Eco-communities as insurgent climate urbanism : radical urban socio-material transformations

Eco-communities are permanent interventions to build and reshape the urban, a form of insurgent urbanism. Using examples from already-existing urban eco-communities the ways such projects demonstrate lasting material, social and economic transformations are illustrated through three examples of; generating affordability, designing for frequent social interaction, and repurposing marginalized public urban spaces. These examples are scalable to the city level, but would work best if replicated and reworked by neighborhoods, rather than taking one-size-fits-all approach to climate urbanism. However, for many eco-communities, there are often gaps between their imagined politics and their realization. Racial exclusion and class exclusivity, along with contradictions encountered in property ownership and affordability, require ongoing critical interrogation of seemingly radical versions of climate urbanism, lest they too contribute to the entrenchment rather than amelioration of inequalities in the contemporary urban

Making space for disability in eco-housing and eco-communities

There is continued failure to build homes for diverse and disabled occupancy. We use three eco-communities in England to explore how their eco-houses and wider community spaces accommodate the complex disability of hypotonic Cerebral Palsy. Using site visits, video footage, spatial mapping, field diary observations, surveys and interviews, this paper argues that little attention has been paid to making eco-communities and eco-houses accessible. There are, we argue, three useful and productive ways to interrogate accessibility in eco-communities, through understandings of legislation, barriers and mobility. These have three significant consequences for eco-communities and disabled access: ecological living as practised by these eco-communities relies upon particular bodily capacities, and thus excludes many disabled people; disabled access was only considered in relation to the house and its thresholds, not to the much broader space of the home; and eco-communities need to be, and would benefit from being, spaces of diverse interaction

How Neighborhoods Influence Health: Lessons to be learned from the application of political ecology

AimThis paper articulates how political ecology can be a useful tool for asking fundamental questions and applying relevant methods to investigate structures that impact relationship between neighborhood and health. Through a narrative analysis, we identify how political ecology can develop our future agendas for neighborhood-health research as it relates to social, political, environmental, and economic structures. Political ecology makes clear the connection between political economy and neighborhood by highlighting the historical and structural processes that produce and maintain social inequality, which affect health and well-being. These concepts encourage researchers to examine how people construct neighborhood and health in different ways that, in turn, can influence different health outcomes and, thus, efforts to address solutions

Urban ecological futures: Five eco-community strategies for more sustainable and equitable cities

Cities are critical sites for understanding, and potentially ameliorating, the effects of global ecological change, the climate emergency, and natural resource depletion. Contemporary cities are socio-materially connected through global markets, trade and transportation, placing ever-increasing demands on the natural environment and generating dangerous pollutants and emissions. Current approaches to address these environmental crises are dominated by neoliberal forms of ‘green’ urban development, carbon accounting, and techno-economic solutions, which extend corporate control over cities and tend to entrench inequality. A more strategic approach for enabling ecologically sustainable and equitable urban futures is urgently needed. We present five strategies for urban ecological futures in the Global North, derived from qualitative and ethnographic empirical research with international eco-communities, which open up discussions about how to tackle this challenge by acknowledging the role and potential of: (1) non-extractive community economies; (2)democratic processes of cooperative action; (3) social approaches to resource management; (4) participatory collaborative governance; and (5) urban heterogeneity and social justice. We explore the relational, contested and contextual processes through which these approaches could become embedded in urban policy and planning, thereby offering the strategic capacity required to move towards truly sustainable cities