Material Geographies of Household SustainabilityCharting new research directions, this book constructs a series of imperatives for linking culturally informed research around household sustainability with policy and planning. The household, or 'home', is a critical scale for understanding activities that connect individual behaviours and societal attitudes. The focus on the household in this collection provides a window into the sheer diversity of homemaking and maintenance activities that entail resource use. These practices have affective or emotive dimensions as well as habitual aspects. Diversity, innovation and change at the household scale is often missed in policy approaches which assume that simplistic economic motivations drive demand and this can in turn be 'managed' through regulation or market pricing. The research challenge extends beyond describing existing unsustainable economies driving resource intensive behaviour to consider realistic options for transformations in cultural practices, material relationships and, ultimately, the political economies they sit within. Without change in these systems, government initiatives to promote ecological modernisation run the risk of simply green-washing the very economies of consumption that currently drive unsustainable practices. Social and cultural change at the household level is critical to promoting sustainability at a range of wider scales. |
Contents
1 | |
Part I Contributions of a Cultural Approach to Household Sustainability | 17 |
Part II Domestic Spaces and Material Flows | 73 |
Common terms and phrases
action activities agenda Aidan Davison alternative technology approach argued australian behaviour bottled water Cambodia cent chapter climate change Clts Cohort cohousing collection complex concerns consumer consumption practices context Cultural Geography discourses domestic sustainable consumption eco-efficiency economic embodied energy Environment environmental politics environmental sustainability ethics everyday example explore focus focused formal furniture global governmental green Gregson Hobson home improvement homemaking homeyness household practices household sustainability housing Human Geography individual informal infrastructure institutional interactions involved issues lifestyle living material geographies Matt watson Melbourne modern multiple neo-liberal networks norms objects Online organisations participants Phnom Penh Planning potential pro-environmental projects recycling relation renovation residents responsibility retail rMit university role routes of reuse scale second-hand Shove social society space strategies suburban sustainable development sustainable living technology movement tonle sap understanding United Kingdom urban waste hierarchy waste management