ABSTRACT
This chapter draws attention to the different and uneven ways in which sustainable urban environments, and their associated practices of citizenship and mobility, are produced and contested. By combining critical approaches to sustainable urbanism, ecological citizenship and mobility with social practice theory, this chapter highlights the social justice dimensions of green transitions through the case of a cycling-promoting initiative within a sustainable regeneration project in Järva, an ethnically diverse suburb outside Stockholm, Sweden. The results reveal divergent understandings of suburban regeneration and ecological citizenship, and the deeply political nature of cycling. In Järva, the promoted practices of ecological citizenship overlapped with norms and values linked to a “Swedish” identity associated with environmental responsibility, familiarity with nature, and active outdoor mobility, thus normatively reproducing power structures of class and race in the public opinion on desired forms of ecological citizenship and mobility. The results challenge post-political understandings of sustainability, affirming that just transitions to sustainable futures that ensure both the “green” and the “just” require environmentally progressive ontologies of sustainability, urbanism, ecological citizenship, and mobility, promoting ecologically sound transitions while accommodating difference, and addressing the joint environmental and social justice implications for diverse communities.
