A Closer Look at Social Sustainability

Social sustainability, as an integral dimension of sustainability, means durability or perpetuity in social structure and function. Simply speaking, social sustainability engages recycling and waste reduction in social life. Such engagement necessarily requires social actions such as community development and care, volunteering, mutuality, and socialization or enculturation to maintain social integration, health, and culture. Community development consists in urban renewal and related aid, including volunteering and its organization for mutual care, particularly for elders. The care also transpires in public support for organ transplantation to rehabilitate precarious patients. Such social action crucially hinges on cultural or ethical orientations such as egalitarianism, paternalism, and Confucianism, notably in Chinese context. The social actions, its cultural bases, and social well-being together constitute social sustainability elaborated in this volume. Essentially, this volume presents original evidence based on unprecedented empirical research to reveal, consolidate, and advance theories and principles for social sustainability. The volume thereby elaborates and unpacks structural and functional mechanisms to achieve social sustainability. Such mechanisms are evident in the research to unravel six facets of social sustainability, namely, urban renewal, community integration, volunteering commitment, eldercare, kidney transplantation, and social value orientations. All these perpetuate social commitment, solidarity, and regeneration, and prevent social risks, losses, and breakdown.