Despite of significant role of collective decision making in strategic community development towards sustainability, this area is seen to be generally underestimated by community planners and ecovillage members, comparing with, for example, legal, financial and technological aspects of community life. This study aims to understand how Strategic Sustainable Development (SSD) perspective can contribute to decision making procedures in ecovillages in Sweden. The research examines how decision making procedures work in ecovillages today and to which extent strategic component, viewed through SSD perspective, is currently incorporated. Secondly research explores how SSD perspective could possibly be incorporated into decision making procedures in ecovillages, in order to foster their development towards sustainability. To address this purpose decision making model was created, based on literature review; three ecovillage studies were conducted; and recommendations were offered, based on findings from literature and findings from current experience of selected ecovillages in Sweden.

Sustainability has been characterized and explored mostly from an environmental standpoint, with relatively less attention paid to social and economic dimensions. Because many sustainability organizations have grown out of the environmental movement, they tend to emphasize environmental priorities and retain many of the organizational strategies that were pioneered when the focus was on environmental conservation. However, to attain a more socially and economically informed environmental practice, broader procedural aspects, including recognition and participation, and substantive aspects, including issues of social need, distribution of wealth, and economic opportunity, need to be addressed as these matters are intimately linked to environmental concerns. In this thesis, I examined sustainability organizations against the concept of ‘just sustainability’, with specific consideration paid to uniting the substantive concerns of sustainability with the procedural concerns of environmental justice. I focused my examination on model forests and UNESCO biosphere reserves located in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, an area of high economic vulnerability and low political power. By looking to governance directives from environmental justice, entrepreneurship, and community development, I conducted a multi-case study analysis with organizations that have a mandate to address the environmental, social and economic imperatives of sustainability. Through engaging these organizations in a comparative learning situation, I was able to achieve the following objectives, to: i) assess the governance strategies used within these organizations against just sustainability theory; ii) understand the challenges faced by place-based organizations and examine strategies to better improve local understanding, community empowerment, as well as sustainability outcomes; and iii) assess the feasibility - conceptually and empirically – of incorporating social entrepreneurship into the governance practices of sustainability organizations to bring together the benefits of both approaches. The findings of this thesis make valuable contributions to the empirical evidence needed to advance our understanding of just sustainability, both conceptually and in practice. Overall, my findings point to the importance of understanding and improving our practice of sustainability governance through identifying and offering examples of innovative governance arrangements that are better able to address procedural and substantive concerns. Findings show that the stakeholder model typically used by biosphere reserves and model forests contributes to systemic challenges that limit procedural justice in these organizations. By looking to other literatures, including community development and social entrepreneurship, and to lessons learned from other place-based organizations, I propose ways to adapt governance strategies to improve community engagement and organizational outcomes, including a framework to inform place-based governance for just sustainability and a “hybrid model” that captures the benefits of stakeholder representation and social enterprise. This study speaks to the need for researchers and practitioners seeking to advance sustainability governance to extend their understanding beyond environmental sustainability to embrace more social dimensions. This thesis demonstrates the value of looking to broad literatures and new models to inform sustainability governance and encourage the adoption of new ways of thinking, new strategies, and new tools to help advance sustainability.

Landscape architecture is about creating a sense of place. A worthwhile investigation lies in how to reinforce and/or improve that sense of place where one already exists, be it good or bad. The purpose of this practicum is to investigate the sabotaged landscapes in and around Landi Kotal, a city that lies near the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and determine how the quality of the exterior environment can be enhanced to improve the already tumultuous sense of place that exists in the city. People within this disrupted landscape are optimistic about the future. This optimism is the reason why I am inspired to focus on this place and understand how current methods of design can aid to improve the futures of this distinct region. The influence of subjective beauty was taken into consideration. This can be achieved through the study of people within environments, those who ultimately contribute to the perception of particular landscapes, and eventually, societies. In this project it is pertinent to reveal the effects environments have on the children that occupy them. The approach taken to this practicum is to consider the measures to be taken in order to encourage a socially sustainable environment in the region through a designed exterior environment surrounding an orphanage.The ways in which people interact with their environments can be understood through a phenomenological interpretation. Phenomenology will be used in this practicum as a lens by which exterior environments and their individual perception are understood. The Islamic paradise garden has influenced the research and design approach used throughout this practicum; the centrifugal/centripetal qualities of symmetrically designed outdoor environments are a useful platform for this design intervention. The proposition of an orphanage situated in the city of Landi Kotal will focus on the shelter and education of the less privileged communities that reside on the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. As previous efforts to establish a peaceful settlement in these regions have achieved little to no results, this project proposes mechanisms for regional stability by applying design techniques to demonstrate how landscape architecture can contribute to education and experience for children of all ages, specifically in a war-torn area through the creation of appropriate environments. The research and subsequent design offer an example for future socially sustainable projects which aim to enhance individual and communal territories of regions negatively affected by war and violence.

