How Sustainable Is Our Urban Social-Sustainability Theory?

Abstract

This short opinion article critically comments on some current mainstream trends, characteristics, and biases in urban social sustainability research literature. Through identifying some gaps regarding geography, sub-topics, and study approaches, and through considering “off-the-map” southern urban realities, it calls for the need to refocus and reshape some of the basic notions and presumptions that currently stand behind urban social sustainability theory, concepts, and policy design. Enhancing our sensitivity to truly global urban conditions, argue the authors, would result in less expected and generic (Eurocentric) approaches regarding urban social sustainability and would contribute to its more meaningful and comprehensive understanding. A bias towards qualitative, place-based, and context-sensitive analysis is a necessary step in rendering urban social sustainability truly global as well as in the making of more place-intelligent and place-responsive planning interventions.

During the last two decades, up until the present, it seems to have been a generic custom to open almost every study in the field of social sustainability with a comment about the opaqueness of the term “social sustainability” and the lack of its serious definition, theorization, and policy design. This situation is in contrast, it has been argued, to the clearer definition and application of the two other pillars that compose the agenda of sustainability, that is, the environmental and the economic. An almost rudimentary sample of quotes, borrowed from a few prominent essays in the field of social sustainability within the urban context, provided in chronological order, well exemplifies this. In an UNESCO expert meeting report in 2001, for instance, Juliette Koning posited that “[w]hat we can witness in debates on sustainable development is a slowly emerging interest in the social and cultural elements but at the same time denoting what it means remains vague” [1] (p. 69). In a working paper from 2004, Stephen McKenzie remarked that “[s]ocial sustainability is far more difficult to quantify than economic growth or environmental impact and consequently it is the most neglected element of triple bottom line reporting” [2] (p. 7). According to Beate Littig and Erich Grießler, both the one-pillar model of sustainable development (which clearly prioritizes the environmental component) and the three-pillar model (combining the three components in an essentially equitable manner) “often just provide for ecological and economic, but hardly ever for social gains” [3] (p. 67); it is a fact that “a clear theoretical concept of social sustainability is still missing” [3] (p. 88).

In the same vein, according to Nicola Dempsey (et al., 2011), “[d]espite the anthropocentric focus of the definition of sustainability […], surprisingly little attention has been given to the definition of social sustainability in built environment disciplines” [4] (p. 289). Moreover, they argue, “[s]ocial sustainability is a wide-ranging multi-dimensional concept, with the underlying question ‘what are the social goals of sustainable development?’, which is open to a multitude of answers, with no consensus on how these goals are defined” [4] (p. 290). In addition, according to Asma Mehan and Fazaneh Soflaei (2014), “[s]cholars believe that regarding the social aspect of sustainability; there are still uncertainties in definition, criteria and measurement system until now” [5] (p. 294). Furthermore, the opening chapter in a recent collective volume aimed at highlighting the significance of “the social” for sustainability in urban contexts, states that “[o]verall, despite recent attention to social dimensions, social sustainability remains relatively under-theorized and poorly discussed” [6] (p. 9). In contrast, few other important essays in the field see an advantage in the ambiguous situation of the conceptualization and measurement of social sustainability. This is because it implies the application of discipline-specific criteria within the overarching transdisciplinary nature of the term, rather than mere generalization. It has been argued that “diverse definitions and theoretical approaches could be understood as an asset and extremely productive and generative” [7] (p. 1538) and that common key principles can be discerned in the bulk of the literature, such as equity, democracy, well-being, community participation, and quality of life—some of which are more challenging and sophisticated by being “soft” and intangible [6,7,8]. A multiscale approach is unavoidable for these principles to be applicable and meaningful or to be ideally implemented in neighborhoods, cities, and comparative urban contexts [7,8].

