired research program, we analyze urban transformations as interrelations between infrastructural configurations, i.e. context-dependent material infrastructures and their multi-scalar political-economic regulations, and socio-cultural modes of living. Describing different modes of infrastructure provisioning in Vienna between 1890 and today, we illustrate how political-economic processes of commodification and decommodification have co-evolved with socio-culturally specific modes of living, grounded in different classes and milieus. We show how, today, two modes of living-"traditional," established during postwar welfare capitalism, and "liberal," formed during neoliberal capitalism-co-exist. In the current conjuncture of rising inequality, neoliberal urban regeneration, and accelerating climate crisis, these modes of living are not only increasingly polarized and antagonistic, but also increasingly unable to satisfy needs and self-defined aspirations. Therefore, we explore the potential of social-ecological infrastructural configurations as an alliance-building project for a systemic social-ecological transformation, potentially linking different classes, social segments and forces around a common eco-social endeavor.
This article examines the limits and potential of the state in orchestrating sustainability transitions from the standpoint of critical theory on the green state. Two interrelated questions are posed. First, to what extent are democratic capitalist states necessarily compromised in their functional capacity to orchestrate ecological sustainability? Second, in light of this analysis, how can a theory of the green state that claims to be critical and transformative, rather than merely problem-solving, provide practical guidance to state and societal change agents in approaching the political challenges of ecological transition? A critical method for approaching these challenges is outlined, encompassing conjunctural analysis followed by situated, critical problem solving, which is geared to identifying the ‘next best transition steps’ with the greatest long-term transformational potential. The method is briefly illustrated in relation to the critical conjuncture presented by the coronavirus pandemic.
Under regimes of austerity, social movements´ transformative eco-politics may appear endangered. What kinds of environmentalism and radical imaginaries can unfold in social movements in crisis-ridden societies? I focus on the ‘movement of the squares’ during its post-encampment phase, with a case study of three urban projects of the Indignados movement in Barcelona. Observation of these projects reveals the importance of three common and intertwined radical imaginaries embodied in participants’ social practices and orienting their future visions: the commons, autonomy, and ecologism. The ecologism imaginary cannot be properly understood if disembedded from the other two: the ‘Indignant’ projects constitute community structures re-embedding (re)production, jointly covering and generating needs differently, in response to the global capitalist forces that are threatening their social reproduction. Eco-politics can only be plausibly transformative if it is able to articulate a politics of intersectionality linking social reproduction with ecological interconnectedness and struggles against dispossessions and social injustice.
What are the capacities of the state to facilitate a comprehensive sustainability transition? It is argued that structural barriers akin to an invisible 'glass ceiling' are inhibiting any such transformation. First, the structure of state imperatives does not allow for the addition of an independent sustainability imperative without major contradictions. Second, the imperative of legitimation is identified as a crucial component of the glass ceiling. A distinction is introduced between 'lifeworld' and 'system' sustainability, showing that the environmental state has created an environmentally sustainable lifeworld, which continues to be predicated on a fundamentally unsustainable reproductive system. While this 'decoupling' of lifeworld from system sustainability has alleviated legitimation pressure from the state, a transition to systemic sustainability will require deep changes in the life-world. This constitutes a renewed challenge for state legitimation. Some speculations regarding possible futures of the environmental state conclude the article.
A commoning framework offers a critical lens to fully appreciate the scope and impact of alternative food networks (AFNs). Fieldwork from an AFN in southern China is drawn upon to show how commoning enacts changes in how members contextualise and anchor their social relations to one another with regards to sourcing food as a commons. A commoning framework gives a fuller picture of how the constitutive effects of AFNs reside not in their introduction of a new uniformity but in their navigation of the multiplicity of the social through its proposition and co-construction of a new ‘cognitive praxis’.
Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a ‘safe and just’ development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial. Achieving a high quality of life within the biophysical limits of the planet is a significant challenge. This study quantifies the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, compares it to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations and finds that no country meets its citizens’ basic needs sustainably.
