/pdf/modern-social-imaginaries-3bxtlxvdjy.pdf

Modern Social Imaginaries

Ways of Worldmaking

Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xxxix + 392 pp. $80.00 (cloth), $29.99 (paper). S...

Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity

Urbanization and urban areas are profoundly altering the relationship between society and the environment, and affecting cities’ sustainability and resilience in complex ways at alarming rates. Over the last decades, sustainability and resilience have become key concepts aimed at understanding existing urban dynamics and responding to the challenges of creating livable urban futures. Sustainability and resilience have also moved and are now core analytic and normative concepts for many scholars, transnational networks and urban communities of practice. Yet, even with this elevated scholarly attention, strategies for bridging between research and practice remain elusive, and efforts to understand and affect change towards more sustainable and resilient urban centers have often fallen short. This paper seeks to synthesize, from this issue’s papers and other strands of literature, the knowledge, theory and practice of urban sustainability and resilience. Specifically, we focus on what capacities urban actors draw on to create sustainability and resilience and how different definitions of these concepts intersect, complement, or contradict each other. We then examine the implications of those intersections and differences in the efforts by urban actors to enhance the capacity to change unsustainable trajectories and transform themselves, their communities, and their cities toward sustainable and resilient relationships with the environment.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/12/1224/pdf

Urban Sustainability and Resilience: From Theory to Practice

Several individual scholars and international organizations have attempted to conceptualize "culture" in its different meanings in sustainability. Despite those efforts, a tangle of different approaches are being used, reflecting the various disciplines and policy aims. In this paper we propose an interdisciplinary framework for identifying the different roles of culture in sustainability in an attempt to guide the research and policy activities in this complex field. The framework is comprised of three representations defined by a literature review on "cultural sustainability", which are further explored through eight organizing dimensions that mark the similarities and differences between the three representations. The article reveals that the three representations are partly interlinked and that they also reveal gradients in the dynamics of the system, as well as in the human/nature interface.

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/7087524/file/7087548.pdf

Culture-sustainability relation : towards a conceptual framework

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Lisa Nathan and Samuel Mann, Editors

Sustainability in an imaginary world

We report on preliminary results from a public engagement project based on a procedural approach to sustainability. The project centered on an interactive art installation that comprised a live actor, an immersive soundscape featuring a handful of different characters, an interactive touch-table, and four interactive rooms within which participants wandered, partially guided by a narrative through-line, yet at the same time left to make sense of any larger meanings on their own. The installation was designed to experiment with two propositions: (1) that there is value in public engagement with sustainability based on the exploration and articulation of deeply held beliefs about the world—the worldviews, values, and presuppositions that mediate perception and action; (2) that there is value in replacing the infocentric tendency of most public engagement on sustainability with an approach premised in aesthetics and experiential resonance. Following the installation’s two-week pilot run, our preliminary results indicated that the majority of participants found the experience both resonant and thought provoking, and were mostly willing to critically engage with their preexisting notions of sustainability.

/pdf/the-imaginary-worlds-of-sustainability-observations-from-an-3272ybdksh.pdf

David Maggs

Papers

Sustainability in an imaginary world

The imaginary worlds of sustainability: observations from an interactive art installation

Recalibrating the Anthropocene: Sustainability in an Imaginary World

Sustainability in an Imaginary World : Art and the Question of Agency