This research examines the farming landscape of the island of Tinos. Since the 14th century, travellers have often referred to it as the best cultivated of Cycladic islands, rich in silk-production and the making of silk stockings which once employed mainly women and became a major exportable product of the island.'' The crops are probably more cultivated here rather than in the rest of the island. While the ground is rocky, crops are almost everywhere in the area. Nevertheless, it has the advantage of a significant amount of freshwater that is irrigated from everywhere and contributes to the fertility of barley and other grains; legumes are collected in great abundance.''  Today the Tinos’ landscape is a composition of blurred boundaries among natural and man-made features. In order to allow the steep and dry land to be cultivated the hills and mountain areas were covered with terraces. Some of these are ancient, but most were created under Venetian rule, and extended from the 18th century when it fell under Ottoman occupation. Heavily populated during these later years the island needed to be intensely cultivated in order to cover the daily needs for food, something that forced the further extension of the terraces network. Of equal importance on TInos is its strong connection with religion since antiquity.  Over the centuries the interweaving of religion with the land’s cultivation became the key elements of daily life around which communal identity was, and remains constituted.

This paper focuses on the farming landscape of the village of Kampos today, at a time when farming no longer holds the same key role in the island’s commercial and cultural life as in the past. As one of the oldest villages of the island it belongs to the region of the Middle Lands, which  consists of villages with rural economies and mostly catholic religion. In the village there is no focal public space, such as a central square. Other communal places, such as the village wash rooms (laundries) and the old stone ovens were used by the villagers through their everyday life. Other vital public spaces are formed by the streets of the village. Of particular note is one street whose turn is gradually widened to create an open space called ''choreftra''. Here is where dances were organised on special festive occasions and where people still pause at the local cafe.

.
 In a landscape that appears as semi-artificial, the boundaries on land and on water use became an essential element for the villagers. This research explores the presence and the negotiation of these boundaries as they lead to the understanding of ownership and bonding within the village culture. This is explored thought using nine different narratives that are based on archival work and field research. The fluidity of most of 
these spatial boundaries reveals the existence of ethical and emotional boundaries. This study of boundaries that define ownership in daily practice leads, through formal and informal narratives, to seeing boundaries that create contact zones and ethical spaces.

Mythmaking presents us with an idiosyncratic fusion of language and metaphysics so as to simply convey meaning as language does, and also communicate an entire metaphysics at a level of meaning beyond language and image. Claiming so, is to attest to the relevance of myths in the operationalization of ecological worldviews. In this paper, I will assume such an operational relationship between myths and ecological worldviews. First and foremost, our worldviews act as 'first principles' in establishing our interaction with our environment. At a time when anthropogenic ecocide presents a grave threat to the balance of life on earth, this fundamental notion is of great relevance. Specifically, this paper will study how myths mediated human interaction with nature in the past and continue to do so today. By comparing sets of myths of the Tukano Indians of the Amazon and Hindus of India, I will identify two functions of myth as mediator between man and nature.

Evidence-based practice has become an important approach to social work practice. This paper highlights some of the ethical dilemmas which may be implicated by this approach, and encourages social workers and social work researchers to carefully consider these potential quandaries.

The book introduces students to the background and key issues of sustainability and suggests ways in which these concepts can be applied in business practice. Though the book takes a business perspective, it is interdisciplinary in its nature and draws on knowledge from socio-economic, political, and environmental studies, thereby providing a practical understanding of sustainability in the changing paradigm of global business.

Dolgozatom egy viszonylag keveset vizsgált kérdésben kíván gondolatébresztőként szolgálni. Összeegyeztethető-e a luxus fogyasztás a fenntarthatóság alapelveivel? Lehet-e úgy jólétben, luxusban, kiemelkedő minőségű termékek és szolgáltatások között élni, hogy közben nem ássuk alá a jövő nemzedékek megélhetésének alap természeti feltételeit? Valóban szüksége van-e a természeti tőke excesszív felhasználásra a luxustermékek gyártásához, a szolgáltatások magas minőségének biztosításához?

This is a unique opportunity for early career researchers to join The Alan Turing Institute. The Alan Turing Institute (ATI) is the UK’s new national institute for data science, established to bring together world-leading expertise to provide leadership in the emerging field of data science. The Institute has been founded by the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and Warwick and the EPSRC.

This is a targeted call, by which we intend to recruit researchers in subjects currently underrepresented by our fellowship cohort. Fellowships are available for 3 years with the potential for an additional 2 years of support following interim review. Fellows will pursue research based at the Institute hub in the British Library, London. Fellowships will be awarded to individual candidates and fellows will be employed by a joint venture partner university (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL or Warwick).

This paper examines local sustainability concepts in Connemara, a predominantly rural region in the West of Ireland, to show how they are (re-)constituted through people’s interactions with social and biophysical environments. We argue that these interactions produce diverse forms of lay environmental knowledge and expertise that encompass cognitive and emotional aspects, a fact that is frequently ignored in environmental policy-making which prioritises rational arguments over reactions rooted in people’s sense of place and community. Local people’s responses to this dominance of “official” rational-technical sustainability concepts are central to recent cases of environmental controversy and lack of compliance to environmental policies that have characterised the study area but that show many parallels to conflicts and disputes elsewhere. Drawing on rich qualitative evidence from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper demonstrates how communities’ responses to environmental policies depend on how well (or poorly) sustainability concepts underpinning these policies match local people’s social-ecological practices and related place-specific views of what should be sustained.

Keywords: lay knowledge; sustainability; expertise; environmental policy; Connemara; Ireland

Awareness and significance of sustainable development (SD) has been growing around the world for the last few decades. Sustainable construction is now considered a way for the construction industry to contribute to this larger effort. It is clear why the construction industry must respond accordingly and focus its attention on developing more sustainable buildings - not least because of its huge size, the vast amount of resources it consumes and its major impact on the built and natural environments. This research work therefore aims to examine the concept of sustainability, investigate the costs related to producing sustainable buildings and the relationship that exists between these costs. A review of the literature showed that the concept of sustainability is broad but the economic, social and environmental aspects, which are inextricably linked, remain the three fundamental pillars of sustainability. Initial construction cost (IC), cost-in-use (CIU) and carbon cost (CC) were rev...

In an article titled “Robochop,” The Economist reported a practical problem and its technological solution. The problem was that swarms of jellyfish clogged up the pipes of a Swedish nuclear power plant on the Baltic Sea coast, forcing the plant’s temporary shutdown. The proposed solution involved utilizing an invention of “a fleet of killer robots that turn jellyfish into mush.” The devices known as JEROS (Jellyfish Elimination Robotic Swarms) are designed to follow a lead robot and work in formation: they can apparently chop up to 900 kilograms of jellyfish an hour.''

The report raises an irrepressible question: Is there not something wrong—even deeply disturbing—about this picture?

The debate about how to “fix” business schools is intensifying which has coincided with a call for a greater attention to sustainability in business and business education. Teaching sustainability in MBA programs, however, raises a number of questions and challenges. This article presents a few straightforward ideas to address these challenges and offers findings from MBA level sustainability courses I have taught at a major U.S. business school- including a study abroad course to Scandinavia- in which these ideas have demonstrated their effectiveness.

While public relations offers numerous assets for organization-stakeholder relationship building and for ethical corporate social responsibility and sustainability communication, it also faces challenges linked to negative perceptions of the profession which can lead to accusations of "greenwashing." This innovative book critically explores the growing, complex, and sometimes contradictory connections among public relations, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability.

This book chapter is an early version of Cugurullo 2018. Although similar in nature, this chapter explores aspects of experimental urbanism, such as the decomposition of the urban fabric of eco-city projects, which are not discussed in its later incarnation in Environment and Planning A.

The focus of this discussion is to examine the general business patterns associated with social entrepreneurial (SE) practice.  Social enterprises inherently build their infrastructure with social and environmental impacts in mind (Dees 2007), so it follows that double and triple bottom line reporting are suitable practices for them to implement for measuring these impacts.  Socially and environmentally driven (double/triple bottom line)  reporting is currently permeating the business world. Not only do large corporations have to update their social and environmental objectives and practices to adhere to stricter stakeholder standards, but triple bottom line (TBL) reporting is emerging as a screening tool used by investors to review potential social entrepreneurial, nonprofit and commercial clients (Epstein 2008; Estey 2009).

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

The goal of this study is twofold: to create a broader, more inclusive notion of what faith-based social services entails, and to introduce a new set of categories that serve as the basis for an updated mapping of religious social service organizations in America. Utilizing qualitative methods, the study investigates three religious social service programs that reflect the following characteristics: the Holistic Christian Gospel, Progressive Mainline Protestantism, and the Embodied Gospel of Roman Catholicism. The central argument of this study is that newer salient categories for religious social service providers are a theoretical and methodological necessity in order to understand the role of faith in the delivery of these services. This study challenges existing assumptions and understandings of the “faith factor” and frames the “effectiveness” question in a new conceptual and methodological light. Recent attempts to formulate newer categories have not described how religious social service providers implement their faith in their respective programs. Current attempts to systematize program types limit their scope primarily to church-state questions. They do not answer how these organizations specifically engage the world equipped with their religious and spiritual commitments; thus, they lack real relevance to the sociopolitical and socio-cultural ethos present in this era of the “faith-based initiative.” My research addresses these problems by demonstrating that terms and labels such as “faith-saturated” and “faith-based” are misnomers. The programs under consideration in this study all demonstrate that they are “faith-imbued” and “faith-intensive” in how the leadership and staff members of these faith-based programs operationalize their faith commitments in the administration of these services.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is emerging and is taking the financial world by storm. The combination of ESG issues and investors' need for profit has made way for a new wave of responsible investment. Where your ESG compliance metrics and certifications can make or break the future for your company.

As organizations are scrambling to adapt to this new way of investing and doing business, not to get left behind in the dust led us to ask the question:

How is ESG methodology currently being implemented, and how are organizations and ESG practitioners responding to this implementation?

Our goal in this research is to explore how ESG is implemented and what issues organizations and ESG practitioners face when rolling out on the Danish market.

To reach an answer to our research question, we collected our primary data by interviewing nine prominent ESG managers, all chosen based on their expert knowledge of ESG in Denmark. Our secondary data is collected by finding relevant studies that will be used throughout the thesis to support or oppose the primary dataset. We believe that our mix of methods and theories can shine a light on how ESG is impacting the Danish market and how a comprehensive understanding of the issues can provide organizations and us an opportunity to withstand the complex environment it creates.

The findings in this thesis show us some of the issues and difficulties that have manifested in the Danish market. While the interviewees all have experienced different problems dealing with ESG, there is an overall positive consensus on the current state of ESG. However, as ESG is currently lacking any sort of 'best practice' and standardization, the environment will only become more complex. As we explore in this research, the complex environment rejects forcible organizing through traditional leadership.

To counter the rejection, we explore the possibility of ESG managers adopting the characteristics of the enabling leader from Complexity Leadership Theory to be able to combat the complex nature of ESG and the environment in which they operate.

"Purpose: Our research fulfills three purposes: 1) introduce practitioners to the appropriate use of measures of unethical behavior; 2) evaluate the use of integrity related assessments for use in personnel selection; and 3) determine the validity of the MCI instrument using standard validation procedures.

Methodology: Content, construct, convergent and discriminant approaches are applied to establish the relative validity of the assessment tool.

Findings: The results of the MCI purport to align with one’s moral values and behaviors. We establish face validity of the MCI measure, but fail to establish: 1) an appropriate simple factor structure, 2) convergent validity, 3) discriminant validity, and 4) support for the lack of impact of demographic factors on the purported measure of Moral intelligence.

Research limitations: An acceptable but constrained (working students) sample was used in the validation.

Practical implications: Researchers and practitioners should be familiar with psychometric principles to ensure the use of valid tools in a predictive and defensible manner. New measures can be developed, but should be validated before used for developmental or personnel decision making purposes.

Originality/value: 1) The lack of validity associated with the MCI instrument is established; 2) Researchers and practitioners are exposed to considerations in the appropriate use of measures of unethical behavior, and 3) exposed to several previously validated integrity related assessments for use in personnel decision making."

Traditional medicine practice involves a complex combination of activities, order of knowledge, beliefs and customs to generate the desired effects for the diagnosis, prevention or elimination of imbalances in physical, psychological or social wellbeing. Traditional medicine practice is based on the indigenous knowledge of a given people, a given community, and their experiences in the context of the local culture and environment — it is dynamic and changes with time depending on the prevailing situation. Traditional medicine practitioners (TMP) comprise herbalists, bonesetters, psychic healers, traditional birth attendants, faith healers, diviners, and spiritualists who use indigenous knowledge for developing materials and procedures.

In Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis acknowledged that “numerous scientists, philosophers, theologians and civic groups have enriched the Church’s thinking” on sustainability. Hospitals and health care organizations may not be an obvious resource for ecological inspiration, but they have been responsible for shaping the contours of sustainability as well. While some Catholic health care organizations have already established measures to mitigate climate change, Laudato Si’ challenges all of Catholic health care to reflect the dual concerns for “God’s creation and the poor and outcast.” Concretely, two ways this can be achieved are by cutting carbon emissions and reducing water footprints.

Google is a highly regarded global computer services company that has been awarded for its ethical behavior.  This paper explores how the company has responded to challenges it has faced at times in recent years when it has come under fire for its ethical behavior with regard to financial reporting and taxpaying.  Google’s subsequent level of positive ethical decision making is correlated with the company’s reemergence on the Ethisphere Institute’s list of ethical companies in 2014 after a notable three year absence.

Power point accompanying Chapter 1
Kopnina, H. and Blewitt, J. (2014) Sustainable Business: Key issues. Routledge Earthscan, New York.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415739528/
Sustainable Business: Key Issues is the first comprehensive introductory-level textbook to address the interface between environmental challenges and business solutions to provide an overview of the basic concepts of sustainability, sustainable business, and business ethics. The book introduces students to the background and key issues of sustainability and suggests ways in which these concepts can be applied in business practice. Though the book takes a business perspective, it is interdisciplinary in its nature and draws on knowledge from socio-economic, political, and environmental studies, thereby providing a practical and critical understanding of sustainability in the changing paradigm of global business. It goes beyond the conventional theories of sustainability and addresses critical issues concerned with population, consumption and economic growth. It discusses realistic ways forward, in particular the Circular Economy and Cradle to Cradle frameworks."

The main Objective of this market research was to find out the market gap between identity conscious Sri Lankans and Sri Lankan Designer wear that is in the market. As far as Sri Lankan designer wear is concerned there is a lack of modern trendy designer wear that gives prominence to Sri Lankan identity.
Therefore the research was conducted in order to find out data that could help identify stylesand trends and also identify the authenticity which Sri Lanka hold in clothing from ancient time to cater to Sri Lankans locally and globally. After doing a thorough analysis,the research proved that Sri Lanka indeed has a gap where traditional and contemporary clothing are concerned.

Sustainability is assumed to be a goal for the planning and design of coastal infrastructure in general, and specifically for marinas. Well established principles define sustainability in terms of environmental, economic, and social criteria. However, only the environmental dimension of sustainability is well developed in the marina industry. The social dimension of sustainability, conversely, is missing from available marina planning guidelines and usually not a goal considered for marina planning. This paper proposes the basis of social sustainability criteria for physical planning of marinas.
One of the main thesis of this approach is that the built environment can either encourage or prevent participation of the local community in a marina project, which has a major influence on social sustainability. Marina planning needs to create spaces within the marina for local community members and businesses to offer goods and services directly to guests, in order to achieve social sustainability and enhance guest experience.

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

The Aalborg Project may be interpreted as a metaphor of modern politics, modern administration and planning, and of modernity itself. The basic idea of the project was comprehensive, coherent, and innovative, and it was based on rational and democratic argument. During implementation, however, when idea met reality, the play of Machiavellian princes, Nietzschean will to power, and Foucauldian rationality-as-rationalization resulted in the fragmentation of the project.

"By Mark DeKay. Edited Susanne Bennett

"This book offers practical and theoretical tools for more effective sustainable design solutions and for communicating sustainable design ideas to today's diverse stakeholders.

It uses integral theory to make sense of the many competing ideas in this area and offers a powerful conceptual framework for sustainable designers through the four main perspectives of: behaviours; systems; experiences; cultures.

It also uses human developmental theory to reframe sustainable design across four levels of complexity present in society: the Traditional, Modern, Postmodern, and Integral waves. Profuse with illustrations and examples, the book offers many conceptual tools including:

• twelve principles of integral sustainable design
• sixteen prospects of sustainable design
• six perceptual shifts for ecological design thinking
• five levels of sustainable design aesthetics
• ten injunctions for designing connections to nature.""

Settler colonialism is a form of domination that violently disrupts human relationships with the environment. Settler colonialism is ecological domination, committing environmental injustice against Indigenous peoples and other groups. Focusing on the context of Indigenous peoples' facing US domination, this article investigates philosophically one dimension of how settler colonialism commits environmental injustice. When examined ecologically, settler colonialism works strategically to undermine Indigenous peoples' social resilience as self-determining collectives. To understand the relationships connecting settler colonialism, environmental injustice, and violence, the article first engages Anishinaabe intellectual traditions to describe an Indigenous conception of social resilience called collective continuance. One way in which settler colonial violence commits environmental injustice is through strategically undermining Indigenous collective continuance. At least two kinds of environmental injustices demonstrate such violence: vicious sedimentation and insidious loops. The article seeks to contribute to knowledge of how anti-Indigenous settler colonialism and environmental injustice are connected.

At the same time that case studies are widely used and have produced canonical texts, it may be observed that the case study as a methodology is generally held in low regard, or is simply ignored, within the academy. For example, only 2 of the 30 top-ranked U.S. graduate programs in political science require a dedicated graduate course in case study or qualitative methods, and a full third of these programs do not even offer such a course. In contrast, all of the top 30 programs offer courses in quantitative methods and almost all of them require training in such methods, often several courses. In identifying this paradox of the case study’s wide use and low regard, Gerring rightly remarks that the case study survives in a “curious methodological limbo,” and that the reason is that the method is poorly understood. In what follows, we will try to resolve Gerring’s paradox and help case study research gain wider use and acceptance.

The chapter aims at providing a set of interpretive tools to analyze the outcomes of consumer activism when performed through collective action. In the last years, in fact, we have witnessed a shifting from political consumerism understood as a practice of the individual 'citizen-consumer' to political consumerism performed by a growing number of organized collectives like solidarity purchasing groups, consumer-producer cooperatives, ecological communities etc. This implies that a re-conceptualization of political consumerism should be accompanied by renewed interpretive frameworks and methodologies. Drawing from the literature on social movements and their outcomes, the authors come forth with an interpretive 'compass' composed by six main features (type, domain, nature, target, timing, duration) that help understanding the effectiveness of consumer activism in light of the recent developments. In the second and final part of the chapter, the authors underline the importance of taking into account factors like resources, media outreach and alliances as well as the political, socioeconomic and cultural context.

Abstract: The developmentalist gaze of the Fair Trade movement is on Global South producers. In this article we turn our analytic gaze toward North American fair traders to explore the racialized, neocolonial power relations in which these movement actors are implicated. Section One is a brief historical sketch of Fair Trade certification. We argue that the certification system is a multi-sited, global institution that is shaped by and shapes neocolonial power relations in Fair Trade by exploring the consolidation and more recent splintering of the international certification system. Section Two provides a postcolonial critique of developmentalism, with a focus on the timing of development, in order to lay a foundation for the remaining sections. In Section Three we analyze the spatiality of Fair Trade, with an emphasis on what and who are missing from or erased by the structural and conceptual frameworks of Fair Trade. In Section Four we explore the relationship between Fair Trade, commodity fetishism, and the developmentalist conception of space/time propagated by Fair Trade advocates. Section Five is a critical analysis of the neocolonialist and racist discourse of Fair Trade, with a focus on the “helping” discourse. We contend that as Global North fair traders strive to “help” Global South producers, they re-entrench neocolonial narratives of white supremacy and the desire to develop.

Perkembangan teknologi dan industri membutuhkan sumber daya manusia yang kompeten dalam setiap organisasi bisnis. Kehadiran generasi milenial dan generasi Z telah mendominasi angkatan kerja dengan pesat, yang menghadirkan tantangan baru bagi organisasi untuk menyediakan iklim kerja yang mendukung perkembangan mereka. Survey menunjukkan bahwa generasi milenial mahir dalam penggunaan teknologi, tetapi kurang sabar untuk berada dalam organisasi. Kemampuan untuk mempertahankan dan mengembangkan generasi milenial dan generasi Z adalah salah satu faktor keberhasilan organisasi untuk meningkatkan performansi bisnis secara terus menerus. Pengelolaan Sumber Daya Manusia (SDM) membutuhkan pendekatan strategi manajemen yang baru untuk mendapatkan outcome bisnis yang lebih baik. Framework Organizational Sustainability Model in era 4.0 digunakan untuk memetakan strategi SDM untuk mendapatkan keunggulan kompetitif yang berkelanjutan. Input dari model merupakan Key Driver organisasi untuk mendukung kompetensi utama karyawan sehingga menghasilkan performansi yang terbaik dan meningkatkan produktivitas. Skill dan pengalaman tidak cukup, diperlukan motivasi yang dibentuk dari budaya dan iklim organisasi. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan model AMO (Ability, Motivation, Opportunity) untuk mendukung kerangka teori utama. Penelitian dapat digunakan bagi para praktisi dan organisasi karena model ini menyajikan strategi pengelolaan SDM sebagai saran dan pedoman untuk mengembangkan manusia sebagai modal untuk mengembangkan performansi organisasi dan mencapai keunggulan kompetitif secara berkelanjutan.

The objective of this short paper is to analyze, compare and contrast the established CSR discourse with the evolving CDR discourse by examining their commutative structures and narratives. The thesis for this approach is that corporate responsibility has to be rooted in the personal responsibility of every member of an organization, and therefore, has to be rooted in the explicit and implicit items of corporate culture. Communication then can display the outcome of various approaches towards corporate responsibility and provide insights for a holistic digital responsibility of corporations. As digital technology is developing on a broad spectrum with a fast pace and demonstrating disruptive impact on society and businesses, an integrative model is required to apply CDR properly in an openly futuristic manner. As a basis for this, the nature of the discourses have to be examined. Summary: (1) CDR deserves its own consideration alongside CSR. Both differ from each other in their nature, their professionalism and their narratives. However, CSR basics (dimensions) can be used for CDR communication. (2) Organizations do not become less complex through transformation processes-communication is the intrinsic means of strategic orientation and orientation for those involved in the organization. (3) With regard to effective CDR communication, those in positions of responsibility in organizations should be aware of the dimensions in which it operates, particularly in terms of its cultural and normative power. (4) CDR communication is still in its infancy and must be thought of as "ex ante". This is achieved through an interdisciplinary approach. The structural location within the organization still needs to be established. (5) The solution lies in an ethically responsible, multidimensional framework for action.

Collections care professionals are looking for ways to be more sustainable in their work without sacrificing their standards of best-practices. This is important due to the ethical connection of caring for a collection 'in perpetuity' in light of climate change and the negative impacts humanity has had on the environment. This paper centers around two facets of collections care, practices and materials, and explores each in separate but related parts with the common thread of minimizing the consumption of energy, water, chemicals and resources using information gathered from journal articles, blog posts and interviews with professionals in heritage preservation and allied fields.

Urban renewal has a social impact, and, here, we present the Fortitude Valley Renewal Plan (2007), in order to assess its process as a case study in relation to the concept of social sustainability. The objective is to develop recommendations to incorporate social sustainability in a proactive manner within the urban regeneration process. This research is based on the analysis of planning documents and semi-directed interviews with urban stakeholders involved in the regeneration process, particularly in the development of the Fortitude Valley Urban Vision statutory planning document. We analyse the case of Fortitude Valley's regeneration process in regards to three components: urban design, provision of affordable housing and the public engagement process. In conclusion, we explain how the tool of Sustainability Assessment (SA) could be used to improve strategic decision-making for the development of urban regeneration strategies for this case study.

- Result of “the Onlife Initiative,” a one-year project funded by the European Commission to study the deployment of ICTs and its effects on the human condition
- Inspires reflection on the ways in which a hyperconnected world forces the rethinking of the conceptual frameworks on which policies are built
- Draws upon the work of a group of scholars from a wide range of disciplines including, anthropology, cognitive science, computer science, law, philosophy, political science

What is the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the human condition? In order to address this question, in 2012 the European Commission organized a research project entitled The Onlife Initiative: concept reengineering for rethinking societal concerns in the digital transition. This volume collects the work of the Onlife Initiative. It explores how the development and widespread use of ICTs have a radical impact on the human condition.

ICTs are not mere tools but rather social forces that are increasingly affecting our self-conception (who we are), our mutual interactions (how we socialise); our conception of reality (our metaphysics); and our interactions with reality (our agency). In each case, ICTs have a huge ethical, legal, and political significance, yet one with which we have begun to come to terms only recently.

The impact exercised by ICTs is due to at least four major transformations: the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality; the blurring of the distinction between human, machine and nature; the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations, to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks.

Such transformations are testing the foundations of our conceptual frameworks. Our current conceptual toolbox is no longer fitted to address new ICT-related challenges. This is not only a problem in itself. It is also a risk, because the lack of a clear understanding of our present time may easily lead to negative projections about the future. The goal of The Manifesto, and of the whole book that contextualises, is therefore that of contributing to the update of our philosophy. It is a constructive goal. The book is meant to be a positive contribution to rethinking the philosophy on which policies are built in a hyperconnected world, so that we may have a better chance of understanding our ICT-related problems and solving them satisfactorily.

The Manifesto launches an open debate on the impacts of ICTs on public spaces, politics and societal expectations toward policymaking in the Digital Agenda for Europe’s remit. More broadly, it helps start a reflection on the way in which a hyperconnected world calls for rethinking the referential frameworks on which policies are built.