Squatting in the metropolitan area of Barcelona is analysed here by distinguishing protest cycles and larger sociopolitical contexts. The authors identify different social movements related to both squatted social centres (SSCs) and housing struggles. Why have SSCs hardly ever been institutionalised? How do SSCs differ from squatting for housing? This chapter examines how specific political opportunity structures shape squatters’ tactics and orientations. In particular, three relevant contexts are highlighted—legislative changes, global mobilisations, and the emergence of social movements at the national level. In addition, the authors discuss how state repression narrowed the political opportunities for squatting.
One of the unique and emerging responses to the current ecological, social, political and economic crises has been the emergence of community initiatives in a range of formulas and geographical contexts. We explore their emergence and evolution beyond the analysis of a single fixed set of factors that are expected to contribute to their initiation and growth. Upon reviewing the trajectories of various initiatives in the region of Barcelona (Spain), we argue that the metaphor of the fertile soil provides a useful framework to describe or explain the messy process of emergence and evolution of grassroots and community projects. Fertile soil is understood here as a particular quality of the social texture, characterized by richness, diversity, unknowns but also – by multiple tensions and contradictions. Yet it is not only the diversity of factors but the quality of their mutual relatedness that ‘makes’ the soil fertile for the emergence of new groups and the continuation of existing ones. Importantly, the seemingly messy social base in which community initiatives emerge is nourished by their inner and outer contradictions. Likewise, the space opened by dealing with conflicting rationalities creates the conditions for new and more resilient strategies and structures to emerge. As community initiatives get established, the ‘fertile dilemmas’ they frequently face become a key driver of their evolutionary context, contributing to the emergence of new social imaginaries and ways of producing social change.
Social-ecological transformation” is an umbrella term which describes recent political, socioeconomic, and cultural shifts resulting from attempts to address the social-ecological crisis. On the one hand, think tanks and international organizations have issued reports which provide for an interpretation of the crisis and propose ways out of it. Their common denominator is that economic growth can be reconciled with social and environmental objectives. On the other hand, there is an academic debate in progress which at least in part addresses the crisis in more fundamental ways, challenging not only existing technologies and market structures, but also the underlying patterns of production and consumption. It is informed by social ecology, practice theory and political ecology. This entry presents these two strands of the debate and suggests a combination of political ecology and critical political economy as a means for better understanding the crisis and for informing the emancipatory strategies designed to address it.
Recent literature has pointed to the role of urban agriculture in self-empowerment and learning, and in constituting ways to achieve food justice. Building on this work the paper looks at the potential and constraints for overcoming the residual and contingent status of urban agriculture. The first part of the paper aims to expand traditional class/race/ethnicity discussions and to reflect on global, cultural, procedural, capability, distributional and socio-environmental forms of injustice that unfold in the different stages of urban food production. The second part reflects on how to bring forward food justice and build a politics of engagement, capability and empowerment. Three interlinked strategies for action are presented: (1) enhancing the reflexivity and cohesion of the urban food movement by articulating a challenge to neoliberal urbanism; (2) converging urban and agrarian food justice struggles by shaping urban agroecology; and (3) regaining control over social reproduction by engaging with food commoning.
Debates on provisioning systems have become more widespread in recent years. Most of these discussions, however, have centered on the monetized economy. While they have elaborated on actors and institutions in the monetized economy, they tend to ignore the foundational role of unpaid provisioning processes. this article contributes to provisioning systems scholarship by foregrounding this indispensable yet invisibilized foundation of production, distribution, and consumption. in doing so, we combine different approaches on provisioning systems in social ecology, political ecology, and political economy with chronologically older feminist economics debates on social provisioning to arrive at an ecofeminist political economy conceptualization of social-ecological provisioning. We elaborate on this conceptualization by drawing upon the example of food provisioning, thereby showing that people provision for themselves, their families, and their communities through closely interlinked paid and unpaid provisioning practices. Only by acknowledging the central role of actors and institutions in the non-monetized economy and by taking an intersectional approach to the questions of who provides and who is provided for can a more holistic picture of food provisioning be drawn. in the last part of the article, we discuss ecofeminist strategies that strengthen non-monetized social-ecological provisioning without monetizing it, thereby questioning the arbitrariness of what is (un-/under-)paid in capitalist economies.
