Social dimension of sustainability – An example from China

According to all relevant scientific concepts, sustainability is supposed to include the social approach; but the scientists rarely develop further theories concerning the social dimensions. This paper proposes an operational definition of sustainability and shows how the definition can work as an interface between academic disciplines. We consider sustainability as a “balanceseeking process”, between natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities and architecture. This paper presents results from the Sino European research project SUCCESS, “Sustainable User Concepts for China Engaging Scientific Scenarios“, that the authors were coordinating. The results are based on photo interview studies which focused on the life quality in rural Chinese villages. Within these case studies, we could see numerous factors that influence the question of sustainable livelihood. The whole scientific consortium together with the local dwellers developed sustainable future scenarios for seven case study villages. While architects focused on the built environment ensuring the future life quality of a settlement, while the task of the natural scientists was to explore the material flow and its consequences for specific future choices, the social point of view on a balance seeking process takes into account the social topics that represent the life in a village. The village is not a static entity, but a dynamic one, which undergoes constant changes. Yet it is crucial that the social as well as the architectural integrity of the village be maintained throughout this research process, which means that the dwellers of the village go on having the feeling of belonging to a community with its specific identity. When started at the social level, the question of this balance seeking process between the human system on the one hand, the built environment on the other, has chances to be integrated into the village life. Maintaining integrity whilst adapting to changing societal conditions is an inherent quality in the Chinese villages. SUCCESS Sustainable Users Concepts for China Engaging Scientific Scenarios The SUCCESS study – developed and carried out seven casestudies of peri-urban and rural settlements in six different provinces in China. This interdisciplinary project combined the disciplines of social sciences with architecture, economy and ecology. With the participation of local residents, the study worked out sustainable future scenarios for the Chinese case study villages. The basic question of the research was: What to maintain and what to change in the selected villages? The five-year-study initiated a process that leads from the proto-sustainable Chinese villages to contemporary sustainable settlement systems a process which supported an emergent future, respecting human needs combined with the needs of nature. The research studied seven villages in their different architectural and social situations with a case study methodology based on the local situation. By developing the future scenarios, the disciplines analysed the local precondition and the change within the years of the project time. The definition of sustainability The following definition of sustainability was a common approach in the SUCCESS project. All researchers in the SUCCESS project had to agreed to work with this definition in the final phase of the analysis time; thereby we established a feed back loop and bound our findings back to the basic concept of sustainability as our common working hypothesis. We hereby used this definition as a tool for interdisciplinary work, so that the disciplinary analysis was working out their results in relation to the given terms of “local”, “informed”, “participatory”, “future” or “balance-seeking”. In this way, each discipline could adapt this term or parts of the term to break the general idea of sustainability down to the specific structures, theories, notions and connotations from inside the respective discipline. “Sustainability is a local, informed, participatory balance-seeking process, operating within a Sustainable Area Budget, exporting no negative imbalances beyond its territory or into the future, thus opening the spaces of opportunity and possibility.” -local: it happens at a specific place – the living environment of a settlement within its region, including living patterns and creativity of the tenants -informed: it benefits from the tools of the global scientific community and requires an interdisciplinary approach which provides cause and effect feedback as well as systemic loops -participatory: it needs informed, empowered, gender sensitive human actors who are the stakeholders in the sustainability negotiation process -a balance-seeking process: it models alternative future scenarios, taking into account the classical triad of sustainability: economy, ecology, socio-culture, complemented by the context of built environment -Sustainable Area Budget: it operates within people’s fair earth share -spaces of possibilities: sustainability considers the future as an open space where socio cultural life quality, economic equity, and ecological needs converge towards balance (Dumreicher, Levine, Yanarella 1999) The procedure to use a given term in order to analyse the empirical results is inspired by the methodology of social science, where this research process is well established, but never used in an interdisciplinary setting. Working with a common definition is a new method in the realm of interdisciplinary work with little experience so far. Sustainability, as a multidisciplinary research endeavour, is a very young scientific field with need for theoretical work; this paper will be a contribution on the pathway to an operational yet theoretical definition. Since the first sustainability concepts, the question of sustainability includes the social topic as the third of the three established paradigms: ecology, economy and socio-culture. The aim of the sustainability process was, to combine the economic development and the protection of the environment in a way that supports the quality of life in general and the social life with regard to a common sustainable life quality. The “social” topic contains the cultural possibilities, including questions of employment and raising the question of participation in civil society processes. All those approaches often stand by their own, however, a systematic discussion what should be included in a theoretical approach to social sustainability is still missing. In the SUCCESS research several general findings emerged from the intense analysis of the seven case study villages. This paper will contribute to the theory of social sustainability, focusing on a few dimensions which we extrapolated from the empirical results of our social scientist approach. We hereby made a step towards the aim of achieving a definition of sustainability in the context and in the view of social science. Social dimensions of sustainability Sustainability is acting … locally: sustainability happens in a specific place – the living environment of a settlement within its region, including living patterns and creativity of the tenants In the context of sustainability, the local identity is the starting point for future scenarios: the local potential in its singularity will be the glue that holds together the integrity of the village. The existing social patterns have a general character and are not specific to a certain place; they rather show similar qualities in different villages. Emotional co-ownership The emotional co ownership (Dumreicher, Kolb 2003) to ones own village plays a role in all local conditions. In all seven villages, there is a similar devotion to the place, whereas the material form of this sense of ownership differs from place to place. In one village the local element that serves as a focal point for the feeling of emotional co ownership might be a deteriorated temple, in another village, it might be the traditional way of water organisation, in yet another, a common history of funeral and marriage ceremonies. Any local action needs to relate on the one hand to these existing local social parameters, but it also needs to respect and adapt to the larger context that plays an overwhelming role. The social structure is highly influenced by larger provincial or nation-wide guidelines, policies, rules and worldviews. When Chinese policies make a big difference between rural and urban areas, the action field for a local initiative depends highly on the status assigned to this place by the authorities – if your village is considered to belong to an rural area, you need to conform to the respective rules even if your village is on the way to becoming an suburban satellite. The local qualities become significant under specific conditions, especially when the past is still alive in the place. This is the case in most Chinese villages where the memory of the dramatic events during the cultural revolution is still working – like temples that were destroyed, families that were humiliated, people that left the settlement. People have developed social strategies to explain their past, including their life and decisions, in order to come to terms with the past. These strategies still have an impact on changing social situations, concerning the present but even more on the capacity of imagining a future. Local social infrastructure From the view of socio culture, the local infrastructure is an important potential in the selected places. This infrastructure influences the chances, possibilities and life quality in the village: if a good local infrastructure for the social and cultural life exists, the chances for a future development are much higher than in a place with deteriorated local governance.