| Description |
Grassroots experimentations with sustainability innovations pose new and interesting questions centering on the geography of transitioning away from highly consumptive, fossil-fuel intensive societies. A wide variety of grassroots innovations have emerged recently addressing a range of possible solutions, from new systems of provision and economic forms, to social organization and housing. This dissertation explores the geography of grassroots sustainabilities, through investigating i) the placebased conditions that might support grassroots sustainabilities, ii) the spaces that grassroots innovators create, and iii) how geographic tools (internet-based mappings) might encourage grassroots innovative activity. As such, the first chapter uses sociodemographic and political affiliation data on the county-level in a spatial analysis of grassroots innovations in the United States. It finds that i) the demographic, political, and spatial contexts in which GIs emerge differ significantly from US averages and to some extent vary amongst the types of GIs, and ii) the spatial distribution of GIs across the United States is uneven. The second chapter employs ethnographic investigation into the spaces of the grassroots innovation community teeming within the politically and religiously conservative context of Salt Lake City, Utah (USA). It finds that counterspaces act in response to the domination of space on multiple scales, which i) causes the alienation that motivates participants and ii) provides a point around which to invert abstract space and define a counterspace. It also finds that the process of creating a new social space is grounded in five moments: i) the self, ii) social networks, iii) material practices, iv) knowledge creation, and v) economic practices. The third chapter employs action research, drawing from the authors' experience in creating the Utah Resilience Map to examine the potentialities and limitations of Digitally-Mediated Participatory Mapping (DGPM) for grassroots sustainabilities from a critical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) perspective. Specifically, it investigates issues of i) participation, knowledge, and inclusion and ii) access, visibility, and sustainability. It also explores the benefits and complexities of these maps for local users and in the context of broader sustainability transitions. The conclusion explores broader implications of the chapters and areas for future research. |
