Food production, energy generation and housing: What are the possibilities for multifunctional cemeteries?

Abstract

While eco-lightbulbs, tiny homes and bans on single-use plastic bags nibble at the edges of our profligate ways, ecological and social sustainability is beginning to profoundly challenge long-standing death styles. This collection brings together new scholarship on multiple and innovative changes to managing the dead from around the world, including the USA, Poland, the Netherlands, Britain, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, to argue for a new perspective in theorising this shift to more sustainable death ways. This is a perspective that moves on from a top-down approach to social change, viewing the perceived gulf between cultural and space management as more a fabrication than a reality.