Urban Social Sustainability

Theory, Policy and Practice

M. Reza Shirazi, Ramin Keivani, M. Reza Shirazi, Ramin Keivani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351631525
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

Thisground breakingvolume raises radical critiques and proposes innovative solutions for social sustainability in the built environment. Urban Social Sustainability provides an in-depth insight into the discourse and argues that every urban intervention has a social sustainability dimensionthat needs to be taken into consideration, and incorporated into a comprehensive and cohesive 'urban agenda' that is built on three principles of recognition, integration, and monitoring. This should be achieved through a dialogical and reflexive process of decision-making. To achieve sustainable communities, social sustainability should form the basis of a constructive dialogue and be interlinked with other areas of sustainable development. This book underlines the urgency of approaching social sustainability as an urban agenda and goes on to make suggestionsabout its formulation.

Urban Social Sustainability consists of original contributions from academics and experts within the field and explores the significance of social sustainability from different perspectives. Areas covered include urban policy, transportation and mobility, urban space and architectural form, housing, urban heritage, neighbourhood development, and urban governance. Drawing on case studies from a number of countries and world regions the book presents a multifaceted and interdisciplinary understanding from social sustainability in urban settings, and provides practitioners and policy makers with innovative recommendations to achieve more socially sustainable urban environment.

1 Social sustainability discourse

A critical revisit

M. Reza Shirazi and Ramin Keivani

The ‘social’ in the sustainable development discourse: does social sustainability matter?

The idea of sustainability and sustainable development emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a reaction to the growing environmental, economic, and social challenges worldwide. Two interconnected crises played a vital role in the emergence of sustainable urbanism: an ecological crisis as the result of the culmination of the environmental damages of rapid industrialization, and an urban crisis of deteriorating quality of urban life in the rapidly expanding cities worldwide (Whitehead, 2011). Although the roots of public awareness with regard to negative consequences of industrial development, urban growth, environmental degradation, social inequality, and economic injustice go back to decades before, two publications, The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972) and A Blueprint for Survival (Goldsmith and Allen, 1972), suggested serious concerns about the future of our planet. The 1987 release of ‘Our Common Future’ report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by the Prime Minister of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland, was a turning point: the concept of sustainable development became the mainstream globally (Wheeler, 2013). Several international meetings and conferences were organized around this concept, scholars of many fields published intensively to explore its advantages and challenges, city administrations produced plans and visions for a sustainable urban future, and national and local policy documents provided strategic planning guidelines to achieve sustainable urban and regional development.

The classic formulation of sustainable development that appeared in Brundtland’s report defines sustainable development as a kind of ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). It is out of the scope of this introduction to reflect critically on the scholastic debates on the definition, structure, validity, and contradictions of the concept of sustainable development. None the less, it is important for this collection to show the significance and relevance of ‘the social’ to the sustainable development discourse.

A repeatedly referred framework for sustainable development formulates it as the meeting point of ‘three Es’: economy, ecology, and (social) equity (Connelly, 2007; Opp and Saunders, 2013). This tripartite structure has, however, been subject to criticism from the beginning. To gain a clear image of the critiques provided, we can study them in two categories of reformist and revisionary approaches. The reformist approach accepts, or corresponds with, the tripartite structure of sustainable development formulation, namely three Es, but calls for efficient, intensive, and holistic balance and coordination between the Es in order to achieve greater sustainability (Neuman, 1998; Berke, 2002; Winston and Pareja Eastaway, 2008; Dale and Newman, 2010; Boyer et al., 2016; Peterson, 2016). In this sense, sustainability is achieved only if there is a strong dialogue and interaction of three constituent elements of sustainable development. The revisionist approach, on the other hand, challenges the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and all-inclusivity of the tripartite structure, and suggests either a multi-pillar formulation or a totally new format (Hawkes, 2001; Godschalk, 2004; Duxbury and Jeannotte, 2010; Burford et al., 2013; Soini and Birkeland, 2014; Leal Filho et al., 2016). Reviewing some examples from both approaches shows the nature of their argumentation.

