However, as I show in this blog posting, caution is needed because some low income and neighborhoods of color worry that singular, and seemingly broader public interest changes such as bicycle lane additions, street accessibility improvements, transit upgrades and pedestrian zone placements may foster gentrification, further diminishing their voice, rights and roles in the community. Low income and minority communities in the U.S. and around the world have been disproportionally utilized as the loci of industrial or other unwanted land uses and development and as transportation corridors that often pass through, but do not stop in their neighborhoods. Interestingly however, other just sustainabilities issues have arisen recently that ask some fundamental questions about the growing Complete Streets movement’s ideas, actions and their practical effects.

But let’s first look at the related concept of ‘Place Making’ which has become the new paradigm in planning. Kent (2008 p60) describes Place Making as “a set of ideas about creating cities in ways that result in high-quality spaces where people naturally want to live, work, and play.” At this physical, practical level, Place Making seeks to shift the focus of development away from auto-centric planning (wide, high-speed streets, expansive surface parking lots between buildings, signs and lighting that are scaled for moving cars, etc) towards community-based places that inspire civic engagement.

Massey (1995 p188) however takes a more nuanced view than Kent (2008). She sees places not as rigid, physical realities, but as socially constructed, fluid, having no fixed meaning: they are “constantly shifting articulations of social relations through time.” Blokland (2009) through her study of communities in New Haven, Connecticut, builds on Massey’s (1995) ‘shifting articulations’ point, and Sandercock’s (1998) point that there is not one, but multiple publics, by showing how Place Making can be seen as a struggle over different historical narratives of residents who compete to define ‘the community,’ and that ‘absences’ from the dominant narrative can lead to a distorted picture of who the community is and what it can become. This is as pertinent to the Complete Streets vision as it is to Place Making. And its implications are profound. ‘Decisions’ to implement Complete Streets schemes, to construct or locate what might be considered beneficial amenities like bike lanes in traditionally disadvantaged neighborhoods, can be seen as part of a privileged, dominant narrative which drowns out other voices.

In Portland, OR there are two strands to a growing controversy over cycle lanes as gentrification tools, and cycling as an elitist activity. Proposed traffic changes to increase bicycle safety along N. Williams Ave have met with community resistance. There is a fight against what is seen as the imposition by the City of bike lanes as an instrument of gentrification, as Debora Leopold Hutchins who chairs an advisory committee argues:

“the issues of gentrification and race and bicycles have kind of met right here at this location, at this intersection, but one is not cause of the other.” (Preston 2011).

More searing however in her critique is resident Donna Maxey who explained the frustration of people of color with Portland’s bicycle support efforts:

“What is causing the anger and resentment is that it’s only an issue of safety now that whites are the ones who are riding bicycles and walking on the streets. Because we have been in this community for years and it has not been an issue and now it’s an issue. So that’s the resentment you’re hearing…years of people being told, you don’t count, you don’t matter…but now that there’s a group of people who’s coming in that look like the people who are the power brokers — now it’s important. That’s the anger. That’s the hurt.” (Shareable 2011)

On the other hand, there is Portland’s Community Cycling Center (2010) that admits:

“We could do better to understand the needs of our program participants, which are predominantly low-income and communities of color. We could do better to increase and improve programs serving a culturally diverse community.  We could do better at creating employment pathways into our organization. So we developed the ‘Understanding Barriers to Bicycling‘ project’, a community needs assessment, to better understand what were people interested in and concerned about as it related to bicycling. Since we completed the needs assessment, we have been collaborating with our community partners in north and northeast Portland to develop programs and support community leaders to broaden access to bicycling and its benefits — and to ensure that those benefits are accessible to all.”

The Community Cycling Center received an Oregon Metro grant in 2010 to reach out to Portland’s diverse constituencies to better understand how they could support cycling in different communities. Similar challenges, to bicycle lanes and cycling are being made in other cities. Chicago resident and founder of the African American Pioneers Bicycle Club, Oboi Reed, criticized Chicago’s priorities in a New York Times article (NYT 10/16/2011), “City Bike Plan is Accused of a Neighborhood Bias.” According to Reed:

“The lion’s share of the resources” of the city’s $150 million bike plan “are going to go [to the wealthier neighborhoods] downtown and to the North Side–the South and West will only see a sprinkling.”

In New York City, a report by graduate students from the Urban Affairs and Planning Program at Hunter College, “Beyond the Backlash: Equity and Participation in Bicycle Planning,” concluded:

“traditionally underserved areas outside of the core of Manhattan and northwest Brooklyn have inadequate bicycle infrastructure. These areas have many cyclists and residents who are largely new immigrants and people of color.” (Hunter College 2011).

Clearly, there is growing alarm that bike lanes, uber-narrative and key to the physical infrastructure of Complete Streets, themselves a part of the bigger goal of Place Making, may be the ‘new gentrification.’ But I think it goes deeper, along the lines suggested by Donna Maxey in Portland, OR (above): “it’s only an issue of safety now that whites are the ones who are riding bicycles.” Consider that in the US:

“bicycling is the highest among whites and Hispanics (0.9% of all trips). For whites, cycling is mostly for recreation, while for Hispanics, it is to reach the workplace. “ (Pulcher and Renne 2003 p67 my italicization).