Over the past half century, time-use studies have become a leading method for researching unpaid care work, especially in the multidisciplinary field of gender divisions of household work and care and in feminist international studies on counting and accounting for women’s unpaid work. Although attention to conceptual and methodological refinements in time-use methods is increasing, more focus on the challenges of conceptualizing and measuring care responsibilities, the limitations of measuring relational care practices with clock time, the existence of other kinds of time, and the epistemological and ontological moorings of time-use studies is needed. Two research programs inform this article: qualitative and longitudinal research with Canadian households in which parents were challenging norms, practices, and ideologies of male breadwinning and female caregiving; and the development of a feminist ecological ethico-onto-epistemological approach to knowledge making. A case study from the first program and several pivotal ideas drawn from the second—about relational ontologies, multiple ontologies, and the ethico-political dimensions of knowledge making—support three key arguments advanced in this article. First, I argue for a deeper interrogation of methodological and epistemological matters in coding, classifying, and categorizing care tasks in time-use studies. Second, I maintain that care responsibilities exist as “process time”; they can be narrated, but they cannot be measured in fixed units of clock time. Third, I maintain that it is not only possible, but politically and conceptually important for researchers to look beyond clock time, to recognize the ontological multiplicity of time, including relational and non-linear time and to embrace and use different kinds of time. This article is part of a growing call to reimagine how we think about, conceptualize, measure, and make knowledges about time, time use, and care-time intra-actions.
The transformation of local state institutions by way of the paradigm of the common – the creation of commons–state institutions – has become one of the strategies of new municipalist practices. It is an attempt to overcome two crises: the crises of both the privatised and the bureaucratic state forms. It aims to take back the production and distribution of the ‘public’ by the state and to democratise this process. The article analyses the discursive use and material implementation of the paradigm of the common in the transformation of local state institutions, and how contested meanings attributed to it by different actors may influence the definition of commons–state institutions. It analyses two new municipalist contexts, Naples and Barcelona, and examines the common-inspired transformation of their local public services: water services and sociocultural facilities, respectively. It argues that commons–state institutions are negotiated institutional configurations that emerge from the synthesis of the situated and experimental interpretation of the paradigm of the common shared by (different segments of) state and civil society actors, and whose governance needs to be adequately and openly codified to make them robust and enduring.
The term social infrastructure is increasingly being discussed in academic literature, policy reports and public forums. We might even go so far as to say it is the latest buzzword. Feminist economists understand social infrastructures as encompassing all aspects of social reproduction, but these ideas are routinely sidelined in wider debates. This article provides a critical reading of key trends in the ways the term social infrastructure is currently being defined and deployed: namely, as being equivalent to social spaces and spaces of sociability, such as community centres, parks and libraries, rather than being understood in terms of labour, gender and social reproduction. Part of the reason for this is the association between social reproduction and the home, which leads to a dismissal of reproductive work in communities at large. In writing about infrastructures more generally, it is not uncommon for gendered labour, care and reproduction to go completely ignored, or at least to only be discussed in relation to physical infrastructure. This simultaneous erasure and co-optation of feminist ideas has the effect of diminishing, diluting and marginalising the role of social reproduction as the foundation of our economy and society. It is therefore also a form of depoliticisation. In the article's conclusion, the case is made for recognising and reclaiming social reproduction as social infrastructure: an infra-structural approach could help alleviate long-standing tensions in definitions of social reproduction as both process and practice, and as operating on multiple scales.
The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has compromised the ‘healthy cities’ vision, as it has unveiled the need to give more prominence to caring tasks while addressing intersectional social inequities and environmental injustices. However, much-needed transdisciplinary approaches to study and address post-COVID-19 healthy cities challenges and agendas have been scarce so far. To address this gap, we propose a ‘just ecofeminist healthy cities’ research approach, which would be informed by the caring city, environmental justice, just ecofeminist sustainability and the healthy cities paradigms and research fields. Our proposed approach aims to achieve the highest standards of human health possible for the whole population—yet putting the health of socially underprivileged residents in the centre—through preserving and/or improving the existing physical, social and political environment. Importantly, the proposed approach recognises all spheres of daily life (productive, reproductive, personal and political) and their connections with inequities, justice and power dynamics. Last, the just ecofeminist healthy cities approach understands human health as interconnected with the health of non-human animals and the ecosystem. We illustrate the proposed new approach focusing on the implications for women’s health and public green spaces research and propose principles and practices for its operationalisation.
