Matters of Time and Space: Towards Sustainability in Everyday Life

Abstract

This article critically examines dominant sustainability narratives that prioritise technological innovation, market-based solutions and individual behaviour while often neglecting the socio-economic structures driving overconsumption. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in urban and rural Chile over the past decade, it explores how practices of care, repair and material creativity emerge in contexts marked by isolation, scarcity or exclusion. Far from advocating a return to pre-industrial simplicity, the text challenges the binary between modernity and tradition, suggesting that autonomy and material endurance are not incompatible with technological advancement. Through cases ranging from rural repurposing to urban protest adaptations, the article highlights how creative responses to material constraints reveal pathways to rethinking sustainability. It calls for a reimagining of our relationship with objects and consumption, fostering alternatives to the linear logic of production and disposal.