Books in the Routledge Studies in Environment, Culture, and Society series

In recent planning and policy making, utopian thought and experimental approaches to the organization of society and the built environment have been rare. Sustainable society is viewed as something created within the framework of current society, by small steps. This book analyzes the potential of alternative green futures through perspectives such as political ecology, environmental justice, and utopian thought. It includes analyses of strategies and emerging practices on the macro levels of institutional, infrastructural and economic change, and also analyzes micropractices in the form of case studies of self-organised cooperative housing, new forms of local exchange and energy provision.

In Pursuit of Healthy Environments brings temporal depth to a highly topical issue, the interaction between health and the environment.

This book deals with the potentials of social-ecological systems analysis for resolving sustainability problems. Contributors relate inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives to systemic dynamics, human behavior and the different dimensions and scales. With a problem-focused, sustainability-oriented approach to the analysis of human-nature relations, this text will be a useful resource for scholars of human and social ecology, geography, sociology, development studies, social anthropology and natural resources management.

Despite the widespread opinion that calamities foster learning processes, there is much evidence that failure remains the norm. This book explores whether learning in the context of calamities occurs at all, and if so, under which conditions learned knowledge and practices can be achieved and preserved on a societal level in the long run.

This book deals with the potentials of social-ecological systems analysis for resolving sustainability problems. Contributors relate inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives to systemic dynamics, human behavior and the different dimensions and scales. With a problem-focused, sustainability-oriented approach to the analysis of human-nature relations, this text will be a useful resource for scholars of human and social ecology, geography, sociology, development studies, social anthropology and natural resources management.

With an emphasis on the challenges of sustaining the commons across local to global scales, Making Commons Dynamic examines the empirical basis of theorising the concepts of commonisation and decommonisation as a way to understand commons as a process and offers analytical directions for policy and practice.

Despite the widespread opinion that calamities foster learning processes, there is much evidence that failure remains the norm. This book explores whether learning in the context of calamities occurs at all, and if so, under which conditions learned knowledge and practices can be achieved and preserved on a societal level in the long run.

Utopian thought and experimental approaches to societal organization have been rare in the last decades of planning and politics. Instead, there is a widespread belief in ecological modernization, that sustainable societies can be created within the frame of the current global capitalist world order by taking small steps such as eco-labeling, urban densification, and recycling. However, in the context of the current crisis in which resource depletion, climate change, uneven development, and economic instability are seen as interlinked, this belief is increasingly being questioned and alternative developmental paths sought. This collection demonstrates how utopian thought can be used in a contemporary context, as critique and in exploring desired futures. The book includes theoretical perspectives on changing global socio-environmental relationships and political struggles for alternative development paths, and analyzes micro-level practices in co-housing, alternative energy provision, use of green space, transportation, co-production of urban space, peer-to-peer production and consumption, and alternative economies. It contributes research perspectives on contemporary green utopian practices and strategies, combining theoretical and empirical analyses to spark discussions of possible futures.

This book presents transdisciplinary research in practice. It describes methodological innovations and examines the challenges involved in integrating non-academic actors in scientific research, the tensions that arise in the encounter of theory and praxis, and the inherently normative, political nature of sustainability research.