This paper addresses the question of how to organize care in degrowth societies that call for social and ecological sustainability, as well as gender and environmental justice, without prioritizing one over the other. By building on degrowth scholarship, feminist economics, the commons, and decolonial feminisms, we rebut the strategy of shifting yet more unpaid care work to the monetized economy, thereby reinforcing the separation structure in economics. A feminist degrowth imaginary implies destabilizing prevalent dichotomies and overcoming the (inherent hierarchization in the) boundary between the monetized economy and the invisibilized economy of socio-ecological provisioning. The paper proposes an incremental, emancipatory decommodification and a commonization of care in a sphere beyond the public/private divide, namely the sphere of communitarian and transformative caring commons, as they persist at the margins of capitalism and are (re-)created by social movements around the world.
Wendy Harcourt is associate professor at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University. She was editor-in-chief of the journal Development from 1995 to 2012 and during that period published five books, including Women and Politics of Place with Arturo Escobar (Kumarian Press, 2005). Her monograph Body Politics in Development: Critical Debates in Gender and Development (Zed Books, 2009) received the 2010 Feminist and Women's Studies Association's Prize. She is currently completing three books on transnational feminism, embodiment and civic change, and gender and development, and is editor of the book series Gender, Development and Social Change.
Ingrid L. Nelson is assistant professor in the Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Vermont. She completed her PhD in geography and a graduate certificate in women's and gender studies from the University of Oregon. Her research in Mozambique examines masculinities, class and gender dynamics in forest conservation; afforestation ‘land grabs’; and illegal timber trade contexts. She is currently preparing a monograph focused on the practices and rumours that make forest landscapes in Mozambique. Beyond academia, she contributed to the Women's Major Group submission for the ‘zero draft’ document, leading up to Rio+20.
This analysis discusses the lived experiences of Black American women as the basis for a new theoretical framework for understanding women’s unpaid work. Feminist economists have called attention to the invisibility of women’s unpaid work within the private household but have not adequately considered the unpaid, nonmarket work that women perform collectively to address urgent community needs that arise out of racial and ethnic group disparities. As such, racialized women’s unpaid, nonmarket work continues to be subject to invisibility. This analysis reconceptualizes Black women’s community activism as unpaid, nonmarket “work” and illustrates that the community is a primary site of nonmarket production by Black women and other racialized women. The community is an important site where racialized women perform unpaid, nonmarket collective work to improve the welfare of community members and address community needs not met by the public and private sectors. The analysis elevates the community to a site of production on par with the household, thereby calling for a paradigm shift in feminist economic conceptualizations of unpaid work. This new framework enables us to examine intersectional linkages across different sites of production—firms, households, and communities—where multiple forms of oppression operate in structuring peoples’ lives. Compared with additive models of gender and race, this intersectional approach more fully captures the magnitude of racialized women’s oppression.
The climate emergency demands that principles and practices of justice and injustice, harm, loss, suffering, and hope are revisited, to encompass both the human and the natural world and the many interconnections between them. Following work on the Unknown Other in climate justice discourse, I examine a relational space of proximity, empathy, and responsibility across human and non-human Others to advance current understandings of multispecies justice. Via four types of encounters – the visual, the embodied, the ethical, and the political – it is possible to engage in empathetic experiences with and enact responsibility toward infinite other beings and confront layers of shared vulnerabilities and histories of silencing and erasures. These encounters across space and time make tangible what a nature of human and more-than-human togetherness and solidarity may look like and what ethics and politics would be required to overcome untenable human exceptionalism in today’s crises.
The idea that sustainability requires changing individuals’ routines and choices has for decades been regarded as tantamount to the depoliticization of environmentalism. But the 21st century has seen a shift toward considering ‘everyday material practices’ as driving a new wave in environmental politics. Claims about the radical potential of material practices have led some scholars down new theoretical paths and reaffirmed old critiques for others. Viewing this development through an ecofeminist lens uncovers problematic oversights. Starting from the position that ecofeminist theory has never not been grounded in materiality, I offer two arguments. First, it is wrong to accept claims of newness in an ‘everyday turn’ that ignore the past and overlook their specificity. Second, if this turn represents a new scholarly agenda, then old ecofeminist insights about the politics of everyday living should be incorporated. Both my arguments call for reflection on the politics of publishing in environmental politics.
