Between the Marvellous and the Mundane

Everyday Life in the Socialist City and the Politics of the Environment

Bibliographic Data

ID4476265
AuthorsMark Whitehead (0000-0001-6499-4719, University of Wales, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume23
Issue2
Pages273-294
Publication date2005-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/d372t
OpenAlexW2151391487
LanguageEN
Citations received30
References cited29

In a recent essay on modernisation and ecology, Latour claimed that the environmental movement had lost important ground within political debate. He argued that this reversal in political fortunes had in part emerged out of an internal tension within the environmental movement itself-a tension between overinflation and banalisation. In this paper I analyse the nature of the purported processes of overinflation and banalisation within contemporary ecological politics, and explore ways in which it is possible to image a reinvention of environmental politics, forged between the socioecological marvellous and the mundane. Focusing on struggles over the treatment of nature and the urban environment in the socialist city of Katowice in Poland, I reveal a brand of environmental politics emerging out of communist Eastern Europe which appears to have important implications for a reinvented environmentalism. Considering the particular utilisation of the everyday environment which was forced on environmental groups in Katowice by political circumstances, I claim that the quotidian could provide a new ground upon which to perceive and connect social and ecological politics at a variety of different spatial scales and in a powerful array of different socionatural contexts

Aesthetics · Communism · Environmental ethics · Environmental politics · Environmentalism · Everyday life · Modernization theory · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy

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