Cultivating urban green transformations (#journal)

‘One city block at a time’: Researching and cultivating green transformations

 A growing interest in environmental issues has seen suburban backyards, streets, houses and curbsides become sites of experimentation around sustainable lifestyle practices in Melbourne. Green suburban lifestyle initiatives such as ‘permablitzes’ are transformational in a number of ways and embody, materialize and perform broader sets of changes in people’s lives as they seek to switch from practices of consumption to a focus on self-sufficiency and making do. Video-ethnography and photography are some of the ways which capture such enactments and such combined media methods can enable researchers to both document and participate. The article concludes with a discussion of how such a participatory research agenda might be translated into an environmental planning and policy approach for community-led green practices.