Sustainability begins at home? An ecological exploration of sub/urban Australian community-focused housing initiatives
- ISSN: 00167185
- DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.04.002
Abstract
This paper responds to challenges made by Castree Castree, N., 2004. Environmental issues: signals in the noise? Progress in Human Geography 28 (1), 79-90 and Sneddon Sneddon, C., 2000. `Sustainability' in ecological economics, ecology and livelihoods: a review. Progress in Human Geography 24 (4), 521-549 for human geography to clarify its contribution to environmental debates and engage with recent formulations of sustainability as informed by the `new ecology'. This approach focuses on resilience, functional diversity, flexibility and complexity, here used to examine housing sustainability within an industrialised sub/urban context in terms of design philosophy, ownership, management bases, community engagement and funding mechanisms. This framework highlights areas of concern for enhancing the functional diversity of housing systems, echoing recent assertions that challenges for sustainability arise more from trust and power sharing issues, than from physical design and maintenance issues. It is argued that it is precisely human geography's place-by-place consideration of power, embeddedness, scale and politics that can lend new ecology the social relevance it requires.
Author-supplied keywords
Sign up today - FREE
Mendeley saves you time finding and organizing research. Learn more
- All your research in one place
- Add and import papers easily
- Access it anywhere, anytime