This is a significant point: whites are choosing to cycle, are adopting an identity as cyclists, whereas Hispanic (and black) people have no other option, they simply cycle to get to work because it is cheap. They are however, as Donna Maxey intimated, invisible cyclists whose presence on bikes did not seem to elicit the municipal push for bike lanes that the more vociferous newcomers have elicited. Kidder’s (2005) study of cycle messengers in New York City showed that despite the fact that the majority were male, black and Hispanic, those who built a ‘lifestyle’ and identity around it were often female, and largely White. Steinbach et al (2011 p1130) albeit in a study of London make an argument that works more generally:

“In cities where cycling uptake is low, the challenge…is perhaps to de-couple cycling from the rather narrow range of healthy associations it currently has, and provide an infrastructure in which anyone can cycle, rather than just those whose social identities are commensurate with being ‘a cyclist’.”

I’m not disagreeing with the principle and vision of Complete Streets, but as the examples above show, at present, and in many cases, we clearly have Incomplete Streets. We are missing some key ingredients. As in all my work, I look at phenomena through different lenses and if the answer is Complete Streets, lets go back and look at what questions we asked ourselves in order to achieve that answer? One big and crucial question we haven’t yet asked is how do we reconcile the fixed, physical infrastructure needed to make Complete Streets with Massey, Blokland and Sandercock’s points that Complete Streets, as places, are socially constructed, fluid and therefore have no fixed meaning; they can be seen as contestations over different narratives and that (white) privileged narratives usually dominate leading to an incomplete narrative and, well, incomplete streets.

References

Blokland, T (2009) Celebrating Local Histories and Defining Neighbourhood Communities: Place-making in a Gentrified Neighbourhood Urban Studies vol. 46 no. 8 1593-1610

Kent, F. (2008) Place Making Around the World. Urban Land, August 2008 (58-65)

Kidder, J. (2005). Style and action: a decoding of bike messenger symbols. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 34(3), 344-367.

Massey, D. (1995) Places and their pasts History Workshop Journal, 39, pp. 182-192.

NYT (10/16/2011) City Bike Plan Is Accused of a Neighborhood Bias By David Lepeska. Published: October 15, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/us/chicago-bike-plan-accused-of-neighborhood-bias.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=chicago%20bicycle&st=cse Accessed 3/22/2012

Preston, P (2011). Blacks want in on discussion over city’s bike proposal. Northeast Portland Katu http://northeastportland.katu.com/news/news/blacks-want-discussion-over-citys-bike-proposal/442221 Accessed 3/22/2012

Pucher, J and Renne, J (2003) Socioeconomics of Urban Travel: Evidence from the 2001 NHTS Transportation Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3, Summer 2003 (49–77).

Sandercock, L (1998). Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multi-cultural Cities. Chichester, England: Wiley.

Shareable (2011) Are Bike Lanes Expressways to Gentrification? http://shareable.net/blog/are-bike-lanes-an-expressway-to-gentrification Accessed 3/22/2012)

Steinbach, R, Green, J, Datta, J and Edwards, P (2011) . Cycling and the city: A case study of how gendered, ethnic and class identities can shape healthy transport choices Social Science & Medicine 72 p1123-1130.

Co-production is already emerging in several diverse arenas. While some of the trends (e.g. greater self-assembly of furniture) offer little benefit, others (e.g. domestic energy generation, timebanking/time-dollar schemes, self-build co-housing, open source software) exhibit key benefits in that people are reclaiming and reinventing work, refusing to be directed by the logic of capital, engaging their individual and collective capacities to invent, create, shape and co-operate without monetary incentive.

The New Economics Foundation, in Co-production. A manifesto for growing the core economy (NEF 2008 p11/12) note:

 “The past three decades have produced many successful examples of co-production in action around the world. People living in the squatter camps of Orangi in Karachi successfully provided themselves with drainage and mains water faster and at a far lower cost than the more accepted top-down method. Habitat for Humanity has made houses more affordable by including work building other people’s homes into the mortgage payments. Some programmes – notably the Bolsa Escuela scheme in Brazil that pays mothers to make sure their children attend school – have made direct payments to clients or their families to recognise the efforts they are making. ”

One can contrast the co-production model with labour specialisation in the capitalist model which leads to excess ‘leisure’ for some, the unemployed, with all the lack of purpose and stigma that label brings, and overwork for the rest, with the stress–related health effects that can bring. These extremes, together with the commodification of leisure itself means even less potential for self-fulfillment. Co-production differs from the Scandinavian and Dutch social contract models of capitalism. It would theoretically deliver some of the same outcomes in terms of sharing costs and responsibilities between employer, employees and state but through mechanisms that in many respects pool or aggregate individual freedoms into collective freedoms at a much smaller scale than that of the nation state. And the results are impressive:

 “If you are discharged from the Lehigh hospital outside Philadelphia, you will be told that someone will visit you at home, make sure you’re OK, if you have heating and food in the house. You are also told that the person who will visit you is a former patient, not a professional, and that – when you are well – you will be asked if you could do the same for someone else. The result is a dramatically cut re-admission rate, and all by using the human skills of patients and their own needs to feel useful.” (NEF 2008 p18)

In the U.K., the charity Nesta, working in partnership with NEF sees:

“Co-production [as] a new vision for public services which offers a better way to respond to the challenges we face – based on recognising the resources that citizens already have, and delivering services with rather than for service users, their families and their neighbours. Early evidence suggests that this is an effective way to deliver better outcomes, often for less money.”