The concept of Anthropocene has been incorporated within a hegemonic narrative that represents 'Man' as the dominant geological force of our epoch, emphasizing the destruction and salvation power of industrial technologies. This Element will develop a counter-hegemonic narrative based on the perspective of earthcare labour – or the 'forces of reproduction'. It brings to the fore the historical agency of reproductive and subsistence workers as those subjects that, through both daily practices and organized political action, take care of the biophysical conditions for human reproduction, thus keeping the world alive. Adopting a narrative justice approach, and placing feminist political ecology right at the core of its critique of the Anthropocene storyline, this Element offers a novel and timely contribution to the environmental humanities.
The notions of care and stewardship are at the root of all practices concerning food production – from ploughing the soil and sowing, to harvesting, cooking, preserving and composting. Yet, in contrast to cooking, cultivating land is often not perceived as ‘classical’ care work. Instead, care is mostly framed as an interhuman activity concerned with human sustenance and reproduction and therefore, associated mostly with household work, raising children and taking care of the elderly (Waerness 1984; Jochimsen 2003). Given that care remains a rather marginalised category, my goal in this chapter is to reinforce and enrich the discourse on care in degrowth scholarship by demonstrating how food self-provisioning (FSP) in both urban and periurban areas is grounded in ideas of care and stewardship, not only as an interhuman act, but also in connection to the soil and surrounding environment. In this sense, caring means ‘reaching out to something other than the self’ (Tronto 1993, 102) implying a deep empathy with other (living) beings, as well as being followed by some form of action.
Drawing on four of Tronto’s (1993) five expressions of care, I demonstrate that, despite seeming ‘irrational’ in economic terms, FSP is essentially a very rational act of care based on a deep understanding of interdependence and mutual vulnerability between humans and nonhuman nature (Gottschlich 2012).
Care manifests as reciprocal ‘caring about’, ‘care-giving’ and ‘care-receiving’ with the surrounding environment, the gardener’s community and oneself. In this case study, I explore how notions of care are expressed in FSP, and how they can all be recognised as predominant intrinsic motives behind this practice. In contrast, I display how promises and narratives of industrial agriculture fall into Tronto’s fourth category (‘taking care of’) as rather ‘masculine’, ‘public’ and ‘loud’ manifestations
of care. Tronto’s (2013) subsequent, fifth, dimension of care (‘caring
with’) constitutes a less hierarchical relationship as well as a complex interdependence between both counterparts (care-giver and care-receiver) so might provide an additional (potentially more appropriate) framework for analysing care in FSP practice. However, in this chapter the focus lies on the other four dimensions of care for the sake of nuanced analysis of specific aspects and motives of care practice with regard to FSP.
Urban gardens, consolidating spaces as new urban commons, are faced with the contradiction and challenge of being embedded in neoliberal landscapes of urban governance. While their transformative and justice potential has often, and rightly, been celebrated –offering new pathways towards food security and sovereignty; serving social empowerment and political engagement; making cities greener, healthier and more participatory– the mechanisms that can limit such potential have not been explored as much. Focusing on community gardens that have received some municipal support, we apply a feminist political ecology lens to examine the so far under-theorized role of care and time in urban gardens, and the way these aspects are conditioning the sustenance and just distribution of benefits that we know can emerge from urban gardens. Our qualitative empirical analysis of eight municipally supported gardens in Athens, Barcelona, Dublin and Leipzig examines the conflicting timeframes and priorities that gardening projects often have to navigate, revealing how the function of urban gardens is constrained by two types of ‘clashing temporalities’: (i) the invisibility of gardening needs and of their social benefits in a context of limited structural support, and (ii) the undermining of care materialities in light of short municipal timeframes and fast urban growth.
Given profound urban challenges amplified by COVID-19, we need to center anti-racist feminists’ lenses oncare, commoning, and collectivity in our cultivations and analyses of urban change. We join a chorus of feminists that critique the devaluation, erasure, and isolation of care in the cities that we build and the stories we tell about them. But this is well-traversed territory, the ‘me too’ tale of every feminist who dreamsa different city or kind of urban theory. So, we outline a research agenda rooted in intersectional feminist imaginations and transformations that live around us. Neither nomadic nor confined to the home, care, commoning and collectivity can be aspirational, spatial, and practical. Inspired by Dolores Hayden and intersectional feminists, we ask: What kinds of socio-spatial imaginations can produce just, sustainable cities and who makes them? What material practices enable social change and improve everyday life, and at what scales might struggles for just cities be waged?