Yet, the very existence of the many hundreds of interdisciplinary studies that have been developed during the last two decades around (urban) social sustainability proves not only that the “social” pillar has never been sidelined in the sustainable development discourse but also that it has been well disseminated and integrated into this rapidly growing and popularized discourse. This is especially true regarding any discipline or field that is associated with the social sciences and humanities, urban studies, or the built environment more generally. Other fields, however, such as transport studies, infrastructure studies (energy, mining), resources management (water and waste), economics (supply chain), or public health, tend to stress the importance of the relatively recent introduction of social sustainability concerns into their academic domain, e.g., [9,10,11,12,13,14,15], respectively. However, they do not tend to theorize, revisit, or sometimes even explain the term “social sustainability.” Rather, their usage of this term is quite instrumental, aiming at developing more sensitivity to sociological aspects and giving more weight to local communities and the “societal” in the cases scrutinized, mostly in urban contexts [ibid].

A close examination of the mainstream contents reflected in the research literature of urban social sustainability reveals two main historiographic tendencies, which are closely intertwined. The first is a methodological obsession with trying to meet the question of how exactly to typify, measure, and quantify social sustainability indicators; the second tendency is to reach conclusions about this inherently methodological question exclusively through a methodology of desk study, that is, of analysis of previous studies in this field (for both tendencies see, for instance [1,2,3,4,5,7,8,16,17,18,19]). As a result, the preoccupation with criteria and measurement systems has become almost the only lens through which the urban social sustainability discourse is analyzed in the research literature. This situation—turning the means into the subject through indirect means—leaves the reader thirsty for more theorization, for some qualitative content such as in-depth case- and site-specific studies involving fieldwork, direct observation, intimate visual documentation, and semi-ethnographic research methodologies. With relatively few examples of the latter (e.g., [20,21,22]), what the reader normally encounters at present is a series of articles that generically open with the aforementioned opening remarks, are made up of their authors’ comments on numerous previous quotes, and are dotted with generic two-column tables that list the bibliographic items that have tried to define the umbrella term “social sustainability” on the one hand, versus a selected one-sentence quote (often quite random) from each item on the other.

These assertions are made following the authors’ examination of the respective research literature for the purpose of preparing comprehensive and up-to-date introductory postgraduate courses in architecture that deal with urban social sustainability concepts and design, accompanied by a professional workshop. As active researchers who have been developed within research traditions that are rooted in the heart of the humanities, and through which traditions we have enthusiastically continued to explore spatial expressions and meanings (particularly, in our case, philosophy and, especially, phenomenology, as well as area studies, esp. African studies), we were quite surprised to discover this state-of-study atmosphere in the field of urban social sustainability. Moreover, with respect to the field’s current geographical scope against the backdrop of our discipline’s South-Eastern/area studies sensitivities [23,24,25], we shall borrow an outstanding critique of the literature in question. Made by two leading world experts in urban social sustainability, Reza Shirazi and Ramin Keivani (School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK), this critical point is rare in its synoptic ability and insight: “Overall, social sustainability research has been largely limited to developed countries, or a small number of non-western countries mainly from the developing countries of south Asia and Latin America”, they say, “and thus has acquired a European, western-inflected interpretation. As social sustainability is rooted in sociocultural values, any generalization of research findings will be problematic” [6] (p. 13).

“What is urgent”, continue the authors of this critique, “is broadening the geographical coverage of social sustainability research to include different types of countries, cities, and societies” [6] (p. 13) in order to achieve a wider and more nuanced understanding from both the common and specific intertwined threads. It is safe to presume, we argue, that a more geographically inclusive perspective of our globalizing world, combined with more serious attention to qualitative, “down to earth” studies [26], would reciprocally nourish urban social sustainability research with relevance, meaning, and contextual urban policy design. It would also cast a new light on contemporary—mostly Anglo-Americocentric—definitions, criteria, and measurement systems that underline current methodologies (Figure 1).