Through a series of groundbreaking reports such as The challenge of co-production, Public services inside out and Right here, right now, Nesta deepens our understanding and puts forward a convincing argument and evidence base for co-production across a range of public services and recommends a radical re-imagination of policy to support the diffusion of co-production. With widespread, contagious uptake (and co-production is reliant in many ways on the existence of social networks), no longer could waged jobs be assumed to define people, and no longer could they be a key basis for politics. Nor could consumerism hold such powerful sway over politics if greater levels of wellbeing were generated by such participatory activity, rather than by consumption of the end products.

In Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams (2006) see co-production as a function enabled by new technology (especially participatory web-based networks – the eponymous ‘wiki’), emerging first in fields such as software and cultural products, and extending with the development of modular design and decentralised fabrication technologies (3D ‘printers’) to many other sectors, including industrial products. The growth of small-scale (domestic and community) renewable energy schemes and similarly, of local food production and distribution schemes offers an insight into how co-production can build capacities and increase freedoms (in terms of providing security from unstable and insecure global markets for food and energy).

Others amongst the emerging emanations of co-production may seem to involve the commoditisation of leisure, which could be a dangerous development in bringing even more of life into market spheres. Here the mechanisms and institutions will be critical if play and innovation are to become a foundation for co-production and just sustainabilities (Kane 2011), rather than co-opted into a new cycle of conventional economic development. Kane (2011) suggests that:

 “play can help redirect our passions from consumption to craft, from lifestyle narcissism to joyful participation, and thus live lighter (though just as richly) on the planet”and highlights: “the importance of craft – the personal construction of objects and services, as a route to meaning, mastery and autonomy … [and] the power of festivity and carnival – forms of collective, organised behaviour whose end is experiential pleasure, and whose means is participatory involvement.”

He concludes:

 “Communication and game platforms can amplify and coordinate this new, joyful activism. But the aim is to re-channel our playful natures from serving an isolated, subjective escapism, to supporting a civic, inter-subjective engagement.”

It is the potential of co-production to meet needs – not only the desire for novelty and entertainment and freedom, but also the needs for security, community and solidarity and identity – while transforming economic models away from the treadmill of production, growth and consumption that makes its potential so exciting. These are potentially revolutionary changes but such a revolution need not be violent nor will it necessarily be televised: this revolution will be co-produced.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Duncan McLaren for his research and writing in the first chapter of my forthcoming book, and from which this blog was drawn.

References:

Kane, P. (2011a) Radical Animal: Innovation, sustainability and human nature.  http://radicalanimal.ning.com/profiles/blogs/radical-animal-the-general

New Economics Foundation (2008). Co-production: A Manifesto for Growing the Core Economy. NEF. London.

Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford, University Press.

Tapscott, D, and AD Williams, (2006). Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. London, Atlantic.

The authors of the report however appear to have missed what a lot of us have been writing, researching and teaching about for decades and have themselves just discovered the ‘social’ side of sustainability. They are of course eager to tell us all about their great idea, so let’s take a look at it. Aside from the spectacularly un-diverse imagery in the report, problematic terms like ‘social success‘ and ‘social design’ litter the pages with no explanation as to what they mean nor how they should be achieved:

“We need a better understanding of how to create socially successful communities and how to use planning, development and stewardship functions to achieve this goal.”

And:

“Social sustainability is an issue of public value as well as the wellbeing, quality of life and satisfaction of future residents. It demands a new approach to planning, design and development that we call social design, which needs to be integrated into policy and professional practice across all the disciplines involved in the creation of new communities – much like the way standards of environmental sustainability have become widely adopted in recent years.”

However, if these banal and ill defined terms weren’t enough, the most egregious omission is of any consideration of social justice. The term simply does not appear. Neither does equality. The term equity appears twice, once in terms of negative equity, and once in an Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development definition of social sustainability.  How on earth, or perhaps on the moon, does the Young Foundation think that communities can ever be remotely socially successful without a fundamental and intential commitment to social justice? Have the authors not read and digested the implications of Wilkinson and Pickett’s book  The spirit level: Why equality is better for everyone? I’m not going to waste my time giving chapter and verse on this. Read their book. Read my books. Read my blog.

And you know the biggest irony in all this? The Future Communities Programme, of which this Design for Social Sustainability report is the latest offering, was launched in June 2010 with the publication of the unfortunately and presciently named report Never again: Avoiding the mistakes of the past.

