Spaces of Sustainability

Geographical Perspectives on the Sustainable Society

Mark Whitehead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134246366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Spaces of Sustainability is an engaging and accessible introduction to the key philosophical ideas which lie behind the principles of sustainable development. This topical resource discusses key contemporary issues including global warming, third world poverty, transnational citizenship and globalization.

Combining the latest research and theoretical frameworks Spaces of Sustainability offers a unique insight into contemporary attempts to create a more sustainable society and introduces the debates surrounding sustainable development through a series of interesting transcontinental case studies. These include: discussions of land-use conflicts in the USA; agricultural reform in the Indian Punjab; environmental planning in the Barents Sea; community forest development in Kenya; transport policies in Mexico City; and political reform in Russia.

Written in an approachable and concise manner, this is essential reading for students of geography, planning, environmental politics and urban studies. It is illustrated throughout with figures and plates, along with a range of explanatory help boxes and useful web links.

1
THE GEOGRAPHIES OF THE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY

While I was writing sections of this book I spent a brief time living and working in London. During this spell my morning walk in to work took me along the bustling Cromwell Road and past the world famous Natural History Museum. Although I had little time to stop, every morning I would catch glimpses of an outdoor exhibition at the museum, which was comprised of enormous colour photographs of different parts of the world, which had been taken from the air. Even though I used to enjoy looking at those exotic photographs in the morning I never did make (or indeed have) the time to stop and look at the exhibition more closely. Later that year I was walking through my home city of Birmingham when I saw a now familiar set of photographs laid out on the streets and squares of the city. The exhibition I had first seen in London it transpired was on tour. It was now clear to me that I was destined to look at it properly – I wasn’t disappointed. The exhibition was actually entitled the Earth from the Air and was a collection of 160 photographic images by the famous French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The exhibition represented the culmination of a UNESCO-sponsored project to produce a ‘photographic record of the natural world at the start of the new millennium’. What had been produced was a beautiful array of photographs, covering all of the Earth’s continents, and combining views of natural landscapes, cityscapes and agricultural areas. I found the exhibition compelling (I actually viewed it over three days) for two reasons: first because of its sublime beauty and intrinsic fascination; and second because of the way it seemed to speak directly about the links between sustainability and geography I am interested in.

To understand the reasons why this exhibition seemed to speak so directly about the links between sustainability and geography, it is important to reflect upon the intentions of the artist/photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. While wishing to produce a photographic record of the world at the turn of the millennium, Yann Arthus-Bertrand was also keen to show how human development was threatening the social and environmental fabric of the planet. In this context, Arthus-Bertrand juxtaposed images of

Figure 1.1 People exploring the Earth from the Air Exhibition – Victoria Square, Birmingham (July, 2004)

the fragile natural beauty of the Earth (including images of Mount Everest; a caravan of dromedaries in Mauritania; atolls in the Maldives; and glaciers in southern Argentina) with examples of the huge socio-ecological impact that humans are having on the planet (including panoramas of Tokyo and New York cities; an Iraqi tank graveyard in Kuwait; and a deserted residential district surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant). In addition to visual imagery though, throughout the exhibition viewers were presented with statistics relating to rates of environmental destruction, pollution growth and adult literacy in Africa. On other boards you could find information about the principles of sustainable development – an idea which Arthus-Bertrand clearly sees as being of critical importance in addressing the socio-ecological issues he is attempting to raise. A further intention of Yann Arthus-Bertrand, however, was that others could continue the work of this exhibition, by taking their own photographs. Arthus-Bertrand assisted viewers in this exercise by providing details of the photographic techniques and methods he used and by giving precise coordinates for each of the 160 images he had taken, so that others could return there. My favourite photograph for example was of a crowd of people in Abengourou, Côte d’Ivoire, which was taken at precisely N 6°44′, W 3°29′.

To me then, this enthralling exhibition was nothing less than a visual representation of the themes I intend to cover in this book – it was a manifestation of the geographies of the sustainable society. I say this not simply because the exhibition was obviously geographical (it was a collection of photographs from around the world) and because one of its stated aims was to raise awareness about the need for sustainable development. To me the exhibition provided a geographical perspective on the sustainable society because, when taken as a whole, the 160 images that the exhibition brought together served to illustrate the global nature of the issues which the creation of a more sustainable society must address. Added to that, when approached individually, each photograph of a unique place (perhaps N 6°44′, W 3°29′) served to illustrate the very particular ways in which the social, economic and environmental processes that determine whether something is sustainable are constituted within different geographical circumstances.

This volume interprets sustainability in two basic ways: first in terms of the long-term durability of human, ecological and economic systems; and second on the basis of how different human, ecological and economic systems interact in order to determine their own relative levels of sustainability. Geographers have historically had a very keen interest in the notion and implications of sustainable development. Since the popularization of the term in the late 1980s, the idea of sustainability has interested both human and physical geographers alike. Indeed, from the late 1980s onwards, a number of pioneering writings started to appear in geographical books and journals on issues of sustainability. Some human geographers for example sought to build on work exploring the links between environmental perception and behavioural geography to understand how sustainable development, as a discourse, may be transforming human understandings of the environment (see Burgess 1990:139)¹. Perhaps the leading field in early geographical work on sustainability was development geographies. During the late 1980s to early 1990s there was a proliferation of geographical writings on the tensions over sustainable development in less economically developed countries (see Adams and Hollis 1989; Stocking and Perkin 1992). These types of study culminated in W.M. Adams now classic text, Green Development (1990b), which explored sustainable development issues in a range of different development contexts (see also now Adams 2001). At around this time, it is also possible to discern an emerging neo-Marxist inflected critique of sustainability within key geographical texts (see for example O’Riordan 1989). Throughout the 1990s, geographers’ concern with sustainability grew, as physical geographers began to consider the likely climatic effects of sustainable development policies (Warrick 1993), while others considered the spatial planning implications of sustainability (see Thomas and Adams 1997; Cowell 1997; Owens 1994). More recently geographers have been exploring the application of sustainability within a variety of different urban, regional and rural contexts in the developed world (Haughton and Counsell 2004; Marsden et al. 2001; Munton 1997a; Whitehead 2003a), the rise of sustainable development within post-socialist transitions (Oldfield 1999, 2001; Pavlínek and Pickles 2000), and the spread of sustainable development thinking within the business world (Eden 1994). Some have even started to suggest that a concern with sustainability could provide a basis for bridging the divide between human and physical geography (Richards 2004). Beyond those who can be officially ‘labelled’ as geographers, however, it is important to recognize that a number of writers from beyond the geographical discipline have also begun to explore the geographical dimensions of sustainability (see for example Becker and Jahn 1999; Pearce et al. 1990; Yearley 1996).

