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Seeking to Enact Real Ecotopia in the City: Ontological and Ecological Characteristics and Contradictions

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Urban Eco-Communities in Australia

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Abstract

The aim of developments like Christie Walk and WestWyck is to bring ecotopia to the city. Like all eco-communities, they are not fully realised Ecotopias but rather serve as heuristic spaces and demonstrations projects, exploring alternative social and ecological possibilities and hinting at what an eco-city of the future may look like. At a fundamental level these communities challenge the orthodoxy of how we build cities and provide working examples of how we might construct places that foster both social and environmental sustainability, integrated with modern urban lifestyles. Drawing on the themes emanating from the two ethnographic case studies, this chapter considers the ways WestWyck and Christie Walk enact ecotopia through the construction of habitat, the physical environment, and ‘habitus’, the social structures that determines the patterns of living within a place. The combination of habitat and habitus create novel ‘socionatures’ enacted in small-scale, geographically defined places.

What we build creates possibilities for, and limits on, the way we live. What we build teaches those who live in the city, town and village about our values and concerns.

Richard Register (2006 , p. 20)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Liam Cooper

  2. School of Social Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Hans A. Baer

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  1. Liam Cooper
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Correspondence to Liam Cooper .

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Cooper, L., Baer, H.A. (2019). Seeking to Enact Real Ecotopia in the City: Ontological and Ecological Characteristics and Contradictions. In: Urban Eco-Communities in Australia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1168-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1168-0_7

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