The places we inhabit are rarely if ever arbitrary. They’re the products of intention. Personal. Economic. Environmental. Religious. We choose for ourselves, individually and collectively, the kind of places we want and — through leadership, policy, investment, advocacy, action and, at times, inaction — those places begin to take form.
It’s a complicated dance of complementary and competing interests. Making it something that happens for us, rather than something that happens to us, requires, perhaps more than anything, a shared understanding of exactly what it is we’re talking about. A common language.
Such common language provides a context in which people of different opinions and values can work together. It doesn’t necessarily make things any easier (that’s dependent on the amount of common ground that exists between views) but it does make them more rational and productive.
I communicate for a living, which is why I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to simplify concepts, distill big ideas into smaller, more digestible ones, and connect them with things people care about. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of sustainability and wondering if we’ll ever find a way to depoliticized it.
If we could, we’d begin to see that, in concept, it’s an equal opportunity proposition with applicability across the political spectrum.
Political, ideological, nonsensical
First off, sustainability’s not an action. It’s not something you do in support of a political agenda. It’s an underlying value — a driver of actions — to be considered on its own merits. But that consideration requires agreement on its definition.
When we speak of sustainability, what are we even talking about?
My most simplified version is ensuring our ability to keep on keepin’ on, which I adapted from Original Green originator Steve Mouzon, who defines it as “keeping things going in a healthy way long into an uncertain future.”
Perhaps the most commonly cited definition is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Not a new idea: So that’s where my laundry detergent got its name!
That’s not ideology. It’s humility.
It’s not new, either. Steve Mouzon asserts that, historically speaking, we’ve always lived sustainably because, until the industrial “Thermostat Age,” we had no other choice. It’s only our present levels of comfort that have given us the temporary luxury of viewing such behaviors as optional.
Finally, it’s not something reserved for any particular culture. The Iroquois Indians, for example, had their own version, one that pinned their actions to outcomes seven generations down the line. In weighing their decisions, they placed high emphasis on how such actions might impact their kids, and their kids’ kids, and so on, looking roughly a century and a half out.
Simplify and maybe we can get somewhere
If that’s what sustainability’s all about then let the conversation be about that. Let communities begin by asking themselves a simple question: Should we concern ourselves solely with getting through today or should we also consider and prepare for what’s in store tomorrow? And the day after that?
That’s the crux of it. Nothing about one-world government forcing people to live in high-density downtown tenements. No Agenda 21 conspiracies. No Birkenstocks required. Just a simple question getting at the heart of what a community does or doesn’t value.
If it takes not uttering the word to get there, so be it. It really doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is the answer. If you can get to that, to a point where your community genuinely agrees on its connection with, and responsibility to, those yet to come, you can get to the hard work of determining exactly which economic, social and environmental policies and initiatives — across the political spectrum — best put that agreement into practice.
What’s been your experience? Have you found ways to strip away sustainability’s all too common ideological baggage and arrive at a meaningful, non-partisan community conversation? Do tell.
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A long time ago I wrote a film called “The City of Necessity”. The city of choice was … a city that conforms with the notions of freedom and intention. The city of necessity was not the product of such freedom. The movie was about Chicago. Chicago remains both a city of choice and a city of necessity. The message remains clear. As Shakespeare might suggest, the stasis is all.
I can only tell you how I understand sustainability in architecture. I have developing this ideology with AIA/CRAN (Custom Residential Architecture Network) in how we believe sustainability should impact the way architecture should be judged.
Contextual Sustainability: The True Formula for Judging Good Architecture
Architecture should be judged according to Vitruvius’s Ultimate Synthesis. A “recipe” to what defines all good architecture; a perfectly blended combination of Commodity, Firmness, and Delight. It is our job as architects to tweak these ingredients, but at some point the cake simple does not rise, or the structure is NOT architecture.
Upon this age old paradigm CRAN suggests viewing this Ultimate Synthesis in a new updated genesis. An architectural order that relearns and reapplies the historic code of the architectural genome—commodity, firmness, and delight— but then adds to this matrix two more elements: vernacular, both cultural and topographic, and regionalism, in respect to natural resources and labor. It is a new architectural order based on an age-old formula that suggests that local materials, culture, and ideologies form the architectural building blocks to true idiosyncratic regional design.
The debate over traditional and modern is set forth by architects and critics that are territorial to their own style preferences and unable to accept exclusivity. Contextual Sustainability is a style blind code to judge all architecture, traditional or modern…
David Andreozzi
AIA/CRAN Incoming Chairman 2014
To build a fairly sustainable society, a holoistic approach is needed. It all adds up: economy, ecology, biodiversity, culture, architecture, energy sources, social interaction etc Here is one possible way of describing it and how to get there: http://ufbutv.com/2012/08/23/the-sustainable-society-of-2040/