Abstract
This paper emerges from a philosophical difficulty. The chair I occupy has become a node where many strands cross and conflict, including social and cultural issues, ecological activism, just transition debates, cultural questions, and urban sustainability research. A recent project, Horizon 2055, exemplifies this entanglement. This year-long engagement brings together thirty participant-researchers to collectively experience and reflect upon local urban sustainability issues. What began as a straightforward inquiry into how to build “a sustainable city in a sustainable world” has become something more unsettling: an encounter with the impossibility of closure around the very concept of sustainability. Rather than treat sustainability as a solvable problem with identifiable solutions, this paper interrogates its conceptual difficulties, with particular attention to the hidden risks of letting “sustainability” harden into an institutional buzzword. I outline four philosophical provocations: 1. Sustainability requires respect for finitude. 2. Sustainability remains fundamentally human-focused. 3. Sustainability should be approached through the present more than the future. 4. A fully sustainable world is impossible. Through these reflections, I explore the idea that sustainability, rather than being a goal, should be approached as an ongoing ethical, cultural, and ecological struggle—one that resists neat resolution but nonetheless demands responsible action. In this sense, the impossibility of sustainability becomes a space for cultivating humility, creativity, and (perhaps) forms of collective hope.
Presenters
Andrea HurstProfessor of Philosophy and NRF SARChI Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa, Nelson Mandela University, Eastern Cape, South Africa
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Economic, Social, and Cultural Context
KEYWORDS
Sustainability, Philosophy, Finitude, Human-Centeredness, Presence, Impossibility