This dissertation concerns everyday life and sustainability in sparsely populated parts of Northern Sweden. The aim is to study how sustainability is constructed, experienced, practised and perceived in a field of tension between local everyday life and political discourses. Apart from written material, the study is based on interviews and observations performed in the municipalities Strömsund and Örnsköldsvik. Empirical themes include everyday life movements and means of transport, work and spare time practices, and experiences of time. The central theoretical concepts used are everyday life, provinces of meanings, typifications, community, place and policy. These concepts shape the analysis of processes pertaining to space and movement, work and leisure, time and tempo. The study shows gaps between sustainability policies and local experiences of sustainability. In order to highlight complications like the ones between the center and the periphery, polices and lived experiences, I have stressed the importance of the social dimension of sustainability. It is nevertheless important to nuance the concept of social sustainability since it carries an ambiguity, for example in terms of collisions with other dimensions of sustainability. Socially good life styles have a tendency to collide with the ecological definitions of sustainability. The emphasis on the social dimensions has been done in order to draw attention to unfair effects from a time-space perspective, and to point at the problem with urban norms in policies on sustainability.

In recent years, sustainability has gained importance across the world. However, the social aspect of the concept has been explored the least. A trend leads towards cities targeting population growth. Densification is often seen as a tool to accommodate for a growing population in a rather sustainable way. This case study focusses on evaluations of Umeå Municipality’s population goal and densification, and on understanding the social sustainability of such strivings. Aiming to explore emotions, attitudes, and beliefs towards the population goal and densification, the study is based on three research questions, concerning: 1) the response towards the population goal and densification in Umeå; 2) the association of beliefs about social capital and equity in the neighborhood and the response towards the population goal and densification; and 3) the relationship between beliefs and emotions evoked by densification and the attitude towards densification. A web survey was carried out investigating people’s responses to the population goal and densification in Umeå, aiming to better understand the social sustainability of such strivings. In this study, social capital and equity were used as indicators for social sustainability. The literature suggests that the influence of density on social equity is predominantly positive, whereas the influence on social capital is ambiguous. More generally, the relationship between densification and social sustainability is seen as complex and context dependent. The survey indicates attitudes towards the population goal being neutral, and towards densification slightly negative. Moreover, it has been found that beliefs concerning the neighborhood influence the perception particularly of densification. Finally, this study shows that emotions play an important role when it comes to the acceptance of densification.

This research applies an archaeological lens to an inner-city master planned development in order to investigate the tension between the design of space and the use of space. The chosen case study for this thesis is Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV), located in inner city Brisbane, Australia. The site of this urban village has strong links to the past. KGUV draws on both the history of the place in particular along with more general mythologies of village life in its design and subsequent marketing approaches. The design and marketing approach depends upon notions of an imagined past where life in a place shaped like a traditional village was better and more socially sustainable than modern urban spaces. The appropriation of this urban village concept has been criticised as a shallow marketing ploy. The translation and applicability of the urban village model across time and space is therefore contentious. KGUV was considered both in terms of its design and marketing and in terms of a reading of the actual use of this master planned place. Central to this analysis is the figure of the boundary and related themes of social heterogeneity, inclusion and exclusion. The refraction of history in the site is also an important theme. An interpretive archaeological approach was used overall as a novel method to derive this analysis.