Never again? Avoiding mistakes? Past, present, future? I’m not so sure anymore…

What I do see though are cities like my own, Boston, now a majority minority city where in 2010 53% identified themselves as “a race/ethnicity other than non-Hispanic White.” Boston tolerates and struggles to manage difference and diversity, while simultaneously wringing its hands over increasing inequity and division (State of Equity in Metro Boston 2011), seemingly oblivious to the fact that this is a result of the failure to recognize, understand and engage with difference, diversity, and cultural heterogeneity. Cities like Boston lack the political vision, will and courage to leverage diversity and difference.

Difference in my opinion is a more expansive and useful concept than diversity which has become virtually synonymous in the U.S. at least, with race/ethnicity and/or gender. Sandercock (2000 p15) notes that “difference…takes many forms. It acknowledges that population groups, differentiated by criteria of age, gender, class, dis/ability, ethnicity, sexual preference, culture and religion, have different claims on the city for a full life and, in particular, on the built environment.”  Wood and Landry (2008 p63) authors of the excellent The Intercultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage put it simply: “At what point do cities start to see diversity as less a cost, a drag on scarce resources and a mind-numbing complexity and start to see it as a force, a resource and an opportunity?”

During the last decade, a collective of urban geography and planning scholars (including Ash Amin, Peter Hall, and Leonie Sandercock) and practitioners (including Charles Landry, Phil Wood, Richard Brecknock, and G. Pascal Zachary) have been researching and promoting interculturalism. The group noted that approaches rooted in the multiculturalism frame have been effective for cultural preservation, celebration (jokingly steel drums, saris and samosas) and tolerance yet have not fundamentally transformed civic institutions, the public realm, its discourses and entrenched city management practices. This certainly seemed to be the case in Canada where official state policy is, and has been since the Trudeau government of the 1970s, one of multiculturalism.

In my blog Grow Canada? Multiculturalism, Environmental Policy and Planning), I note that:

“Many provinces and municipalities have introduced legislation and established programs and agencies in support of their multicultural objectives. Are they reflected in environmental and sustainability policies and plans in substantive ways? At the provincial level, in this case in Ontario, a study on ethnocultural diversity and planning by Wallace and Milroy, 2001, found that that province’s Planning Act and municipal plans did not have a significant focus on, or little to say about culture.

Consider however, the visionary and transformative potential in the following two paeans to interculturalism.  First, Bloomfield and Bianchini (2002 p6):

“The interculturalism approach goes beyond opportunities and respect for existing cultural differences, to the pluralist transformation of public space, civic culture and institutions. So it does not recognise cultural boundaries as fixed but as in a state of flux and remaking. An interculturalist approach aims to facilitate dialogue, exchange and reciprocal understanding between people of different cultural backgrounds. Cities need to develop policies which prioritise funding for projects where different cultures intersect, “contaminate” each other and hybridize… In other words, city governments should promote cross-fertilisation across all cultural boundaries, between “majority” and “minorities”, “dominant” and “sub” cultures, localities, classes, faiths, disciplines and genres, as the source of cultural, social, political and economic innovation.”

Second, Sandercock (2003 p207-208):

“I dream of a city of bread and festivals, where those who don’t have the bread aren’t excluded from the carnival. I dream of a city in which action grows out of knowledge and understanding; where you haven’t got it made until you can help others to get where you are or beyond; where social justice is more prized than a balanced budget; where I have a right to my surroundings, and so do all my fellow citizens; where we don’t exist for the city but are seduced by it; where only after consultation with local folks could decisions be made about our neighbourhoods; where scarcity does not build a barb-wire fence around carefully guarded inequalities; where no one flaunts their authority and no one is without authority; where I don’t have to translate my ‘expertise’ into jargon to impress officials and confuse citizens.”

Imagine the mayor or leadership group who had the courage to move in these directions; to contaminate and hybridize across cultures; to feel seduced by the city; a mayor or leadership group that refused to go with the status quo, with what is probable, but instead focused on vision, on what is possible. The transformation of Broadway, and the High Line in NYC under Mayor Bloomberg are small but highly significant examples of possibility, as was the more ambitious development and implementation of  London’s Congestion Charge under Mayor Livingstone.

However, the only city wide, culture shifting example that even comes close to Bloomfield and Bianchini, and Sandercock’s moving paeans, is the double act of  Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa who literally performed (in the case of Mockus: Academic turns city into social experiment) the most celebrated of urban transformations, in Bogotá, Colombia. The city underwent a cultural and place-making revolution in the late 1990’s when first Mockus, then Peñalosa, then Mockus again became mayor. By reclaiming public space (creating 1,200 new parks), improving public transport (TransMilenio), promoting non-motorized transport (Ciclovía), and implementing measures for auto-restriction (Pico y placa: peak and [license] plate), the city became a model of just sustainabilities in action. In a matter of just a few years, the city largely transformed itself from a typically gridlocked and crime-ridden Third-World city to a magnet for civic leaders and planners from across the world seeking examples of successful urban renewal and revitalization.

