Urban Environmental Ethics on the City Edge: Making Ethical Citizens for a ‘Blue Backyard’ (Auckland)

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In the Auckland subproject, we research the professional mobilization by expert planners of an urban ethics of environmental care in a livable city. The aim is to deepen understanding of professional ethics within governance and to further explore urban ethics at work in conflict resolution and moral economies of city development. The subproject broadens the scope of the urban in urban ethics by addressing ethical city-hinterland relations and the question of how to live with socio-natures in the city. By retaining a focus on the ethics of experts as they work to legitimate a new city edge master plan, but, interestingly, through an exhaustive participatory planning process, the subproject builds upon the associated Singapore project. It also extends the first Auckland subproject’s investigation of community actors developing an ethics of environmental care among residents, by switching to planning perspectives, and by researching the ways in which urban ethics are used in the public contestation of a new environmental vision for Auckland. The subproject researches new techniques of governance (participatory planning and Marine Spatial Planning) and the fostering of a new urban environmental ethics of care (the “ocean citizen” ideal, attention to the materiality of city-hinterland relations including waste and hazards, indigenous environmental ethics, urban ethics of recreation and leisure, wildlife preservation, environmental justice and decolonization). It researches the promotion of a new moral economy (a “Blue Economy” of appropriate sea-based economic activities within a livable city agenda) and the roles for urban environmental ethics in the management and planning of city edge environments, built and natural. The subproject develops a Geography agenda by linking subject formation through an ethics of environmental care in public debates, including both the assertion of ethical claims and allegations of unethical behavior (opponents), to urban political ecology and the urban ethics approach.