The challenge of facilitating a shift towards sustainable housing, food and mobility has
been taken up by diverse community-based initiatives ranging from "top-down" approaches in
low-carbon municipalities to "bottom-up" approaches in intentional communities. This paper
compares intervention measures in four case study areas belonging to these two types, focusing
on their potential of re-configuring daily housing, food, and mobility practices. Taking up critics
on dominant intervention framings of diffusing low-carbon technical innovations and changing
individual behavior, we draw on social practice theory for the empirical analysis of four case studies.
Framing interventions in relation to re-configuring daily practices, the paper reveals differences
and weaknesses of current low-carbon measures of community-based initiatives in Germany and
Austria. Low-carbon municipalities mainly focus on introducing technologies and offering additional
infrastructure and information to promote low-carbon practices. They avoid interfering into residents¿
daily lives and do not restrict carbon-intensive practices. In contrast, intentional communities
base their interventions on the collective creation of shared visions, decisions, and rules and thus
provide social and material structures, which foster everyday low-carbon practices and discourage
carbon-intensive ones. The paper discusses the relevance of organizational and governance structures
for implementing different types of low-carbon measures and points to opportunities for broadening
current policy strategies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6752 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Schäfer, Martina, Hielscher, Sabine, Haas, Willi, Hausknost, Daniel, Leitner, Michaela, Kunze, Iris, Mandl, Sylvia |
| Publisher | MDPI AG |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su10041047, http://www.mdpi.com/, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6752/ |
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