How do we encourage more of this kind vision and bravery? How do we shift it from the low(er) hanging fruit of fixed assets like Broadway’s transformation, the High Line and the Congestion Charge, to more challenging and fluid assets like interculturalism?

Wood and Landry (2008) offer us Five Principles of an Intercultural City:

The Leader: S/he is a person with an intercultural perspective; a person who has made the intellectual transition from diversity-as-deficit, to diversity-as-advantage; a person who can develop a new narrative of the city, re/telling the city’s story in a compelling intercultural way.

City Making: The wider leadership group uses an intercultural lens in city planning, (culturally competent) consultation, school curricula (remember the Inner London Education Authority?), housing and economic incentives.

City Management: This is where ideas are transferred to actions, but city rules, codes and most services were never developed for intercultural delivery, they were focused around health, safety, traffic flow, waste management etc. The challenge is how to break down silos and introduce interdisciplinary, joined-up thinking which marries effective, efficient service delivery in an intercultural and culturally competent manner.

Some services, such as social work in the U.S. already incorporate cultural competency practice objectives in their code of ethics. In relation to demonstrable racial and ethnic disparities in U.S. health and health care, Betancourt et al. (2003 p299) note: “Given the strong evidence for socio-cultural barriers to care at multiple levels of the health care system, culturally competent care is a key cornerstone in efforts to eliminate racial/ethnic disparities in health and health care.” While the planning profession in the U.S. is beginning to engage with intercultural and cultural competency issues (e.g. Agyeman and Erickson 2012, Vazquez’s Principles of Culturally Competent Planning and Placemaking), the U.K. is further down the line (e.g. Comedia’s Planning and Engaging with Intercultural Communities: Building the Knowledge and Skills Base)

Citizenship: Cities should be the sites of new forms of citizenship where as Sandercock (2003 p207-208) says “I have a right to my surroundings, and so do all my fellow citizens,” in effect, a Right to the City.

Bridgers and Mixers: These are the old-style activists, the social entrepreneurs, the fire souls, the younger social media nerds and crowdsourcers who make things happen. They are us.

Let’s start from a position of humility. We don’t have all the answers in how to do this so let’s begin the journey by asking the right questions. First and foremost, do we want to live in a world where we tolerate the tedium and misery of cities of indifference, or do we want to live in one where we recognize, understand and engage with difference, diversity, and cultural heterogeneity in creative and productive ways, and in ways which could begin to transform civic institutions, the public realm, its discourses and city management practices. As Wood and Landry (2008 p320) argue: “If we want the intercultural city, we cannot leave it to chance.”

References.

Agyeman, Julian and Jennifer Sien Erickson. 2012 “Culture, Recognition and the Negotiation of Difference: Some thoughts on Cultural Competency in Planning Education.” Journal of Planning Education and Research published online 10 April 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0739456X12441213

Betancourt, Joseph, Alexander Green, Emilio Carrillo and Owusu Ananeh-Firempong. 2003. “Defining Cultural Competence: A Practical Framework for Addressing Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Health and Health Care.” Public Health Reports 118 (4): 293-302.

Bloomfield, Jude and Franco Bianchini, F. 2002. Planning for the Cosmopolitan City: A Research Report for Birmingham City Council. Leicester: Comedia, International Cultural Planning and Policy Unit.

Jacobs, Jane and Ruth Fincher. 1998. Cities of Difference. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Sandercock, Leonie. 2000. When Strangers Become Neighbours: Managing Cities of Difference. Journal of Planning Theory and Practice 1 (1): 13–20.

Sandercock, Leonie. 2003. Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21^st Century. Continuum.

Sennett, Richard. 1990. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York: Knopf.

Wood, Phil and Charles Landry. 2008. The Inter-cultural City: Planning for Diversity Advantage. London: Earthscan.

The focus of just sustainabilities which I have articulated more fully elsewhere (Agyeman et al. 2003, Agyeman 2005), is the development of policy and planning themes that:

• Improve people’s quality of life and well-being, both now (intra-generational equity) and into the future (inter-generational equity);

• Are carried out with an intentional focus on just and equitable processes, outputs and outcomes in terms of people’s access to environmental, social, political and economic space(s);

• Aim to achieve a high quality of life and well-being within the notion of environmental limits (that is they are focused on achieving ‘one planet’ lifestyles).

In November 2010, I wrote a blog called ‘Fair Shares in Environmental Space’, a concept based on the early work of Spangenberg and Tischner at the Wuppertal Institute in 1994. My friend and colleague Duncan McLaren (2003:22) argued in my book Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World that environmental space “can underpin the emerging concept of just sustainability” and it can “suggest how sustainable development policies can explicitly incorporate equity concerns” (34). I noted that the environmental space ”implies equal rights to resource consumption for all peoples of the world within the carrying capacity of the planet” (Friends of the Earth International). In other words, as shown in the diagram below, it is that sustainable consumption space between the minimum resource use needed to ensure a basic quality of life and human dignity (the dignity floor), and the maximum use of the Earth’s resources without living beyond nature’s capacity and depleting ecological stocks (the profligacy ceiling).

