Urban agriculture as an already existing sustainability: Lessons from the epistemic peripheries

Petr Jehlička

Drawing on the long-term research on urban food self-provisioning in Czechia and a recent exploratory study of this practice in China, the keynote address argues that sustainability scholarship and policy will accelerate both insight and action by embracing a greater diversity of the notions of sustainability - including the already existing everyday behaviours and routines. These everyday sustainable practices are vulnerable to devaluation or oversight, and the findings point to the risk of their disappearance. The address also seeks to redirect attention to the implications of possible sustainability losses caused by the diminishing or disappearance of these sustainability-compliant existing behaviours. It is important to recognise that the losses in terms of sustainability outcomes due to the disappearance of these behaviours may significantly outweigh the gains brought about by sustainability innovations. This in turn highlights the need to move the endeavour of uncovering new impetuses for the way we think about sustainability to places beyond the epistemic Western ‘core’ and casts epistemic peripheries in the global South and global East as sources of original insights on less conventional forms of sustainability.

The website of the conference is here.