That people consume more whether through shifting perceptions of 'need' or escalations of 'wants' is rightfully held as a major obstacle to environmental sustainability. It is an obstacle largely because the potential for 'down-shifting' (Schor, 1992) our consumption appears so utterly unattractive in a consumer society, particularly when economic imperatives of 'growth' are so closely tied to unabated levels of consumption. The difficulty with conceptualising the environmental problem in this manner is that understandings of consumption are all too often based on simplistic, economic driven interpretations of the consumer. This session moves attention away from representations of consumption as individual, voluntaristic decision-making to demonstrate how the vast majority of consumption relates to mundane, routine and ordered daily practices (Gronow & Warde, 2001). Understanding consumption as the appropriation of goods and services within social practices draws attention to the inter-connectedness between varieties of objects, services, and normative values that together pattern and shape daily lives (Harvey et al, 2001). This session aims to show how patterns of consumption relate to understandings of the world beyond the act itself and how consumption becomes meaningful through the routines of normative social practices.

Galen Cranz starts the session by introducing her work on urban parks. She considers the idea of the ‘ecological park’ as it has developed in the US literature. The prospect of transforming urban parks into spaces of agricultural production create spaces for innovative measures for sustainability, relevant to the urban environment and to the domestic provisioning of food and waste. Such a prospect also offers benefits in terms of health and the development of an ecological aesthetic presently absent within the contemporary city. Importantly, Cranz's paper challenges everyday understandings of how urban space is ordered and what it is for. In addition, she introduces new discursive interpretations of health and food, waste and nature, and aesthetic sensibilities of the urban.

Matthew Watson continues our exploration of practices through his empirical investigation of domestic gardening. As with urban parks, the dominant ideological view associates 'green space' with recreation and relaxation. Gardens, like many other areas of daily life, have been subject to a form of media attention that 'stylizes' the practices and aesthetics involved. As Watson demonstrates, stylized gardens have followed a particular path of development in which apparently natural environments are replaced by ones which are highly commodified. Moreover, this commodification takes a particular form; it organises gardening around new temporal patterns. Gardens are no longer shaped by the rhythms of nature but by an array of commodities (from weed killer to a host of garden pruning devices) that allow them to be re-shaped and managed in ways which reflect contemporary gardeners’ interests in shifting and saving time.

Taking this theme further, the final paper of the session turns from urban and domestic environments to the organisation of social practice in time and space. That contemporary society suffers from a 'time famine', that time is ‘squeezed’ and that people are increasingly 'harried', are topics of public discussion and social scientific interest (Demos, 1995; Schor, 1992; Hewitt, 1993; Linder, 1970). Drawing upon empirical research into daily time - space scheduling, Dale develops a conceptual distinction between 'hot' and 'cold' spots, the management of which involves the orchestration of timing and the optimisation of convenience. These arrangements prove important in relation to the commodification of natural, domestic and urban environments.

Galen Cranz

Historically, those who set policy for the creation and management of urban parks in the United States have insisted that parks are for pleasure and recreation, not work. In the most general terms this dichotomy stems from the laissez-faire theory of Western industrial capitalism. Regulating economic life as little as possible has meant that cities had been allowed to develop economically with minimal competition from other values like beauty, naturalness, cleanliness, public health or visual order. The American Park movement developed in the 19^th century as a reaction against the ugliness and perceived chaos of the city. But rather than challenge or regulate the forces that created these troublesome conurbations, park advocates proposed an antidote by differentiating spaces of production from those of consumption. The legacy of this distinction remains prominent in American parks today. Land uses which suggest the institutions of urban life, including housing, political and military activity, schooling, religious activity, commercial activity, and agriculture, continue to be excluded from parks (Cranz, 1982).

