Freytag, Tim

Miller, Byron

Mössner, Samuel

English

DIE ERDE – Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin

195DIE ERDE · Vol. 148 · 4/2017Editorial: Cities and the politics of urban sustainabilitySamuel Mössner1, Tim Freytag2, Byron Miller31Institut für Geographie, WWU Münster, Heisenbergstraße 2, 48149 Münster, Germany, moessner@uni-muenster.de2Institut für Umweltsozialwissenschaften und Geographie, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 79085 Freiburg, Germany,   tim.freytag@geographie.uni-freiburg.de3Department of Geography, University of Calgary, Canada, byron.miller@ucalgary.caVol. 148, No. 4  ·  EditorialD I E  E R D EJournal of the Geographical Society of BerlinDOI: 10.12854/erde-148-48Samuel Mössner, Tim Freytag, Byron Miller 2017: Editorial: Cities and the politics of urban sustainability. – DIE ERDE 148 (4): 195-196Today, in many cities around the globe, sustainabil-ity policies appear to be broadly consensual. Over 20 years ago, however, environmental movements stimulated antagonistic debates and discussions, raising pointed questions around how society could cope with limited resources, unrestrained growth and rising carbon emissions. With their roots in Ger-man and U.S. environmental activism (Uekötter 2014), environmental movements often directly linked envi-ronmental issues with aspects of distributional jus-tice, redefining conceptions and norms of geographi-cal distribution of environmental improvements and amenities on the one hand and sites of environmental degradation, on the other. Procedural justice became an equally important issue, aiming at the question of who can participate and influence or even make po-litical decisions in this realm.Since then, the claim for a ‘greener’ society seems to have become widely accepted as a common sense global value. Today, we see a wide and deep institu-tionalization of environmental values and policies at various geographical scales, such as national spatial planning codes and regulations, companies’ guidelines and marketing campaigns, and in everyday activi-ties and lifestyles. Indeed, as Swyngedouw (2007: 20) has pointed out, it is virtually impossible to find any-one who is opposed to the idea of sustainability. Why is this so? Has sustainability won in the battle of ideas, backed by a multitude of elites?  Taking a closer look, however, we can see that envi-ronmental and sustainability goals have been pro-foundly transformed since they emerged at the urban scale (Béal 2012: 406) and were translated into urban political practices. The capacity to fundamentally question capitalist growth and democratic practices has been reduced and supplanted by ‘manageable’ practices that seek to reconcile the contradictions be-tween growth and sustainability, subordinating sus-tainability to growth machine politics and economic growth. Rather than elaborating an exit-strategy from growth-oriented pathways, ‘actually-existing sustainability’ policies re-define the limits to growth, placing them somewhere in the distant future, and propose a way to maintain traditional politics. This transformation has evolved as a set of rather non-conflicting consensual political practices, facilitated by technocratic approaches that offer solutions to specific problems, rooted in unquestioned expert knowledge. Governments increasingly seek to emu-late so-called ‘best-practices’, looking for role-models and indicators that can help steer policies toward the provision of “a clean environment, a growing econo-my, and a society that promotes harmonious citizen interactions, while simultaneously limiting carbon dioxide and other GHG emissions” (Zhou et al. 2015: 448). However, these technocratic approaches only selectively problematize urgent problems. Such ap-proaches strive to develop sophisticated, yet apoliti-cal, principles and guidelines that help “to define the 196 DIE ERDE · Vol. 148 · 4/2017elements and goals of urban sustainability” ( Joss et al. 2012: 109). The reduction of complexity that goes with positivist approaches allows for the identification of ‘best-practices’ and role-models for green growth. With this special issue we argue that research on ‘best-practices’ and role-models to green growth lim-its the range of political debate that is necessary to rethink the pathways towards a sustainable urban society. We present a variety of alternative perspec-tives that help to critically approach ‘best-practices’ and techno-scientific framings of sustainability by unveiling power relations, contradictions and con-flicts (Freytag et al. 2014) that are linked to ‘actually existing sustainabilities’ (While et al. 2004; Krueger and Agyeman 2005; Krueger and Gibbs 2007).This special issue is comprised of five papers. Andrew Jonas, Rüdiger Wurzel, Elizabeth Monaghan and Winfried Osthorst investigate new alliances be-tween local governments, businesses and civil society that have been built in Hull (UK) and Bremerhaven (Germany), two structurally disadvantaged port cities, around new opportunities opened up by cli-mate change and the green economy. Aida Nciri and Byron Miller analyze the contested relationship be-tween district heating and combined heat and power (CHP) in Sweden since 1945, focusing on the chang-ing roles of different government and industry actors in the adoption or blockage of combined systems. Examining Boston (US), Thomas Vith and Samuel Mössner show that the implementation of sustainable modes of transportation is linked to questions of so-cial division and exclusion. Lidia Monza discusses the privatization of exclusive housing and its contribu-tion to lifestyle and social inequalities in Milan (Italy), while Veronika Cummings and Aurel von Richthofen point out how sustainability has been progressively mobilized as a narrative for urban planning and re-gional development projects in the Gulf States.All in all, with this special issue we aim to contribute to a richer understanding of the political mechanisms and strategies of building and challenging societal consensus around urban sustainability. We are keen to understand the urban and regional conflicts that emerge through sustainability politics and the pos-sibilities for political alliances and social movements pursuing agendas of both resistance and support. In other words, we seek to bring the political back into the sustainability discourse.ReferencesBéal, V. 2012: Urban governance, sustainability and environ-mental movements: post-democracy in French and Brit-ish cities. – European Urban and Regional Studies 19 (4): 404-419, – doi: 10.1177/0969776411428562Freytag, T., S. Gössling and S. Mössner 2014: Living the green city: Freiburg’s Solarsiedlung between nar-ratives and practices of sustainable urban develop-ment. – Local Environment 19 (6): 644-659, – doi: 10.1080/13549839.2013.868872Joss, S., D. Tomozeiu and R. Cowley 2012: Eco-city indicators: governance challenges. – WIT Transactions on Ecology and The Environment (155): 109-120, – doi: 10.2495/SC120101Krueger, R. and J. Agyeman 2005: Sustainability schizo-phrenia or ‘actually existing sustainabilities?’ Toward a broader understanding of the politics and promise of lo-cal sustainability in the US. – Geoforum 36 (4): 410–417, – doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.07.005Krueger, R. and D. Gibbs 2007: Introduction. Problematizing the Politics of Sustainability. – In: Krueger, R. and D. Gibbs (eds.): The Sustainable Development Paradox. – London and New York: 1-11Swyngedouw, E. 2007: Impossible ‘Sustainability’ and the Postpolitical Condition. – In: Krueger, R. and D. Gibbs (eds.): The Sustainable Development Paradox. – London and New York: 13-40Uekötter, F. 2014: The Greenest Nation? – CambridgeWhile, A., A.E.G. Jonas and D. Gibbs 2004: The Environment and the Entrepreneurial City: Searching for the Urban ‘Sustainability Fix’ in Manchester and Leeds. – Interna-tional Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28 (3): 549-569Zhou, N., G. He, C. Williams and D. Fridley 2015: ELITE cities: A low-carbon eco-city evaluation tool for China. – Ecolog-ical Indicators 48 (1): 448-456Editorial: Cities and the politics of urban sustainability

Editorial: Cities and the politics of urban sustainability

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DIE ERDE – Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin