Promoting social sustainability The case of Athens

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Abstract
The extension of the European Community has led to the application of policies and strategies (and their underlying concepts and assumptions) generated in one set of national and historical contexts to quite other situations. This paper examines the idea of ‘sustainability’—and especially social sustainability—arguing that it is an imperative which has been first de‐socialized and then re‐socialized. It is de‐socialized in that the pursuit of equality is replaced as the central force by the need to make peace with nature. It is re‐socialized through an argument that social inclusion is a necessary condition for making this peace with nature. The paper goes on to demonstrate the timeliness of the sustainability concept for the social democratic parties of Europe, seeking a new basis for legitimation in the post‐fordist period. It ends with a detailed analysis of the failure of this idea to take root effectively in Greece—notably in Athens—where many features of culture, history and social relations have created a context in which it cannot mobilize effective change without ‘serious analysis and the development of a wider social awareness’.

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