This paper argues for special attention to more environmentally friendly use of urban parks through the cultivation of 'ecological parks'. Such proposals require a radical challenge to 'conventional' ordering of ideas regarding urban space and practices. The 'ideal type' ecological park would try to realise an older utopian vision of the city as a garden, with features such as:

1. Native species of plant life with judicious use of mowing to define the edges of meadows so that users can appreciate that natural strands of grasses represent a desired aesthetic, rather than lack of maintenance or care (this could be achieved by using sheep to do the mowing).
2. Compost is an important part of the ecological park and such spaces could be used for garden waste (garden grass cuttings and branches account for 19% of municipal waste)
3. Water is collected, stored, and cleaned in flow forms and ponds that use water-loving plants and support animal life, including amphibians like frogs whose future might otherwise be endangered.
4. Buildings are carefully sited close to mass transit to reduce transit distance, are solar facing, use recycled or less energy intensive construction materials, and are never air-conditioned, relying on natural ventilation systems.
5. Parking lots are kept to a minimum, but where necessary never paved with impermeable materials like blacktop or cement. Pathways for foot traffic are differentiated, always favouring the softer more organic material when possible, crushed gravel being preferable to cement, for example.
6. Fencing is used more to regulate flow of traffic than keep people out. Materials for fencing are selected according to the least long-term environmental costs: metals, post consumer plastics, bamboo, wood.
7. Lighting is minimal and utilises solar collectors and wind generators.
8. Benches and play equipment use more body conscious design than has ever been seen in public places in America, because a planning philosophy that focuses on eco-system health also includes human health.

The paper concludes by arguing that while urban parks have historically not been sites for urban agriculture, agricultural activity should now be included in them for several reasons. Most simply, the space for farming is available within city parks, and plants are already grown there. More importantly, urban agriculture has multiple benefits, and can increase public health for everyone, not just supplement the income of the poor. Significantly, the activity of gardening has become a leisure and recreational activity, no longer solely a utilitarian, economic activity. Consequently, the split between spaces of production and consumption can today be reworked in the post-industrial ecological park in America. Landscape professionals have promoted this new park type primarily since 1991. It can be both summarised and further developed as an 'ideal type'. Barriers to its institutionalisation must be acknowledged, even as general planning principles are formulated. The ideal parks should be self-sufficient materially even as they help solve larger urban problems. Through these two processes the Ecological Park evolves a new visual order for private and public outdoor spaces.

Matt Watson

In Britain, a new breed of TV gardening programmes is leading a revolution in popular understandings of what a garden is for and what can be done to it. In countless gardens around the country, lawns and borders have been replaced by hard landscaping, pot plants and water features. Since these programmes began their domination of early evening terrestrial TV schedules in the mid-90s, the UK horticultural retail industry has grown by 14%, reaching a turnover of £2.6billion (c. €4.2bn) in 2000. This growth has not been in the ‘traditional’ materials of gardening like seeds and bulbs – materials that become garden features only with time and the labour of gardening. Instead, market growth has been in the stuff of the instant garden makeover - established nursery-grown plants, feature paving, outdoor furniture and, most emblematically, timber decking - a product almost unknown in the UK a few years ago but projected to represent a market worth £400 million (c. €6.3m) a year by 2004.

There is enormous potential for gardens to make a contribution to sustainability. In England and Wales, there is estimated to be almost half a million hectares of garden – about 3% of the total land surface. Most of this is divided into manageable areas immediately adjacent to homes, giving ideal opportunities for the composting of domestic waste and the home production of food. However, the ‘makeover’ model of gardening can be situated historically in the progressive democratisation of private gardens as sites of more or less conspicuous consumption and of leisure, rather than of local labour and local production. Changes to gardening over the last century or so can be associated with gardeners finding themselves increasingly able to ‘buy time’. Their own labour time in the garden can be displaced with bought products, whether time-saving technologies like lawnmowers, or chemical weed-killers that cut out the need for hand weeding and hoeing.

The move from gardens dominated by plants to gardens dominated by hard landscaping and inorganic features exemplifies this changing temporality. Rather than just saving time, new ‘technologies’ of gardening allow gardeners greater control over how much time they devote to the garden and when. The ongoing tending of organic processes with their own temporal rhythms is displaced. Instead, maintenance and production of gardens comes to be dominated by one-off events of do-it-yourself construction with inert materials.