The Environmental Space (Copyright Friends of the Earth International)

In the year I wrote the ‘Fair Shares’ blog, research by an international team of earth system scientists further developed our understanding of global thresholds and boundaries. Their focus was just how far above the profligacy ceiling we are really living:

“Nine planetary boundaries [are] identified … the global biogeochemical cycles of nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, and water; the major physical circulation systems of the planet (the climate, stratosphere, ocean systems); biophysical features of Earth that contribute to the underlying resilience of its self-regulatory capacity (marine and terrestrial biodiversity, land systems); and two critical features associated with anthropogenic global change (aerosol loading and chemical pollution).” (Rockström et al 2009:6).

This research found that three of the system parameters are in overshoot: the climate system; biodiversity loss and nitrogen loading:

While Rockström et al (2009) focused on living beyond environmental boundaries, on living beyond the profligacy ceiling, the recent, timely and welcome report by Kate Raworth at Oxfam adds a much needed  just sustainabilities dimension to Rockström et al (2009) by “combining the concept of planetary boundaries with the complementary concept of social boundaries” (p4). Unfortunately however, Raworth doesn’t seem to be aware of the great similarities between the earlier, environmental space concept and Oxfam’s ‘doughnut’ model, nor the seminal work of Spangenberg and Tischner, Spangenberg et at (1995, 1998), McLaren (1998, 2003), Carley and Spapens (1998), Buhrs (2004) and countless others whose work could have more firmly anchored and underpinned her own. Indeed, another striking thing on reading the report was that the only pre-2009 reference is to the 1987 Brundtland Report.

Consider for instance, Spangenberg et al’s (1998:9) description of the Environmental Space:

Environmental space is a normative concept which takes into account the physical as well as the social and developmental aspects of sustainability. Physically, environmental space is described as the capacity of the biosphere’s environmental functions to support human economic activities, the upper limit given by the carrying capacity. The social dimension of environmental space is given by the “global fair shares” or “equity principle” derived from the definition of sustainable development, assigning to all living people a right to achieve a comparable level of resource use, and to future generations a right to an equivalent supply. This is equivalent to the principle of inter- and intra-generational justice of distribution. Obviously, such a right cannot be implemented in a straight- forward manner – it is a human right to use a fair share of the common heritage of mankind rather than a piece of enforceable legislation.

In explaining the Safe and Just Operating Space, Raworth (2012:4) notes that:

“the social foundation forms an inner boundary, below which are many dimensions of human deprivation. The environmental ceiling forms an outer boundary, beyond which are many dimensions of environmental degradation. Between the two boundaries lies an area – shaped like a doughnut – which represents an environmentally safe and socially just space for humanity to thrive in. It is also the space in which inclusive and sustainable economic development takes place, “

and that:

“This framework brings out a new perspective on sustainable development. Human-rights advocates have long focused on the imperative of ensuring every person’s claim to life’s essentials, while ecological economists have highlighted the need to situate the economy within environmental limits. The framework brings the two approaches together in a simple, visual way, creating a closed system that is bounded by human rights on the inside and environmental sustainability on the outside.” (p15)

The Safe and Just Space for Humanity (Raworth 2012)

I’m not so sure that this post-2009 perspective on sustainable development is so new? The authors I mention above and others too many to mention, have like me, wrestled with the linkages between environmental quality and human equality. What is novel in the report however, is that based on social concerns raised in 80 governmental submissions to the Rio+20 process, Raworth (2012:15) notes that “the 11 dimensions of the social foundation are illustrative and are based on governments’ priorities for Rio+20. The nine dimensions of the environmental ceiling are based on the planetary boundaries set out by Rockström et al (2009).” [Note: the 11 dimensions are those inside the social foundation or hole in the doughnut in the diagram above].

So what are some of the take home messages from Raworth’s work?

1 She asks and answers the question: “would eradicating poverty put planetary boundaries under stress? No. Available data imply that the social foundation could be achieved for every person alive today with strikingly few additional resources.” (p5). She also notes “sustainable development can only succeed if poverty eradication and environmental sustainability are pursued together.” (p8). Similarly, much of my work has been on the inextricable links between environmental quality and human equality, and the need to work on both together, which has been borne out by the work of Wilkinson and Pickett (2010) on inequality.

2 Related, she argues that “moving into the safe and just space for humanity means eradicating poverty to bring everyone above the social foundation, and reducing global resource use, to bring it back within planetary boundaries. Social justice demands that this double objective be achieved through far greater global equity in the use of natural resources, with the greatest reductions coming from the world’s richest consumers. And it demands far greater efficiency in transforming natural resources to meet human needs.” (p5)

3 Finally, her $billion question, but one that needs to be asked: “Who should determine the dimensions and boundaries of an internationally agreed social foundation and an environmental ceiling, and how?” We’re better at assigning social minima like the $1.25 a day Poverty Threshold. I wonder, will we ever begin to truly define not only environmental, but other maxima too?

Postscript

A day after I’d written this Post, I came across another critique of Oxfam’s Doughnut in Is Doughnut Economics too Western? Critique from a Latin American Environmentalist. In it Eduardo Gudynas makes a similar point to mine about Environmental Space.

