Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice - Circles of Sustainability

Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice - Circles of Sustainability, Paul James with Liam Magee, Andy Scerri and Manfred Steger, Routledge (2015). xxii+260 pp., £85.00 (Hardback), ISBN 978-1-138-02573-8Featuring Bruegel's 'Tower of Babel' on its cover, Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice vividly underlines its ambition to develop a common, globally applicable, yet locally attuned 'language' of sustainable development at the city scale both in theory and in practice. The text traces the development of the Circles of Sustainability approach over twelve chapters. Arranged in three parts, the book refines notions of sustainability and sustainable development in the context of urban complexity; maps and investigates this complexity as the overlap of multiple social domains and develops tools and methods to qualitatively and quantitatively assess sustainability across these social domains. The different chapters also feature altogether six case studies employing the Circles of Sustainability method to varying degrees across cities of the Global South and North.The Circles of Sustainability approach elaborated in the book forms part of the wider Circles of Social Life methodology as a form of practically applied Critical Theory. An iterative movement back and forth between the real-world complexity of ecological, economic and social relations and the conceptualisation and theorisation thereof is part and parcel of what the authors refer to as Engaged Theory. The underlying ontological commitment to complexity is a focus shared with increasingly popular socio-technical transition approaches to development (see for example Grin et al., 2010). Yet, it distinctly sets the Circles of Sustainability method apart from overly reductive approaches to urban sustainable development, which remain dominant despite or perhaps due to their often arbitrary emphasis on single dimensions of urban change, such as for example the environment in the Green City or technology in the Smart City. Similarly, the text calls for a move away from the popular technomanagerial sustainability accounting practices of benchmarks, indices and rankings that impose normatively and ideologically charged categories and indicators of urban sustainable development onto local communities and individual stakeholders.Centrally, the book argues the need to re-politicise, liberalise and democratise urban sustainable development in theory and practice in light of the complexity of urban social life. In consequence, the authors advocate a paradigmatic shift away from dominant reductive, growth-based notions of urban sustainability towards a more holistic, reflexive and socially balanced understanding and assessment of urban sustainable development. This more critical view is increasingly echoed in other current literature on urban development (see for example Flint and Raco, 2012; Imrie and Lees, 2014). Part one of the book lays out the text's ambition to elaborate a framework for understanding, assessing and guiding urban sustainable development that is both actionable in and comparable across local contexts. The first two chapters of the book discuss the need for alternative approaches to urban planning and development as a result of the tensions and contradictions arising from the increasing global-local embeddedness of cities and urban communities. Chapter two specifically focuses on redefining key terms used throughout the book by formulating fundamentally relational and processual conceptualisations of development, sustainability, community and the urban in the context of globalisation to inform a qualitative shift in our engagement with the urban.The second part of the book is concerned with the development of a heuristic to encounter and positively engage with urban complexity. …