Social Sustainability: Creating a Sustainable Socioeconomic Systems where People Matter
Sustainability is a vague term, and the language we use is often not well designed to bring these important ideas into the practical reality of mainstream society. Because of this vagueness, the ecological design movement has not been able to realize its potential. What’s needed are integrated approaches to sustainable development geared to provide practical alternatives to conspicuous consumption and suburban sprawl utilizing or incorporating alternative energy, green business and ecological design.
In the construction of the communities which make up any urban experience, the experiences and the perspectives of the people in these cities should matter:
Where people matter
Environment is respected
Influence of cars is minimized
Conspicuous consumption is discouraged.
Ecological principles and understandings will be front and center within the norms and values of this city/community/habitat because of a growing human need to minimize the ecological footprint of the modern industrial civilization. ecovillage is a type of development that will eventually manifest on a much grander scale becoming a fully featured ecocity. Bold new thinking will be required to transform our society into one that is in balance with nature.
Ecocities and ecovillages will more fully represent the “urban effect,” because they will design themselves to be ecologically and socially consistent–having nearly “total recall” of how their actions affect other peoples, the surrounding environment and the future state of things. They will have embedded within their cultural and organizational identity, a total commitment to integrating energy, efficiency and ecological process within an aesthetic design that expresses a reverence for life.
The social architecture thesis implies that systems are self-organizing and in fact that notion of conscious human intention defining the world today is a myth. The notion of what is moral becomes an embedded meme in our minds. It is an attempt to control our behaviors but it never wins because they are dualistic assumptions of reality, we could not exist without that part of ourselves which we call evil. Even those who are deemed creative successes are inhibited by their realities as to limit their ability to effectively communicate their ideas to the public. www.smartmeme.org.