Reformist approach argues for a balance among three Es, because they are structurally interdependent, conceptually inseparable, and practically indistinguishable. For example, Peterson (2016) contends that sustainability should be understood as an integrated concept whereby social aspects are imbedded into environmental and economic aspects in an undistinguishable way. Campbell (1996) argues that the tripartite structure of sustainable development is a useful model for planning, but carries significant conflicting interests for three constituent components that need to be discursively examined and creatively reconciled. Boyer et al. (2016: 2) argue for an integrated, place-based, and process-oriented approach to sustainability that requires ‘a framework that acknowledges the legitimacy of local knowledge and the importance of decision-making processes in policy and business’.

Revisionist approach normally argues for a ‘missing pillar’ (Burford et al., 2013) in the sustainable development definition, and introduces it as an important aspect that has not been included in, and identified as an integral part of, the sustainability discourse. A number of concepts have been suggested as the missing pillar, such as culture, liveability, governance, politics, and ethical values. Culture has been repeatedly suggested as the most important missing pillar (Hawkes, 2001). Soini and Birkeland (2014: 214) argue that ‘there have been no scientific studies systematically aimed at analysing and elaborating the role and meaning of culture in sustainable development and culture in the framework of sustainable development has remained under-emphasized and under-theorized’. They suggest ‘cultural sustainability’ as the fourth and parallel dimension to ecological, economic, and social sustainability, and obviously distinguishable from other dimensions:

Cultural sustainability is linked but not equal to issues of social sustainability, such as social justice and equity, social infrastructure, participation and engaged governance, social cohesion, awareness, needs and work, and issues of the distribution of environmental ‘goods’ and ‘bads’.

(Soini and Birkeland, 2014: 214)

Other dimensions that have been suggested as supplementary pillar include ‘governance’ (Leal Filho et al., 2016), ‘political bottom line’ (Bendell and Kearins, 2005), and ‘ethical values’ (Burford et al., 2013), to name but a few.

Some revisionist approaches go further and propose a new format for sustainable development. For example, Godschalk (2004) proposes a ‘sustainability/liveability prism’ which is capable of guiding best practices in land use planning and discovering the interaction between the elements. Seghezzo (2009) suggests a five-dimensional sustainability triangle formed on three Ps: ‘Place’ which contains three dimensions of space, ‘Permanence’ which is the dimension of time, and ‘Persons’ as the fifth human dimension. Psarikidou and Szerszynski (2012) argue that the three-pillar structure leads to narrow, desocialized conceptions of nature and economy. They suggest a sociomaterial turn in the way we think about sustainability, which would be both social in the sense of attending to social relations, practices, cultural meanings, and normative judgements, and material in the sense that recognizes the conduction of social life by embodied beings in exchange with their physical environment. In this sense, ‘the economic’ is understood as embedded in social relations and ‘the social’ as including relations between humans and the material world, and thus boundaries between the three Es are dissolved. This approach, they argue, ‘requires us to approach sustainability as a whole in a different way – as a lived, embodied form of life, with its own spatial organization and temporal rhythms’ (Psarikidou and Szerszynski, 2012: 37).

This brief review confirms that, no matter how many dimensions or pillars sustainable development framework should have, and how these dimensions should interact and be integrated, the social aspect remains an integral component of any sustainable development framework (Shirazi and Keivani, 2017). In both reformist and revisionist approaches, the significance of the social dimension has not been challenged, but recognized and underlined to the extent that we could argue social sustainability does matter!

Social sustainability as an umbrella discourse

As is briefly noted in Chapter 6, studying ‘the social’ in the built environment is much older than the sustainable development debate; scholars have intensively and broadly investigated social dimension of cities and communities under a wide range of informative concepts. However, it is fair to argue that, by the advent of the sustainable development concept and its mainstreaming, many already existing and developed discourses with social concerns were assembled under the ‘social sustainability discourse’. Here we would like to have a closer look at a number of similar concepts and explore areas of commonalities: social equity and justice, social capital, social cohesion, social exclusion, environmental justice, quality of life, and urban liveability.