Erasmus Student Network (ESN) plays an important role in the integration process of international students who spend their study abroad period in a new country. ESN community in Kalmar in Sweden has Facebook groups for every semester which spread the hospitality through the local ESN members, also called as ‘hosts’, for the new members who can be called either ‘guests’, ‘tourists’, ‘exchange students’ or ‘freemovers’. The previous literature in tourism regarding social life online has emphasised the user-generated content on travel-related online communities on social media and ‘mobility turn’ that is an emerged topic in social sciences and has put social into travel and has thus forced researches to come up with new mobile methods to study online communities. Despite the fact that the word ‘social’ seems to be everywhere, social sustainability has been somewhat overlooked research area particularly in terms of online communities. This thesis project aims to fill this gap in the tourism literature and seeks to find out what social sustainability means in a context of online communities. Social sustainability forms the conceptual framework of the thesis and discusses the hosts and guests paradigm connecting it to online environments. The empirical material was collected by using qualitative methods including online survey distributed on ESN Kalmar Facebook groups and netnography concerning the ESN Kalmar online communities on Facebook. In addition to a theoretical contribution, the thesis project makes a methodological addition since netnography is still underutilised method among tourism scholars. These methods provided comprehensive data both from subjective and objective perspectives. The data was analysed by thematic analysis under the themes of social support, well-being and friendships, which were found to be connected to socially sustainable communities in the literature. The results found that online communities benefit from offline meetings that make the relationships between the community members stronger and thus create trust among the members. The role of the hosts and their local knowledge in the online community was proven vital in making guests to feel welcome, cared and supported during their study abroad period. However, the socially sustainable online community requires interaction and hospitality from both parties. Social sustainability of an online community can be disrupted if the community members are not cooperating and being open enough. Besides the local importance of the study in developing ESN Kalmar’s online community dynamics by emphasising the role of social sustainability, the results can be applied to discussions of internet behaviour in general. Also, the study provides help for communities where the roles between the hosts and guests are constantly “on move”.

This paper presents an expert system to monitor social sustainability compliance in supply chains. The system allows to continuously rank suppliers based on their risk of breaching sustainability standards on child labor. It uses a Bayesian network to determine the breach likelihood for each supplier location based on the integration of statistical data, audit results and public reports of child labor incidents. Publicly available statistics on the frequency of child labor in different regions and industries are used as contextual prior. The impact of audit results on the breach likelihood is calibrated based on expert input. Child labor incident observations are included automatically from publicly available news sources using text mining algorithms. The impact of an observation on the breach likelihood is determined by its relevance, credibility and frequency. Extensive tests reveal that the expert system correctly replicates the decisions of domain experts in the fields supply chain management, sustainability management, and risk management.

This paper will investigate both modern and potential future methods of data collection and analysis. The research was conducted through qualitative research practices such as an autoethnographic recounting of a personal privacy scare on a mobile device, personal interviews regarding the individual’s own online data, and observed reactions to relevant instances regarding for instance surveillance apps. This research was done while considering a wide breadth of texts and articles relevant to the question of what things like dataveillance look like today, how they affect our lives and how they may take form in the future. This research finally culminates in the form of a short film in which these topics are framed in a speculative and somewhat more dystopian near future scenario

This thesis explores the historic preservation projects in two cities: Suzhou, China, and Pasadena, California, United States. The purpose of investigating the strategies and policies used in each of the historic districts is to discuss whether preservation strategies applied in both cases could represent historic authenticity. The first two chapters focus on the project plan of the two historic districts. By evaluating the preservation policies at both national and regional level, histories of the districts, and approaches adopted by two cities, this thesis discerns the different perceptions of “authenticity” in preservation strategies in two countries. The next part of the thesis compares the two historic districts in terms of their distinctive focuses on preservation approaches. I, therefore, conclude that even though both cases have been deemed as successful models of preservation projects in each country, both historic district has demonstrated different levels of insufficient protection in culture and social sustainability.