Editorial: Cities and the politics of urban sustainability

Abstract

DOI: 10.12854/erde-148-48 Samuel Mössner, Tim Freytag, Byron Miller 2017: Editorial: Cities and the politics of urban sustainability. – DIE ERDE 148 (4): 195-196 Today, in many cities around the globe, sustainability policies appear to be broadly consensual. Over 20 years ago, however, environmental movements stimulated antagonistic debates and discussions, raising pointed questions around how society could cope with limited resources, unrestrained growth and rising carbon emissions. With their roots in German and U.S. environmental activism (Uekötter 2014), environmental movements often directly linked environmental issues with aspects of distributional justice, redefining conceptions and norms of geographical distribution of environmental improvements and amenities on the one hand and sites of environmental degradation, on the other. Procedural justice became an equally important issue, aiming at the question of who can participate and influence or even make political decisions in this realm.