Social equity and social justice has been one of the central concerns of planning since mid-twentieth century (Yiftachel and Hedgcock, 1993) as a basic human right (Magis and Shinn, 2009). It has both intra-generational and inter-generational aspects so that ‘Both intra-generational equity providing for the needs of the least advantaged in society, and inter-generational equity, ensuring a fair treatment of future generations, need to be considered’ (Elkin et al., 1991: 203). Social equity and justice advocates the notion of distributive justice and fairness in the apportionment of resources in society, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, and social status. According to Harvey (2009: 98), the principle of social justice starts with this skeleton concept: ‘a just distribution justly arrived at’. Distributional justice can be seen from two perspectives: fairness of the outcome of distribution (the end result), and the fairness of the actions and procedures that generate the outcome (Burton, 2000: 1987). Social equity indicates equal access of services in terms of geography; all areas regardless of social or political character should have equal access to the services, what Kay (2005) refers to as horizontal equity. Social equity also addressees access to political and economic opportunities, and requires restructuring of power through wealth distribution, elimination of any type of socioeconomic and legal barriers, and removal of excessive political power from the minority (Magis and Shinn, 2009). Thus, social equity and justice provide an ethical ground for formulating social sustainability (Cuthill, 2010).

Social capital is

the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively-owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various sense of the word.

(Bourdieu, 1986: 248)

Unlike physical capital, which is entirely tangible, social capital is less tangible because ‘it exists in the relations among persons’ (Coleman, 1988: 110–111). Three forms of social capital exist: obligations and expectations, information channels, and social norms. Obligations and expectations are based on trustworthiness and make a community powerful, social relations provide information that facilitates action, and social norms provide benefit for individuals, families, and groups within community. This term has been extensively used in the late twentieth century by academics, international institutions, and policy makers (World Bank, 1998; Forrest and Kearns, 2001; Grootaert and Bastelaer, 2001). Putnam played a significant role in further development of the concept. He defines social capital as the ‘features of social organization, such as trust, norms and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions’ (Putnam et al., 1993: 167). Social capital may have bonding (exclusive) qualities or bridging (inclusive) qualities; while bonding forms of social capital are inward looking and ‘reinforce exclusive identities and homogenous groups’, bridging qualities are ‘outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages’ (Putnam, 2000: 22). EU and UK urban policy has been influenced by Putnam’s interpretation of the concept of social capital (Manzi et al., 2010).

Social cohesion has been an enduring subject of inquiry for sociologists and psychologists (Friedkin, 2004). It refers to the force that holds individuals within a group, and is associated with social interaction, social networks, sense of belonging, and community engagement (Raman, 2010). Social cohesion emphasizes

the need for a shared sense of morality and common purpose; aspects of social control and social order; the threat to social solidarity of income and wealth inequalities between people, groups and places; the level of social interaction within communities or families; and a sense of belonging to place.

(Forrest and Kearns, 2001: 2128)

In the contemporary cities, high crime rate, unemployment, organized crime, and low living standard, all point to weak social cohesion in the cities. This generates social disorder and conflict, disparate moral values, social injustice, social exclusion, and place dis-attachment.

Social exclusion was first used in France in the 1970s to describe the condition of certain marginalized groups cut from the benefits of the welfare state, though it later gained a wide currency in the social policy Europe-wide and across the globe (Pierson, 2010). It refers to a ‘process over time that deprives individuals and families, groups and neighbourhoods of the resources required for participation in the social, economic and political activity of society as a whole’ (Pierson, 2010: 12). An individual is socially excluded ‘if he or she does not participate in key activities of the society in which he or she lives’ (Burchardt et al., 2002a: 30).

Social exclusion is a slippery and contested concept (Gough and Eisenschitz, 2006; Taket et al., 2009) and covers a wide range of issues such as unemployment, low income, low educational attainment (lack of skills), bad health, poor housing, and high crime (Social Exclusi...