References

Agyeman, J, Bullard, R and Evans, B. (eds) (2003) Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.

Agyeman, J (2005) Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice. New York. New York University Press.

Buhrs, T. (2004) Sharing Environmental Space: The Role of Law, Economics and Politics. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. Vol. 47 No. 3. pp. 429-447.

Carley, M and Spapens, P. (1998). Sharing the World: Sustainable Living and Global Equity in the 21^st Century. New York. St. Martin’s Press.

We need to redouble our efforts toward flourishing: developing the capabilities and potential in all humans in order to live productively in a convivial manner within environmental limits. Failure to do so will end our ability to approach anything near the just and sustainable futures we are fully capable of.

Together, these stories gave me pause to think about some research my students and I did last year on the potential in new agricultures to help us re-imagine what constitutes ‘local foods.’ Is it for example, what our increasingly diverse populations want to buy locally as culturally appropriate foods, or is it what should be grown locally according to the predominantly ecologically-focused local food movement?

Consider the following from the NYT article:

“New Roots [San Diego], with 85 growers from 12 countries, is one of more than 50 community farms dedicated to refugee agriculture, an entrepreneurial movement spreading across the country. American agriculture has historically been forged by newcomers, like the Scandinavians who helped settle the Great Plains; today’s growers are more likely to be rural subsistence farmers from Africa and Asia, resettled in and around cities from New York, Burlington, Vt., and Lowell, Mass., to Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego”.

Absent however in much of the popular discourse surrounding the local food movement and local food systems, has been an explicit recognition of the social justice and cultural concerns involving the ability of refugee, minority, economically marginalized and ‘new’ populations to produce, access and consume healthy and culturally appropriate foods. The local food movement has used ecological arguments in the main to tell us what should be grown, and has tended to focus on growing native food plants, especially plants local to a given (bio)region. It has also catered to mostly middle and upper income populations, with its food earning the moniker “Yuppie Chow,” due to the niche market status of organic and local foods, and the common focus on providing ecological sustainability, and sustainable incomes for small scale farmers rather than affordable healthy food and culturally appropriate foods for low income, ‘new’ and refugee populations.

In its most physically and spatially extreme form these low income, ‘new’ and refugee populations live in areas called food deserts (Wrigley, 2002). These ‘food deserts’ are the result of a history of disinvestment in and neglect of mostly low income urban (and rural) areas which have not been recognized as profitable sites for supermarket and grocery store location and have therefore been left with limited and often less healthy options for food access, such as corner stores and fast food establishments. The residents of these neighborhoods, such as City Heights, San Diego, where New Roots Community Farm is located, are more vulnerable to food insecurity and have less ability to determine their access to healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food as a result. As the NYT article notes: “In City Heights, where half the residents live at or below the federal poverty line, the three-year-old farmer’s market was the city’s first in a low-income neighborhood, a collaboration between the nonprofit International Rescue Committee and the San Diego County Farm Bureau.”

But food is far more than a product which merely sustains life. In our book ‘Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability‘, Alison Alkon and I note that:

“Winson (1993) refers to food as an “intimate commodity” that is literally taken inside the body and imbued with heightened significance. Not only is it a physiological necessity, but food practices—what scholars often call foodways —are manifestations and symbols of cultural histories and proclivities. As individuals participate in culturally defined proper ways of eating, they perform their own identities and memberships in particular groups (Douglass 1996). Food informs individuals’ identities, including their racial identities, in ways that other environmental justice and sustainability issues—energy, water, garbage and so on—do not”.

Food, food production, food access…. these are not the solely ecological concerns foregrounded by the dominant narrative, reducible to questions of environmental sustainability, vitally important though this is. Food and foodways are fundamental to peoples’ individual and collective identities, and these are even more to the fore in ‘new’ populations and other marginalized populations who are invisiblized by, and in the dominant culture.  As we move towards a more intercultural America, the local food movement(s) should recognize, embrace and celebrate cultural diversity as much as it currently celebrates biodiversity. As an ecology student in the 1970s, what was it our professors kept telling us about ecosystems? Oh yes, in ecosystems ‘diversity equals stability‘. I think this maxim works as well for social movements, like the local food movement, as it does for ecosystems………

References:

Douglass, M. (1996) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Purity and Taboo. New York: Taylor.

Winson, A. (1993) The Intimate Commodity. Toronto, Canada: Garamond Press.

Wrigley, N. (2002) “‘Food deserts’ in British cities: Policy context and research priorities’, Urban Studies, vol. 39, no. 11, pp. 2029-2040.

“Thankfully, the 2008 presidential campaign just got a whole lot more serious. In fact the stakes really couldn’t be higher for the U.S. and for the whole planet. In the past month or so, we’ve moved smoothly and thankfully from lipstick on pigs, via Tina Fey (Saturday Night Live) on Governor Palin’s foreign policy experience, namely “I can see Russia from my house”, to debate the nitty-gritty policy positions of each respective campaign. Not a moment too soon in my book.

