••
Everyday life and sustainability Everyday life is the world seen and lived by a subject in his normal living contexts, where what occurs is “what we do everyday”. Just because of this, these are the contexts that each of us refers to when judging the quality of our own lives, when comparing this with our expectations of well being and possibly deciding if and how to improve it. We act out our lives through a series of contexts in which the functions we meet with on a daily basis take place. These contexts and their functions constitute the daily stage where life modes develop, and along with them the habits of production, use and consumption on which our daily lives are based. Their everyday nature often makes these practices routine: they occur out of habit from motives and options which are almost always unconscious. Only in certain periods, when the context and/or functions change, must a routine action turn into a conscious choice in the planning of a suitable action strategy. We are in such a period today, for various reasons, of which the transformation towards sustainability is certainly the most pressing and of greatest interest to us here. As already said, the transition towards sustainability entails a systemic discontinuity. In terms of everyday routine, this means that each of us will have to stop many of the almost unconscious, repetitive sequences of action which underlie our existence. We will have to find new grounds, define new objectives and build up a network of people, products, services and know-how to achieve them, and so generate new forms of everyday life. Some suggestions for solutions in which this changing everyday life merges with a search for sustainability will be presented in this chapter, but before beginning the discussion we can usefully outline the background to these propositions and answer two questions: firstly, what is urban everyday life? Secondly, in what terms can we talk about sustainable urban everyday life?
•
Everyday life in the city The concept of everyday city life has to do with the way daily functions appear to the inhabitants, and emerges from a combination of numerous factors. Among these, the most important are those associated with the forms of the city, especially its density, the distribution of its functions, the quality of its technical networks (energy, water, transport, waste disposal), the degree of connectivity it offers its citizens (the capillarity and extension of its communication channels), the services it provides (the nature, quantity and quality of services accessible on an urban and local scale) and also its building traditions (principal building typologies, construction systems and the technical systems within buildings). To these physical and territorial factors we must add others which constitute what we can call the social forms of the city. By these we mean: the size and role of the nuclear families (or more generally the group of people who share a home and deal with daily functions as a unit), the nature of local expectations of well-being (the acceptable standards of quality which are socially recognised at that particular time and place). And obviously the distribution of wealth and knowledge, and the spread of organisations which promote a widespread participatory democracy. 63 ı SUSTAINABLE EVERYDAY