The comfortable endurance of sustainable practices: values, affect and community dynamics in Catalan eco-communities

Abstract

This article examines how discomforts shape the endurance of practices in two Catalan eco-communities. Despite the common perception of sustainable practices as uncomfortable, scant empirical attention has hitherto been paid to how residents in alternative spaces cope with discomfort-inducing practices. While cultural geographies have typically emphasised the co-adaptation of bodies and environments as necessary to ensure the comfortable endurance of practices, this article introduces three additional elements in the context of eco-communities: values, repetition and community dynamics. It demonstrates this by first examining how residents initially navigated the winter cold, demonstrating the efficacy of bodily adaptations and guiding values. Second, considering more slowly emerging discomforts, this article foregrounds the impact of a practice’s repeated performance on ever-changing bodies, that oftentimes led to their abandonment. Finally, it emphasises the impact of community dynamics, revealing that tendencies to abandon more ‘radical’ practices were always contested. By underscoring the interplay between values, embodied affects and community dynamics over time, this article contributes to geographies of comfort by showcasing the generativity of eco-communities as valuable spaces for theorisations of dis/comfort and the endurance of practices.