Insurgent planning and radical planning are two of the most popular conceptual frames of reference for progressive planners and theorists of transformative planning practices. In the past decades, scholars have extended these two planning conceptions to new geographies and realities to shed light on how planning can challenge structural injustices and marginalization. However, less attention has been given to how insurgent planning renovates radical planning practices in response to the crisis of neoliberal urbanization. While appreciating that radical and insurgent planning remain braided in practice, this article contributes to the literature on transformative planning by highlighting how insurgent planning builds on radical planning and innovates with regard to social location, epistemic distinction, and analytical unit.
In this paper I explore the possibility of the feminist ethic of care to enhance urban theory by placing emphasis upon our collective interdependence and responsibility to one another. As an ethics, care has the potential to maintain, continue, repair and transform our worlds. As a practice, care is often hidden from view despite the integral role care plays in ensuring survival in our worlds of both human and non-human others. As a performative act attuned to the possibility of care in the city I discuss how care was manifest in this space of care by drawing on research undertaken at The Women’s Library, Newtown which is located in Sydney, Australia. I reflect upon care-full practices that maintain, continue and repair our worlds within and beyond the library. Following this, I propose three ways we might continue to pay attention to/with care in urban theory. I argue that paying attention to/with care may assist us in understanding the role of maintenance and repair in creating more caring and just cities; emphasise our collective inter-dependence and responsibility for one another; and reveal silences, injustices and neglect in a way that provokes action.
This article analyses a unique case of local environmental activism in order to think through the puzzle of how to interpret the transformative potential of the forms of small-scale collective action that have recently emerged in neoliberal cities of the Global North. In response to the call by J.K. Gibson-Graham and others for research that is less driven by abstract theory and more attuned to context and ambivalent possibilities, I present the findings of research co-produced with Upping It, a small activist group that uses innovative tactics to clean, green and rehabilitate stigmatized neighbourhoods in Moss Side, Manchester. By enacting forms of interstitial politics, Upping It makes a tangible difference in the lives of ordinary people and creates conditions necessary for politicization, while also participating in unfair and unsustainable local systems. Their story offers rich material for considering the strengths and limitations of two theoretical framings that appear to dominate the literature on micro-political movements: the post-political and new environmentalism framings. These frames, and the criticisms that have been made about them, help to identify two key insights from Upping It that are useful for better capturing the ambiguities and tensions of their kind of struggle in the current conjuncture. Firstly, we can see the importance of including justice-oriented activisms, which in this case might be seen as a form of defensive everyday environmentalism, in the emerging picture of new urban movements. Secondly, Upping It highlights the value of finding modest transformative potential in the cracks and on the margins of urban politics.
Problem, research strategy, and findings: Sherry Arnstein intended her ladder of participation as a conceptual tool to help planners redistribute power to citizens, but a key institution to include residents in decision making, the community development corporation (CDC), has proven limited. Based on a case study of participation and insurgency in Detroit’s (MI) urban planning, we argue that CDCs structurally align with the planning establishment, serving as relays for governments and developers and controlling information. These limitations inspired insurgent planners to arise from the resident Charlevoix Village Association (CVA) in Detroit and to intervene in the planning process. CVA’s insurgent activities and knowledge production have galvanized residents to engage beyond the participatory planning paradigm. CVA has demonstrated that insurgency can enable engaged residents to build the power to push for equitable development in ways that Arnstein’s ladder of participation failed to account for.
Takeaway for practice: We suggest that although CDCs have not been an effective means for redistributing power to marginalized residents, planning insurgencies can be important vehicles for achieving community control and promoting equitable development. We argue that planners should not promote CDCs at the expense of insurgent planners. Instead, planners can engage in dialogue and partnerships with insurgent planners, provide key resources and information to bolster their capabilities, and design participatory frameworks that enhance their influence.
