Urban Transition Labs: co-creating transformative action for sustainable cities

In a general mindset of ‘local elaboration’ of sustainable development, cities are logical loci for action: they do not only concentrate (future) consumption and production – and are hence at the origin of unsustainability ‘symptoms’-, they simultaneously are the operational units in which concrete actions can be envisaged, designed, (politically) facilitated and effectively rolled out. Whenever cities engage in this innovative, ambitious and responsible task of change for integrated sustainability, an undoubtedly major amount of learning emerges; and vice versa, sound knowledge/best practices on how to proceed with local sustainability oriented change processes could be a firm support for local actors in their quest for effective and efficient action. In this paper, we present ‘Urban Transition Labs’ (UTL) as settings in which real life trajectories of sustainable development in cities are deployed and at the same time carefully observed; in a co-creative collaboration between actors and researchers (transdisciplinary research). Thereby, a transition management approach is applied, resulting in a cycle of five distinct phases: (a) process design and system analysis, (b) problem structuring and envisioning, (c) back casting, determining major pathways and agenda setting, (d) experimenting and (e) monitoring and evaluation. The process is guided by a ‘Transition-team’ that co-designs the process and feeds in relevant information to the city transition ‘arenas’. These arenas are the actual initial incubators of change; they are crewed by local frontrunners that are considered as engaged visionary people with diverse backgrounds. The findings of arenas feed a further participatory process to engage the relevant city stakeholders into action. In this paper, we want to present the UTL as a potentially valuable concept to support a ‘walking-the-talk’ of sustainable development by cities; and we share the first impressions on specific barriers and enablers that could determine the effectiveness of the envisaged approach.

[1]  Adrian Smith,et al.  The governance of sustainable socio-technical transitions , 2005 .

[2]  John Holmberg,et al.  Backcasting: A Natural Step in Operationalising Sustainable Development(*) , 1998 .

[3]  Robbert A. Kivits,et al.  A post-carbon aviation future: airports and the transition to a cleaner aviation sector (Conference publication) , 2010 .

[4]  Robert Costanza,et al.  Envisioning shared goals for humanity: a detailed, shared vision of a sustainable and desirable USA in 2100 , 2002 .

[5]  Paul Lanoie,et al.  Measuring the sustainability of cities: An analysis of the use of local indicators , 2010 .

[6]  Jouni Korhonen,et al.  Municipalities and industrial ecology: reconsidering municipal environmental management , 2001 .

[7]  L. Sugar,et al.  Cities and greenhouse gas emissions: moving forward , 2011 .

[8]  E. Andersson,et al.  Scale-Crossing Brokers and Network Governance of Urban Ecosystem Services : The Case of Stockholm , 2010 .

[9]  Flor Avelino,et al.  Power in Transition: Empowering Discourses on Sustainability Transitions , 2006 .

[10]  Lars Coenen,et al.  Towards a spatial perspective on sustainability transitions , 2012 .

[11]  Susan Taljaard,et al.  Pilot projects and their diffusion: a case study of integrated coastal management in South Africa , 2012 .

[12]  Bernhard Truffer,et al.  The Local Sources of Market Formation: Explaining Regional Growth Differentials in German Photovoltaic Markets , 2012 .

[13]  J. Rotmans,et al.  The practice of transition management: Examples and lessons from four distinct cases , 2010 .

[14]  T. Elmqvist,et al.  Urban Transitions: On Urban Resilience and Human-Dominated Ecosystems , 2010, AMBIO.

[15]  R. Kemp.  Technology and the transition to environmental sustainability , 1994 .

[16]  Rob Raven,et al.  Transitions and strategic niche management: towards a competence kit for practitioners , 2010, Int. J. Technol. Manag..

[17]  Paul J. Dosal.  Power in transition , 1995 .

[18]  H. Bulkeley,et al.  Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change , 2013 .

[19]  Derk Loorbach,et al.  Policy innovation in isolation? , 2009 .

[20]  Volker Bilgram,et al.  User-Centric Innovations in New Product Development - Systematic Identification of Lead Users Harnes , 2008 .

[21]  C. Jefferies,et al.  The SWITCH Transitioning Manual , 2011 .

[22]  Patsy Healey,et al.  Transforming governance: Challenges of institutional adaptation and a new politics of space1 , 2006 .

[23]  G. de Roo,et al.  Exploring Transitions in the Peri-Urban Area , 2011 .

[24]  J. Tàbara,et al.  Culture as trigger for sustainability transition in the water domain: the case of the Spanish water policy and the Ebro river basin , 2008 .

[25]  John Robinson,et al.  Envisioning sustainability: Recent progress in the use of participatory backcasting approaches for sustainability research , 2011 .

[26]  B. Truffer,et al.  Sustainability transitions: An emerging field of research and its prospects , 2012 .

[27]  J. Grin,et al.  Transitions to Sustainable Development: New Directions in the Study of Long Term Transformative Change , 2010 .

[28]  J. Rotmans.  Societal Innovation: Between Dream and Reality Lies Complexity , 2005 .

[29]  L. Carvalho,et al.  Green Urban Transport Policies and Cleantech Innovations: Evidence from Curitiba, Göteborg and Hamburg , 2012 .

[30]  Appu Haapio,et al.  Towards sustainable urban communities , 2012 .

[31]  S. Hammer,et al.  Cities and Green Growth: A Conceptual Framework , 2011 .

