Eighteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

As a society, the pandemic has placed us before the mirror of our limitations, weaknesses, and fractures and also before our priorities. It has highlighted the weaknesses of democracy and the Welfare State. In short, it has called into question our development model. A radically unfair, ineffective and unsustainable model, of which leisure and consumption are essential allies. A leisure that has relegated the common good and has normalized inequality and social injustice, getting used to living together and neutralizing the discomfort that these inequalities generate. If the objective is to move towards a more sustainable and socially just future, we are at a turning point, which we should not miss. Can leisure be a starting point and source of inspiration for social transformation? What kind of leisure can be an accomplice to a more humane and sustainable development? What role will the leisure industries play in this challenge? And the citizenship? To what extent are we willing, as a society and as individuals, to recognize the limitations and assume the renunciations that leisure and responsible and sustainable consumption entail, for the sake of a common good? This communication responds to these and other questions, claiming, on the one hand, the political dimension of leisure and the possibilities that it offers for agency and the empowerment of citizens and, on the other hand, the new models of governance that demand the theories of sustainable urban development, protected in a collaborative, transversal, cross-sectoral and co-creative democracy.

Presenters

María Jesús Monteagudo
Professor and Researcher, Faculty of Human and Social Sciences. Deusto Cities Lab Chair, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain

Roberto San Salvador Del Valle
Catedrático, Director Deusto Cities Lab Katedra, Universidad de Deusto, Vizcaya, Spain

Fernando Villatoro
Investigador, Universidad de Deusto, Vizcaya, Spain