Despite the emerging historical relationship between geographical study and sustainability over the last twenty years (for reviews see Eden 2000; Munton 1997b), it is still unclear what a geographical perspective on sustainability involves, or how this perspective may or may not be different to other disciplinary approaches to sustainable development. This chapter has two primary goals. First, it serves to introduce the idea of sustainability and the related vision of a sustainable society. Second, the chapter offers one explanation of what a geographical perspective on the sustainable society involves, and why such a perspective is important. The first section thus considers what a spatial perspective on the world offers sustainability studies and how contemporary patterns of globalization are transforming understandings of sustainable space. The following section then explores how the creation of a more sustainable society has been driven by fears over different socio-ecological dystopia. The penultimate section of this chapter then analyses the philosophical and geopolitical origins of sustainability and considers its implications for how we organize space. By way of conclusion, this chapter closes by reasserting what geography can offer to sustainability studies.

Geography, globalization and the sustainable society

In order to understand the value of a geographical perspective on the sustainable society, it is important to be aware of the recent contributions which geography, as a disciple, has made to the broader social sciences (see Soja 1989: chapter 1). Soja argues that geography has played a central role in the recent reassertion of space into analyses of the social, economic, political and cultural worlds within which we live (ibid.). In this sense a geographical perspective on the sustainable society is, at least partially, about developing a spatial perception of sustainability. This spatial perception is in part about understanding how the construction of more sustainable societies is related to the production of new spatial systems within which people can live, work, commute and interact with the natural world in more sustainable ways. At perhaps a more profound level, however, this spatial perspective on sustainability challenges how we understand and interpret sustainability as a concept. For me then, a geographical perspective on the sustainable society questions the conventional accounts of sustainability we often read, which describe it as the outcome of a long historical series of policy developments and negotiations. Such historical accounts often talk about the key meetings, publications and protocols that have all contributed to the gradual evolution of sustainability as a key international policy goal. My problem with these depictions of sustainability is that they tend to (often inadvertently) reduce sustainability to the historical emergence of a singular concept of social and ecological development – that of sustainable development. To consider the spatialities of the sustainable society, then, is to become aware of the stories, struggles and values which cut across the history of sustainable development (see Soja 1989:21–24). A spatial perspective on the sustainable society consequently alerts us to the varied cultural and political versions of sustainability which exist alongside, and sometimes in opposition to, prevailing doctrines of sustainable development. This book is dedicated to exploring these geographies of sustainability. Before we begin this task, however, it is important to consider the changing geographical parameters associated with globalization.

Many people’s intuitive understanding of geography is that of a discipline which is devoted to studying different societies. On these terms, of course, the idea of society, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries at least, has been routinely equated with those bounded territories, or states, which are drawn on the political map of the world with which we are all so familiar. This classical geopolitical view of the world is a world of nation states, each with their sovereign powers, national interests and political territories. So-called realist accounts of the world in international politics have described this geopolitical system as one which is based upon the selfish interests of individual states, each looking after their own needs and guarding their social and economic assets through military force. It is the assertion of this book that if we are to understand the relationship between geography and the sustainable ‘society’ we need to challenge these rather limited assumptions about what both geography and societies are.

A number of things have occurred over the last thirty-five years which have challenged the neat political division of the world into self-contained national states. While the challenges to a nation-state oriented view of the world have at times been economic, social and environmental, they have all in one way or another been embroiled within the complex set of processes which we collectively refer to as globalization. David Held et al. provide us with a useful insight into what these processes of globalization actually are:

Globalization may be thought of initially as the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnections in all aspects of contemporary social life, from the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual. That computer programmers in India now deliver services in real time to their employers in Europe and USA, while the cultivation of poppies in Burma can be linked to drug abuse in Berlin or Belfast, illustrates the ways in which contemporary globalization connects communities in one region of the world to developments in another continent.

(Held et al. 1999:2)

As this quote from Held suggests, new patterns of migration, global economic transactions and the flow of various forms of electronic information around the world are making the boundaries surrounding nation states look increasingly meaningless. One issue which is conspicuously absent from this quote, however, is the role of environmental issues in the globalization debate (although it is covered in a dedicated section in the book from which this quote is taken, see Held et al. 1999: chapter 8; see also Yearley 1996). The environment has been a factor within the processes associated with globalization for three reasons: (1) because of the increasing incidence of transboundary pollution events; (2) because of the growing social awareness of systemic forms of environmental change; and (3) because of a growing scientific consciousness of the integrated nature of environmental systems at a global level (these processes are all explained and explored in greater detail in Chapter 6). Essentially, over the last thirty years scientific studies of the environment have shown that national boundar...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• FIGURES AND TABLES
• BOXES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 THE GEOGRAPHIES OF THE SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
• PART I Spaces of sustainability
• PART II Scales of sustainability
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX