The green city citizen: Exploring the ambiguities of sustainable lifestyles in Copenhagen

摘要

Sustainable lifestyles research to date reveals a need for empirical insight to how it is defined in practice within the context of societal change. This article attends to this gap by demonstrating how sustainable lifestyles are understood in one of the world's "greenest" cities: Copenhagen (DK). On the basis of ethnographic field research with local policy-makers and sustainability-oriented community groups, I found that a dominant theme reflects Copenhagen's green city policy goals, as it envisions a techno-moral, energy-efficient citizen. Three contradictions were evident in this imaginary: privilege (class), suburbanites (scale), and disincentivizing (measurement). I give examples of how this green city citizen imaginary is inserted in policy, which demonstrates a disjuncture between how sustainable lifestyles are understood in practice and theory. This study empirically contributes to the ambiguous concept of sustainable lifestyles, while shedding light on potential social tensions of technocentric green city policy.