To the beach: community conservation and its role in sustainable development. Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Publishing

Abstract

In his book To the beach: community conservation and its role in sustainable development, Thor Kerr offers a descriptive case study of a large coastal development project in the city of Freemantle, a part of the Perth metropolitan area in Western Australia, using data collected from local government meetings, advertisements, newspapers, websites, and other media sources. The framing of this coastal project was illustrative of production operating under the ideology of ecological modernization, which is based on the assumption that science and technology can provide the solutions to ecological crisis with the help of economic agents including innovators, entrepreneurs and technologists (Mol 1997). In Kerr's study of project failure, we can see how ecological modernization materialized in the context of a proposed large residential and commercial development, and the challenges of framing this particular type of production as 'green.' Kerr argues that the promotion of the North Port Quay (NPQ) development project as carbon-neutral, and therefore beneficial for an ambiguous global public, opened the doors for local opposition predicated on residents' different conceptions of a local working-class utopia