Workshop: Sustainability

Sustainable Cultures, Cultural Sustainability, or Cultures of Sustainability?(Andressa Schröder)

The general definition of sustainability created in the late 1980s is based on what has been defined as the three-pillar model of sustainable development (being the economic, ecological and social each of these pillars). This model has been extensively criticized for its overemphasis on the economic dimension of sustainability and the narrow or practically nonexistent recognition of the role of culture within its definitions. In this workshop we are going to examine different cultural approaches to sustainability that have emerged since the early 2000s and discuss the contributions and limitations that a cultural approach might have to the topic. The aim of the workshop is to explore different definitions of sustainability, which are unavoidably culturally influenced. In this sense, the cultural approaches to sustainability vary according to different interpretations of culture, what it embraces and its relation to the environment (in the sense of environmental management, ecological thinking and human-nature systems of co-existence). The workshop will be structured with a brief theoretical introduction to the topic of sustainability vs. sustainable development, followed by a practical investigation of the conceptual potentials and limits of some of the cultural approaches to sustainability – exploring for example different layers of such discourses like the integralist, the technocratic, the aesthetic, and the activist ones (in this part of the workshop, the participants will work in smaller groups and will be required to discuss specific examples of projects that combine culture and sustainability). Finally, the last part of the workshop will be reserved for a discussion about individual and collective (in)conclusions that may arise in the process.