Social sustainability and social mixing

Sustainability is based on the idea that ‘marginal and poor groups should not disproportionately bear the costs of public or private activities or policies’ (Manzi et al, 2010, p 9). Yet planners are now concerned primarily with creating ‘sustainable cities that balance environmental concerns, the needs of future populations and economic growth (Beauregard, 2005, p 204). Planners seem less concerned with the traditional ideals of social justice and of balancing the market and social interests in the public good. Social sustainability is usually defined in relation to environmental and economic sustainability, but Kearns and Turok (2004) argue that it has a more anthropogenic quality that considers human needs and quality of life issues. Polese and Stren (2000, pp 16-17) define it as: ‘development (and/or growth) that is compatible with the harmonious evolution of civil society, fostering an environment conducive to the compatible cohabitation of culturally and socially diverse groups while at the same time encouraging social integration, with improvements in the quality of life for all segments of the population.’ But a ‘clear theoretical concept of social sustainability is still missing’ (Littig and Griessler, 2005, p 68), and in sustainability policy issues of social equity are often addressed by vague, qualitative platitudes such as sense of place, community, diversity and vibrancy (see Raco, 2005, pp 333-4).

Social sustainability has been very influential in British housing policy; it is perhaps most evident in the policy of creating mixed-income communities, mixing tenures and social classes in ‘affordable’ and market rate housing. Indeed, throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s neighbourhood regeneration was bound tightly to the rhetoric of social sustainability that was encapsulated in mixed communities policy. The concept of ‘mixed communities’ or ‘social mix’ re-emerged in the 1990s in reaction to the large concentrations of socially homogeneous populations of poor people residing in the inner cities of Western Europe and North America. Social mix policies have had one dominant objective, to de-concentrate or dilute large concentrations of low-income/poor households. The welfare programmes that built large council estates in the 1950s and 1960s have been blamed for creating monolithic, socially segregated areas of poverty and social deprivation in the inner city.