The Green City in Religious and Non-Religious Eco-citizenship Projects and Environmental Activism

In the West, the sustainable city discourse that began to develop in the 1960s has become fragmented into many kinds of conflicting discourse, and urban sustainability practices are presently divided between neo-liberal, social, and environmental justice discourses, among others. The transitions towns movement, which started in 2005 in the UK and spread rapidly to many countries in Europe, grappled with some of these concerns in material and aesthetic ways, in urban environments. Transition towns, like many other green networks involved in urban projects, attempted to re-imagine the city in the age of energy descent, with roads being dug up to create spaces for communal gardens.

Dr Maria Nita's presentation will contrast some distinct case studies, looking at how self-identified religious and non-religious networks engage in these re-imaginings of the city. She will show how distinct environmental groups and networks in my ethnographic research – such as participants in XR groups and Green Christians – strive to create material dimensions of transformed alternative urban futures. She will examine these practices from a cultural and historical standpoint, aiming to illuminate the cultural processes that allow for these re-imaginings of the green city in a post-carbon, sustainable future.