Framing questions of sustainability

Framing questions of sustainability

Read, S.A.

Architecture and The Built Environment

Urbanism

2014-07-09

Sustainability sits at the top of the policy agendas of the EU and other governmental bodies. But sustainability is complex and not one thing, it relates to different sectors and multiple systems, and also to different zones, scales, ‘levels’ those systems occupy. Theoretically and practically we are involved with different questions depending on where the question is bounded and at what scope we want to look at or deal with it. Situation, in a relational sense, matters. Without understanding this contextual, relational and framing factor we can end with inadequate or misleading answers to important questions. Questions need to be framed and framing involves complex topologies of spatial insides and outsides and functional parts and wholes. This relational and framing aspect of sustainability has been radically underconsidered and this paper will propose a method to address this deficit. The approach is ‘materialist’ but also ‘constructivist’, not in the sense of ‘social construction’. Instead it is proposed we live in a reality historically and technically constructed and that the ‘social’, the ‘economic’, the ‘cultural’ and even the ‘environmental’ are what we thus construct. This converges with a so-called ‘technoscience’ perspective, one that has been addressed through ‘actor-network theory’. But there are issues with actor-network theory that the method proposed addresses.

technoscience
sustainability
urban form

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:dc30303a-b60d-493f-b9c5-a976c4cc887f

AESOP

AESOP 2014 Annual Conference:“From Control to Co-evolution”, Utrecht/Delft, The Netherlands, 9-12 July, 2014 (authors version)

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) Read, S.