In my blog of July 7th, I wrote: “basically the American dream is fast becoming the American nightmare and the problem is that neither presidential candidate is prepared to redefine and dematerialize the dream”. I wrote that before the Wall Street and consequent global financial meltdown. That redefinition is even more crucial now.

The materialist, greed-driven meltdown is widely accepted as an indicator that our whole human enterprise on this planet is badly out of control. As Al Gore said in San Jose recently “I actually do think that the green revolution is the solution to the financial crisis, the national security crisis, the debt crisis and the climate crisis—they’re all connected.”

But is either presidential candidate really ready to go before the American people and talk down, dematerialize the dream? Is either prepared to emphasize the need for quality of life increases that would confer a sense of individual and community wellbeing, rather than tax giveaways that are somehow supposed to increase our standard of living? Are they really ready to say, in effect, less is more?

In his historic “Our moment is now” speech in Des Moines, Iowa on December 27 2007 in which he invoked Dr Martin Luther King’s notion of “the fierce urgency of now”, Obama said “we are at a defining moment in our history. Our nation is at war. Our planet is in peril. Our health care system is broken, our economy is out of balance, our education system fails too many of our children, and our retirement system is in tatters.” This was a wonderful set up to what I thought might be a joined-up discussion of the need for a more sustainable America. I waited, and waited………..

Yet a quick and dirty search of both candidate websites revealed that neither candidate is talking about sustainable development as a strategic overarching policy agenda recognizing as Gore does the interrelatedness of the crises we face and spanning a concern for both people and the planet. To be fair, Obama’s website does mention sustainable communities but only as a subset of his environmental policies. Even the Pope gets it. As he said on his recent tour of Australia there needs to be “agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the wellbeing of all while respecting environmental balances”.

The U.S. is clearly at a tipping point. We are in a paradigm shift. As ‘Earth Scholar’ Thomas Berry wrote: “It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story-the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it-is not functioning properly and we have not learned the new story”. The old dominant social paradigm, the neo-liberal story of how things are and came to be so, simply isn’t working. We need to write the new story, and quickly. Here, out of these cascading crises, I think we have a golden opportunity.

Obama has in many ways lifted us, filled us with hope and with a constellation of phrases that hint, but only hint, at an understanding of the real need for a new story. In one of those phrases he says: “together we will begin the next great chapter in the American story”. My question to you Barack is this: are we going to simply read a prewritten chapter, or are we going to start afresh, writing the chapter ourselves along more sustainable lines? That, Mr President-in-waiting, is the really fierce urgency of now.”

Yesterday, walking around the Occupy Boston site in Dewey Square in the October heatwave, with around 300 residents and many more sympathetic visitors, the message is no less vociferous than that of Occupy Wall Street. It’s a message that’s getting louder and clearer by the day: too many people are hurting, change is needed quickly and we need to write that new chapter along more just and sustainable lines. The question is, now President Obama, who will write that new chapter?

However, when Pollan begins his first rule by telling us not to “eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” he ignores the fact that “our” great-grandmothers come from a wide variety of social and economic contexts that may have informed their perceptions of food quite differently. Some were enslaved, transported across the ocean, and forced to subsist on the overflow from the master’s table. Others were forcibly sent to state-mandated boarding schools, in which they were taught to despise, and even forget, any foods they would previously have recognized. And those who have emigrated from various parts of the global south in the past few generations may have great-grandmothers who saw the foods they recognized demeaned, or even forbidden, by those who claimed their lands. Of course it is not these histories that Pollan intends to invoke when he urges readers to choose fruits and vegetables over processed foods. But because of his privileged positionality, Pollan fails to consider the effects of race on food access and the alternative meanings his words may hold for people of color in the United States. In this same way, whites in the food movement often simply do not see the subtle exclusivities that are woven into its narrative.

This is not to say that some of the food movement’s insights, particularly those regarding the destructive nature of industrial agriculture, are not important. Indeed, many of the authors included in this volume are supporters and consumers of local and organic food. Among us are individual and community gardeners, former farm apprentices, members of community-supported agriculture projects, and farmers market shoppers. Nevertheless, for many of us, our involvement with the food movement, along with our academic training, has contributed to the belief that the dominant narrative described earlier, compelling as it may be to some, might drown out other stories. In these additional stories, food is not only linked to ecological sustainability, community, and health but also to racial, economic, and environmental justice.

Our goal in highlighting these additional stories is not to chastise the food movement, but to work toward building a stronger and deeper critique of industrialized agriculture, which includes injustice along with environmental and social degradation. If activists in the food movement are to go beyond providing alternatives and truly challenge agribusiness’s destructive power, they will need a broad coalition of supporters. We argue that such support can best be found in the low-income communities and communities of color that have been, and are currently, most deeply harmed by the food system. But this alliance will require that the food movement reach beyond its own dominant narrative to understand the experiences and perspectives of its potential allies”.

Excerpt from ‘Introduction: The Food Movement as Polyculture’ by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman from our book Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability

Reference.

Pollan, Michael (2007). Unhappy Meals. The New York Times Magazine, January 28. http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=87 (accessed October 27, 2009).