What counts as sustainability?: a sociospatial analysis

ABSTRACT

Sustainability is a ubiquitous term today and one that is central to key environmental and social policy discussions relating to the most pressing questions faced in contemporary societies. In this paper we argue that sustainability needs to be understood in relation to social space. We do so by engaging with Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking tools as well as Edward Soja’s spatial analysis to deconstruct how differently positioned actors understand and relate to space, including how to sustain it. Drawing on focus group and interview data from a small Australian city, we use Soja’s typology to critique spatial tropes and dualistic frames common in sustainability discourses such as ecological/social, global/local, and reveal nuanced interpretations of spatial relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Space
• bourdieu
• sustainability
• soja
• qualitative
• social networking

Acknowledgements

Kim would like to acknowledge the support she received for her research through the provision of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship at the University of Tasmania. She also acknowledges that much of this research would not have been possible without the support and guidance of her PhD supervisors, for which Michael Corbett was one.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This issue gained nation-wide media attention during the time of the interview. Media reports positioned the topic and decisions associated with it as controversial (Neales, 2016) with news headings such as, ‘Expert warns sale of Australia’s largest dairy to Chinese company could be disastrous’ (Tabakoff, 2016).

2. Rose (1999) argues that over the last fifty years, governments have strategically linked their objectives to the ‘private’ sphere of the family. This argument is similar to Margaret’s concerns that she is being unfairly ‘responsibilised’ and is being asked to do the work that she believes should be the responsibility of governments and corporations.

3. This might also be framed in Bourdieu’s (1984) terms in which the middle classes define themselves and their practices in terms of what he called, ‘distance from necessity.’ To be bourgeois is not to have to worry about practicalities and ‘basic’ sustainability requirements, but rather to focus on ethereal, distant and refined concerns as though this marks out one’s particular gifts and moral superiority rather than possessing the wealth and resources to make such ‘necessities’ appear irrelevant.

4. Anthony Giddens (1990) uses the twin ideas of expert systems (professionals) and symbolic tokens (money, credentials, awards) as central to his understanding of late modernity in The Consequences of Modernity. Leading European social theorists from very different perspectives like Giddens, Bourdieu, Lefebvre and Foucault recognize how modernity/postmodernity needs to be understood in spatial as well as temporal terms.