The sustainability imperative and urban New Zealand : promise and paradox

Abstract

'Urban sustainability' is an increasingly ubiquitous term now featuring in all manner of policy documents and promotional material. As an ambitious attempt to address social, economic and bio-physical environmental issues it appears to balance philanthropic ideals, such as social development, with environmental concern and fiscal efficiency. Yet, my research involving in-depth interviews with 35 urban practitioners in Christchurch, New Zealand, exposes much of the apparent consensus around its meaning as illusory.

Though the concept's promise rests on an apparently neutral reconciliation of disparate goals and aspirations, it is conceptually paradoxical, difficult to implement and extremely political. While the orthodox tripartite promotes a combination of social, economic and environmental elements, I have found practitioners tend to emphasise bio-physical aspects of the concept. As a corollary, urban sustainability is often reified as a technical problem to be managed within certain budget constraints.

The ways in which the concept is quite literally made concrete in our cities and towns naturalises certain social arrangements, such as, for example, the spatial segregation of different groups. The processes of reification also serve to legitimise particular rationalities, one of which encourages a particular reading of 'the environment' that rests on an unhelpful and possibly dangerous separation of nature and the city. In this thesis I use techniques associated with discourse analysis and symbolic interaction, informed by an eclectic literature around social geography, and urban political economy and ecology, to explore and elaborate upon these themes.