In her seminal paper, “Global and World Cities: A View from Off the Map”, Jennifer Robinson quotes John Friedman, who “asks, in his review of ‘World city research—10 years on’, whether the world city hypothesis ‘is a heuristic, a way of asking questions about cities in general, or a statement about a class of particular cities—world cities—set apart from other urban agglomerations by specific characteristics?’” [27] (p. 22), in [28] (p. 534). Similarly, in trying to understand social sustainability about “10 years on” from the time it had started to be developed (for the purpose of creating a policy-oriented agenda), Stephen McKenzie defined it (inter alia) as both “a life-enhancing condition within communities, and a process within communities that can achieve that condition” [2] (p. 12). In this way, the (heuristic) features of social sustainability—such as equity, connectedness, political participation, and community responsibility—become both “indicators of the condition, and steps towards their establishment and implementation” [2] (p. 12).

However, it seems that looking from “off the map”, especially through Southern urban experiences, at some of the features given by McKenzie—such as “equity of access to key services (including health, education, transport, housing and recreation)”; “a system of cultural relations in which the positive aspects of disparate cultures are valued and protected, and in which cultural integration is supported and promoted when it is desired by individuals or groups”; or “the widespread political participation of citizens not only in electoral procedures but also in other areas of political activity, particularly at a local level” (ibid)—only enhances the dichotomy between both hemispheres. That is, the geographical division between “theory” (normally originates in Western Europe and North America and is disseminated in the English language) and “development” (normally applied in the South, where challenging urban realities are stubbornly disconnected from theory).

Social sustainability discourse, similarly to other discourse that gained global attention in theory and policy design as well as in academic, professional, and popular circles, such as global/world cities, or urban planning, has been imported from the North/West. Its architects, practitioners, articulators and sustainers have been so far not only rarely engaged with South-Eastern environments, but probably have never read from the experience of urbanists such as Philip Harrison, who, working in the context of Johannesburg, argued that “contemporary planning theory is underpinned by an anti-realist ontology that has eroded its capacity to engage meaningfully with the materiality of space” [29] (p. 65), or from the experience of Vanessa Watson, who had shown the irrelevance of virtually normative (or rather Eurocentric) notions such as “civil society”, “participatory planning”, “democracy”, “state”, “identity”, and the “just city” in the context of sub-Saharan Africa cities [30]. While these notions constitute keystones in the social sustainability theory which imagines and presumes a “relatively stable, cohesive and law-abiding civil society, on which the enforcement of regulatory planning and support for the modernist vision depends” [31] (p. 2264), they should be brought into question in view of the realities in some of the world’s regions.

For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, economic decline, political crisis, endemic violence and state collapse, unemployment, crime, insecurity, population movements, and the breakdown of civil society have led informality (in economy, settlement, and modes of behavior) to no longer be a deviation, but the norm [31] (Figure 2). Under such conditions of an “increasingly ‘exotic’, complex and chaotic world that seems to announce the end of the social life and the social fabric as most of us know it”, as exemplified by Filip de Boeck in the context of the Democratic Republic of Congo [32] (p. 93), state and urban governance are only one facet of authority—alongside traditional institutions, warlords, and crime organizations—and are often weaker than the latter. Therefore, the present preoccupation with the apparently “universalistic” discourse of social sustainability of topics of urban policy design and management—such as “participatory planning”, “social cohesion and equity”, “place keeping”, “livability”, and “well-being” [4,5,33,34]—is quite at odds with reality. This casts renewed relevance on Watson’s earlier call for spatial interventions to respond to particular contexts and conditions without being subjected to imported notions from very different world regions [31]. The current state of study regarding urban social sustainability, particularly its geographical lacunae and understandings that are disseminated unidirectionally from one part of the globe to another, invites context-sensitive analysis and place-based research approaches. The employment of contextual approaches and comparisons will enable us to sharpen and enrich the existing corpus of indicators, methodologies, and policies to achieve social sustainability and place-intelligent, place-responsive cities.