Reading for day 3 social sustainability

What is social sustainability?

Definition and principles of sustainability contain the social
Sustainability has grown out of the environmental movement and in many people’s minds is mostly about the broader aspects of the environment – reducing resource consumption,
reducing automobile dependence, reducing the processes that lead to land degradation.
However, it didn’t take long for people to realize that this agenda could not be achieved without making social considerations a priority. Households and communities consume resources; cities and suburbs become car dependent; regional and local communities prioritize land management. Thus social considerations were drawn into how we understand sustainability, though without a clear understanding of what that could mean. In particular, the link between social justice and sustainability is being heavily debated …

The social sustainability agenda does not mean that every social agenda is part of it.
Sustainability is about social causes that simultaneously produce economic and
environmental benefit. It is about environmental causes that simultaneously produce
economic and social benefit, and it is about economic causes that have social and
environmental benefit. Not everything fits this. Throwing the word “sustainability” onto the end of a pet social cause doesn’t or shouldn’t cut any ice just as it doesn’t when a business tries to add luster to its case by liberally spraying “sustainability” about on its brochures. Sustainability has to be argued and demonstrated, and not just used as a vague context word…

Social disparities do generally have multiple implications that can be related to
sustainability. …disparities [can] lead to unsustainability--particularly with social issues such as housing, health, education, transport. For example, housing affordability, quality and location can lead to poorer people wasting energy and water and traveling far too much when they can least afford it. Generally, for such disparities to be understood in terms of their environmental aspects, it requires the social issue to be analyzed in terms of its geography or place implications. This is not always done yet the issue becomes much richer and more policy relevant when it is.

Social sustainability is about social capital related to place
People cannot live truly without relating to place. Modernism suggests we can float through life as observers and consumers not belonging anywhere. But such is not the worldview of those holding indigenous and traditional beliefs… Sustainability challenges modernism that reduces everything to a global professional function and finds “belonging” and “sense of place” to be nonsense. A “sense of place” and heritage “reaches some deeper hunger for continuity when the future may appear cavernously unpredictable,” says Kim Wikie (quoted recently by Andre Malan when discussing the importance of place). Sustainability challenges globalization (the global modernism agenda) to show that bioregions and communities do matter. [Social sustainability approaches] … show that the social dimension is the missing link of economic planning in regions…It suggests that regional sustainability strategies need to develop new ways of bringing “sense of place” perspectives into regions [in both rural and urban areas]. This will require an understanding of the story of a region – its aboriginal story, its local history and its natural history. This is now called “place narrative” and only by doing this can a place or region create a long term vision for its future and hence shape its development.

Social sustainability is about values and visions shaping the market.
The market has been shaped by community values and visions to prevent slavery, child labor and excessive working hours. …Environmental assessment is another process shaping the market. Sustainability provides us with a coherent checklist for drawing together our core values about economic, social and environmental benefits that we want for our future. It asserts fundamental human rights, but it is wary of fundamentalism. Just as we cannot say “fix the market and we fix everything,” we cannot say “fix the environment and we fix everything” or “fix the community and we fix everything.” We need values that integrate these three.
[…]

Social sustainability gives new substance to transparent participatory processes, to
multiculturalism and to the arts.
The sustainability agenda is a list of really hard issues, long-term complex issues that do not lend themselves to simple engineering or financial solutions. Transparent participatory processes are highlighted by sustainability not only because of the human right to be informed but because without it we won’t solve the problems. … deliberative democracy is required to solve “wicked problems” that logic cannot solve. These issues require innovation based on dialogue from different perspectives. Such innovation comes from welcoming differences and delighting therefore in multiculturalism. It also recognizes the importance of artistic voices that can probe beneath the surface and push us into new awareness.

(adapted by Sharon Meagher from THE SOCIAL SIDE OF THE STATE SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY By Professor Peter Newman, Director, Sustainability Policy Unit Department of the Premier and Cabinet, Western Australia, available on the website for The Sigma Project--Sustainability --Integrated Guidelines for Management, the UK Department of Trade and Industry; the unedited text can be found at: http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:P-9Ya0ZUF_YJ:www.projectsigma.com/RnDStreams/RD_soc_research.pdf+social+sustainability&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=19)