This article analyzes the remarkable wave of metropolitan rebellions that inaugurated the 21st century around the world (2000–2016). It argues that they fuel an emergent politics of city-making in which residents consider the city as a collective social and material product that they produce; in effect, a commons. It investigates this politics at the intersection of processes of city-making, city-occupying, and rights-claiming that generate movements for insurgent urban citizenships. It develops a critique of the so-called post-political in anthropological theory, analyzes recent urban uprisings in Brazil and Turkey, distinguishes between protest and insurgent movements, evaluates digital communication technologies as a new means to common the city, and suggests what urban citizenship brings to politics that the national does not.
There is ongoing debate about the relevance and usefulness of environmental citizenship theory. Questions about embodiment and accusations of false universalism are developing in response to dominant conceptualisations that often appear to ignore social difference. Still largely absent from these considerations, however, is any in-depth exploration of disability issues. While citizenship has always been a concern of disability studies, disabled people remain underrepresented in mainstream citizenship theorising. Although disabled people’s relationships to the natural environment and environmentalism are receiving increasing attention, disability is seldom considered explicitly in environmental citizenship debates. Environmental citizenship theories are relevant to disabled people, however, and drawing on theory as well as empirical work in the UK a more inclusive concept of environmental citizenship is proposed.
Women’s increased role in the labour market has combined with concerns about the damaging effects of long working hours to push time-related issues up the policy agenda in many Western nations. This wide-ranging and accessible book assesses policy alternatives in the light of feminist theory and factual evidence. The book introduces mainstream ideas on the nature and political significance of time and re-frames them from a feminist perspective to provide a critical overview of policies in Western welfare states. Themes covered include gender differences in time use and the impact of ‘time poverty’ on women’s citizenship; the need to value time spent giving and receiving care; the social meanings of time and whether we can talk about ‘women’s time’ and ‘men’s time’; and the role of the past in framing policy options today. The book is essential reading for all those interested in gender inequality, time-use or work/rest-of-life balance. It will be an invaluable resource for students and academics throughout the social sciences.
Modern economics is not sufficiently accounting for the work women do or the damage done to the environment. To account for this, economics should focus on social and ecological wellbeing. But what would a sustainable, sufficiency economy look like?
In recent years, the concept of smart sustainable cities has come to the fore. And it is rapidly gaining momentum and worldwide attention as a promising response to the challenge of urban sustainability. This pertains particularly to ecologically and technologically advanced nations. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the field of smart (and) sustainable cities in terms of its underlying foundations and assumptions, state–of–the art research and development, research opportunities and horizons, emerging scientific and technological trends, and future planning practices. As to the design strategy, the paper reviews existing sustainable city models and smart city approaches. Their strengths and weaknesses are discussed with particular emphasis being placed on the extent to which the former contributes to the goals of sustainable development and whether the latter incorporates these goals. To identify the related challenges, those models and approaches are evaluated and compared against each other in line with the notion of sustainability. The gaps in the research within the field of smart sustainable cities are identified in accordance with and beyond the research being proposed. As a result, an integrated approach is proposed based on an applied theoretical perspective to align the existing problems and solutions identification for future practices in the area of smart sustainable urban planning and development. As to the findings, the paper shows that critical issues remain unsettled, less explored, largely ignored, and theoretically underdeveloped for applied purposes concerning existing models of sustainable urban form as to their contribution to sustainability, among other things. It also reveals that numerous research opportunities are available and can be realized in the realm of smart sustainable cities. Our perspective on the topic in this regard is to develop a theoretically and practically convincing model of smart sustainable city or a framework for strategic smart sustainable urban development. This model or framework aims to address the key limitations, uncertainties, paradoxes, and fallacies pertaining to existing models of sustainable urban form—with support of ICT of the new wave of computing and the underlying big data and context–aware computing technologies and their advanced applications. We conclude that the applied theoretical inquiry into smart sustainable cities of the future is deemed of high pertinence and importance—given that the research in the field is still in its early stages, and that the subject matter draws upon contemporary and influential theories with practical applications. The comprehensive overview of and critique on existing work on smart (and) sustainable cities provide a valuable and seminal reference for researchers and practitioners in related research communities and the necessary material to inform these communities of the latest developments in the area of smart sustainable urban planning and development. In addition, the proposed integrated approach is believed to be the first of its kind and has not been, to the best of one’s knowledge, produced elsewhere.