[32]  A. Roy.  The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory , 2009 .

[33]  Agis M. Papadopoulos,et al.  A feasibility evaluation tool for sustainable cities – A case study for Greece , 2012 .

[34]  M. Betsill,et al.  Rethinking Sustainable Cities: Multilevel Governance and the 'Urban' Politics of Climate Change , 2005 .

[35]  David L. Cooperrider,et al.  Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change , 2005 .

[36]  P. Newman,et al.  Cities as sustainable ecosystems : principles and practices , 2008 .

[37]  E. Shove,et al.  Caution! Transitions Ahead: Politics, Practice, and Sustainable Transition Management , 2007 .

[38]  A. Carlsson-kanyama,et al.  Participative backcasting: A tool for involving stakeholders in local sustainability planning , 2008 .

[39]  F. Geels,et al.  Typology of sociotechnical transition pathways , 2007 .

[40]  D. McEvoy.  Climate Change and Cities , 2007 .

[41]  Lars Coenen,et al.  Places and Spaces of Sustainability Transitions: Geographical Contributions to an Emerging Research and Policy Field , 2012 .

[42]  Derk Loorbach,et al.  Complexity and Transition Management , 2009 .

[43]  D. Loorbach.  Transition management for sustainable development: A prescriptive, complexity-based governance framework , 2010 .

[44]  C. Rosenzweig.  Climate change and cities : first assessment report of the urban climate change research network , 2011 .

[45]  Xuemei Bai,et al.  Integrating Global Environmental Concerns into Urban Management: The Scale and Readiness Arguments , 2007 .

[46]  K. Dreborg.  Essence of backcasting , 1996 .

[47]  Niki Frantzeskaki,et al.  Governing societal transitions to sustainability , 2012 .

[48]  A. Maassen,et al.  Heterogeneity of Lock-In and the Role of Strategic Technological Interventions in Urban Infrastructural Transformations , 2012 .

[49]  K. Seto,et al.  The New Geography of Contemporary Urbanization and the Environment , 2010 .

[50]  Lars Coenen,et al.  Environmental Innovation and Sustainability Transitions in Regional Studies , 2012 .

[51]  P. Bocquier.  WORLD URBANIZATION PROSPECTS: AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE UN MODEL OF PROJECTION COMPATIBLE WITH URBAN TRANSITION THEORY 1 , 2005 .

[52]  N. Grimm,et al.  Global Change and the Ecology of Cities , 2008, Science.

[53]  Pier Vellinga,et al.  An integrated planning tool for sustainable cities , 2000 .

[54]  D. Loorbach.  Transition Management: New Mode of Governance for Sustainable Development , 2007 .

[55]  E. Hippel,et al.  Lead users: a source of novel product concepts , 1986 .

[56]  Michaël Meijer,et al.  A next step for sustainable urban design in the Netherlands , 2011 .

[57]  L. Whitmarsh,et al.  A multi-level analysis of sustainable mobility transitions: Niche development in the UK and Sweden , 2008 .

[58]  Frank Nevens,et al.  ‘On tomorrow's grounds’, Flemish agriculture in 2030: a case of participatory translation of sustainability principles into a vision for the future , 2008 .

[59]  Meng Li,et al.  Appreciative inquiry: A positive revolution in change , 2011 .

[60]  M. V. Asselt,et al.  More evolution than revolution: transition management in public policy , 2001 .

[61]  Ruud van der Helm.  The vision phenomenon: Towards a theoretical underpinning of visions of the future and the process of envisioning , 2009 .

[62]  Mike Hodson,et al.  Mediating Low-Carbon Urban Transitions? Forms of Organization, Knowledge and Action , 2012 .

[63]  Jaco Quist,et al.  Backcasting for a Sustainable Future: The Impact After 10 Years , 2007 .

[64]  Harald Rohracher,et al.  Local Demonstrations for Global Transitions—Dynamics across Governance Levels Fostering Socio-Technical Regime Change Towards Sustainability , 2012 .

[65]  N. Frantzeskaki,et al.  Transitions: Two steps from theory to policy , 2009 .

[66]  G. Verbong,et al.  Governing the Energy Transition. Reality, Illusion or Necessity , 2012 .

[67]  A. Tukker,et al.  Governance of sustainable transitions: about the 4(0) ways to change the world , 2007 .

[68]  Anil Graves,et al.  Who's in and why? A typology of stakeholder analysis methods for natural resource management. , 2009, Journal of environmental management.

[69]  A. Lovins.  Energy strategy , 1976, Nature.

[70]  Michele M. Betsill,et al.  Mitigating Climate Change in US Cities: Opportunities and obstacles , 2001 .

[71]  Henry Chesbrough,et al.  Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology , 2003 .

[72]  Suzanne van den Bosch,et al.  Transition Experiments: Exploring societal changes towards sustainability , 2010 .

[73]  Nafis Sadik,et al.  The state of world population. , 1995 .

[74]  Mark Deakin,et al.  The case for socially inclusive visioning in the community-based approach to sustainable urban regeneration , 2012 .

[75]  John Grin.  The politics of transition governance in Dutch agriculture: conceptual understanding and implications for transition management , 2012 .

[76]  R. Madlener,et al.  Impacts of urbanization on urban structures and energy demand: What can we learn for urban energy planning and urbanization management? , 2011 .