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 government and funded through taxation. Lifestyle consumption, on the other hand, is generally defined as consumption in excess of, or in addition to, that ordinary consumption oriented toward satisfying basic needs. Lifestyle consumption is often represented as being oriented to certain kinds of goods, including clothing, cosmetics, and the products of the culture industries. Lifestyle is presented as a reflexive, biographical project of identity-formation and self-presentation, based particularly upon the consumption of the symbolic dimensions of commodities. Some kind of project or strategy is implied or explicitly [Page 282]claimed, and a lifestyle is seen as something that makes sense of consumer choice, reduces the anxiety that flows from having to make such choices, and provides a consistent framework within which consumption decisions are made, such that there is a consonance between the objects, services, or experiences chosen and consumed. This kind of consumption is seen by many environmentalists as particularly wasteful and harmful, not simply because of the resources it uses, but, because it is regarded as frivolous and superfluous.

Urban planning measures include the creation of green belts within the city limits, like this restored wetland in Chicago. Green space helps reduce the so-called heat island effect of urban areas

Source: Lynn Betts/Natural Resources Conservation Service/USDA