Representations of the garden as a ‘room outside’ are closely associated with this model of instant gardening. Re-defined as a room, the garden figures as an extension of the home, a materially passive context in which humans interact with each other rather than a space where humans engage with non-human nature. Listed under the title of ‘outdoor living’, consumer durables, ranging from hardwood furniture to outdoor space heaters, become a cascade of necessities once the script of the outdoor life takes hold.

Gardening is a field in which long term processes of commodification are accelerating through the re-shaping of what gardens are, and what they are for. This is in part one manifestation of the speeding up and fragmentation that characterises contemporary experience of time and that is further reflected in the displacement of schedule-threatening organic entities (e.g. lawn grass) with more temporally amenable entities (e.g. decking). It also suggests an extension of the ideals and practices of home such that the garden also becomes a space for do-it-yourself material transformation, sociability and the display of taste and identity.

Dale Southerton

This paper reports on preliminary analysis of research that investigates experiences of harriedness, impressions of time shortage and the strategies that people employ to organise their daily practices. Twenty in-depth interviews with people living in a suburban town revealed an overwhelming belief that contemporary society suffers from a shortage of time. Respondents were quick to suggest explanations, namely the demands of work; rising household standards of cleanliness; economic competition; and, the social pressures derived from a pursuit of social distinction. However, experiences of ‘being harried’ were not evenly distributed. Instead, they were contained within ‘hot spots’ - usually around weekday mealtimes for those with children and predictable parts of the working day for those without. ‘Hot spots’ were characterised by a density of social practices, network obligations and an accompanied increase in the potential for the disruption of personal schedules. To some extent, hot spots arose as a consequence of compressing some practices in order to free other ‘blocks’ of time (often termed ‘quality time’) at other points in the day.

Only those with significant degrees of power, and a lack of informal obligations within networks, had the personal flexibility required to develop and successfully administer this strategy of stretching and squeezing time. Yet the point remains. Impressions of ‘being harried’ were the consequence of seeking to impose a personal structure onto various socio-temporal constraints (such as mealtimes and periods devoted to household tasks; work place routines; times traditionally viewed as ‘free time’).

The paper concludes by arguing that practices of consumption are embedded within socio-temporal routines that are characterised by flexibility within particular social parameters. In responding to what they were convinced was a generic 'time squeeze', respondents adopted various strategies including that of consumption as a means of dealing with the time problem. However, because the time problem is primarily centred around 'freeing up' time through the increasingly complex task of co-ordinating network interactions and social practices, the very strategies employed in response were at the same time those responsible for the experience of being harried.

The paper demonstrates that consumption of this kind is both the response to and the cause of being harried. This analysis helps to explain the proliferation of goods and services, dependent on other goods and services, which together contribute to the ordering of social practices in ways that make alternative social arrangements unimaginable. In conclusion, the discourse of a time squeeze and promised solutions, like the technologies and commodities offered and marketed in the name of convenience, lock people into an ordering of environmentally problematic practices.

This session is truly eclectic and only scratches the surface of the diversity of social practice. It nonetheless supports the view that it is not consumption per se that presents the challenge for sustainability. Rather, it is the socially embedded, normative and routine ordering of everyday life which counts, and within which consumer practice must be comprehended. By advancing this argument, the session aims to stimulate ideas that challenge the 'normality' of social lives. By moving beyond simplistic understandings of consumption as the expression of choice it should provoke radical re-conceptualisation of the obstacles to, and the opportunities for, sustainability.

Harvey, M., McMeekin, A., Randles, S., Southerton, D., Tether, B. & Warde, A. (2001) Between demand & consumption: a framework for research. CRIC Discussion Paper No 40, The University of Manchester & UMIST.

Hewitt, P. (1993) About Time: the revolution in work and family life. Rivers Oram Press.

Gronow, J. & Warde, A. (2001) Ordinary Consumption. London: Harwood Press.

Linder, S. B. (1970) The Harried Leisure Class. Columbia University Press.

Schor, J. (1992) The Overworked American: the unexpected decline of leisure. Basic Books.

Shove, E & Southerton, D (2000) Defrosting the Freezer: from novelty to convenience. A narrative of normalisation, The Journal of Material Culture.