Extract from the Editorial by Gary McDonogh, Cindy Isenhour and Melissa Checker:
The term “sustainability” is everywhere. As a word, as shorthand for diverse sets of practices, as the subject of scientific debate, as a fluid concept attached to institutions as varied as planning offices, schools and tourist complexes—the term is ubiquitous. Over the past decade, with growing alarm over the effects of climate change and the rapid pace of urbanization around the globe, sustainability has also come to permeate discussions about urban living. In this context, sustainability has the power of an objective scientific concept. Even in non-scientific discourse it is legitimized through appeals to rationality, modernity and precision (however imprecisely used). And yet, in practice, meanings of, and associations with sustainability are vague, broad and even perplexing. What, for example, do we make of phrases such as “sustainable tourism” or “sustainable luxury”? What contradictions lurk in everyday planning for “sustainable growth,”“urban sustainability,” or “sustainable development?” This collection represents our ethnographic investigations into the simultaneous ubiquity and ambiguity of sustainability and its affects on the everyday lives of urban residents.
