Andrea Colantonio

Social Sustainability: Exploring the Linkages Between Research, Policy and Practice

In recent years the social dimension (or ‘social sustainability’) has gained increased recognition as a fundamental component of sustainable development, becoming increasingly entwined with the delivery of sustainable communities discourse and the urban sustainability discourse. Environmental and economic issues dominated the sustainable development debate at its beginning whilst it is only in the late 1990s that social issues were taken into account within the sustainability agenda. Although its growing recognition has spurred an emerging body of literature on social sustainability, our understanding of this concept is still fuzzy and limited by theoretical and methodological constraints stemming from its context and disciplinary-dependent definitions and measurements. As Sachs (1999) puts it, at a fundamental level, it is still unclear whether the concept of social sustainability means the social preconditions for sustainable development or the need to sustain specific structures and customs in communities and societies.