Local Economies, Land and Property

Abstract

This chapter examines the concerns with local environmental qualities arising from the worlds of economic organisation and business life. A characteristic of western industrial capitalism has been the separation of economic life from everyday life, both in terms of time (work happens in factory or office time) and place (symbolised by the activity of going to work). In the context of western rationalism too, modern life has privileged material growth and technological development as a measure of welfare (see Ekins, 1986). Through the social technologies of skill development, company management and the development of the money form, and through engineering technologies, for transport and communications, and for labour saving devices, material resources have expanded around us, structuring our daily lives and our life strategies. These technologies have become systems which penetrate our ‘lifeworlds’. The philosophy of the pursuit of material improvement, encapsulated in the strive for continual economic growth, provides the ideological underpinning for the dominance of economic organisation and priorities in public policy.