Lifestyle, Urban

The urban environment can provide a fruitful location for the development of sustainable lifestyle practices and a means of lessening of environmental impact. Lifestyle as a practice is intimately connected to consumption, but is not simply based on personal consumption by individuals. Individuals are generally part of households, and household consumption decisions not only make a significant environmental impact, they also have the ability to lessen that impact. More significantly, individual consumption is not all concerned with lifestyles. As Tim Jackson has pointed out, much consumption can be best defined as ordinary consumption and is concerned with matters including convenience, habit, and individual responses to changing social contexts.

Much ordinary consumption is obligatory; food, fuel, travel, insurance, and, increasingly, services that are often provided by the ...