While the United Nations Millennium Declaration identified several key benchmarks for sustainable development, the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (ASD) now reaffirms, refines, and retools those sustainable development goals for the next 15 years. Specifically, the ASD calls for developing and extending opportunities for transitions to sustainable societies-a goal that necessarily includes more sustainable research practices capable of fostering the uptake of the values, behaviors, strategies, and lifestyles required to realize a sustainable future for all people and societies as well. This paper describes one such sustainable practice project: Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO). Housed at Michigan State University in the United States, at all levels of its ESD project, SAWBO enacts a collaborative, flexible, adaptive, and resilient practice with global and local, scientific and indigenous, knowledge experts in order to transfer scientifically grounded knowledge about agricultural, public health, and socioeconomic issues of public concern to rural areas of Africa and other places affected by those concerns. SAWBO's principle medium of transfer uses animated, linguistically localized, educational videos, distributed free of cost, and intended to be both readily accessible and easily shared by all types of audiences, but especially by low-literate adult learners in developing regions. As such, SAWBO's ESD approach addresses many of Agenda 2030's 17 Global Goals and aligns with the global effort to develop educational approaches that are not only economically, but also socially and environmentally, sustainable. As a project, SAWBO also embodies a model of sustainability education practice adaptable to different methodologies across a variety of spaces and educational levels and is itself also methodologically sustainable.
The widespread use of digital technologies and the expansion of social networks has created new communication and meeting spaces where people and social and political actors connect with each other. This opens diverse spaces and possibilities for digital engagement in a more accessible, immediate, continuous, egalitarian, and personalized way. Digital technology facilitates learning, dissemination, and access to information, turning it into a means of communication and fueling the practice of critical thinking. In particular civic critical thinking practices improve the organization and effectiveness of civic networks and spaces for citizen participation, ultimately helping to produce responsible, conscious citizens. This study proposes a series of hypotheses based on the relationships between digital learning, critical thinking and civic participation, and tests them using the technique of structural equation modeling (SEM) with partial least squares (PLS) applied to a sample of 191 primary and secondary school students. The results indicate that digital tools have a positive impact on the development of critical thinking, and this influences citizen participation, transforming people into more engaged citizens of the world with participatory attitudes and values.
The roles of medium-sized cities in processes of demographic challenge have taken many different paths. New forms of urban sprawl, deconcentrating processes, and the emergence of the diffuse city have marked a change in the relations that Spanish medium-sized cities have traditionally had with their most directly influenced territories. In line with the theoretical framework of the European next generation urban regeneration programme, the main aim of this paper is to propose a methodology to develop a project that fosters resilience strategies and the revitalization of local environments. This will also benefit the institutions that are involved in promoting it. The innovative methodology employed has been denominated the “We Propose!” project and has received several national acknowledgments. This is a strategically designed civic participation urban renewal project and has been subject to geographical analysis through field trips and in situ research. A case study into urban renewal strategies was carried out in Ciudad Real, which is a medium-sized city in Spain’s third largest region. It includes an evaluation of both the design and implementation of what could be considered a successful case of urban renewal carried out in the city. This urban development initiative was undertaken by the public administration, but it was designed and proposed by local citizens.
The concept of sustainability has recently become a key matter of concern in urban planning, especially in the context of ever-increasing populations in urban spaces, as noted in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11, “Sustainable cities and communities”. In this study, we analyze the policies that are shaping the transition toward urban sustainability in the Spanish context. We focus on the evolution of such policies since the end of the last century, from Local Agenda 21 to the current sustainable development strategies. The territorial scope of the study covers the five provincial capitals of the region of Castilla-La Mancha (Albacete, Toledo, Guadalajara, Ciudad Real, and Cuenca). The research question posed herein is: “Have the policies that have been applied made these cities more sustainable?”. The methodology for answering this question is based on bibliographic analysis and analytical analysis, achieved by the qualitative method of interviewing the agents involved in the ISUDS, and conducting an applied analysis of the main actions developed in each of the cities, for which collaboration with the city councils has been key. Synthetic analysis has been used to conduct research using geographic information systems. The key findings relate to the progress made in achieving urban sustainability in these medium-sized cities, and the success of the urban planning process. We identified the following variables in the current ISUDS actions: new uses for unused urban lots, new building construction programs, street rehabilitation, building rehabilitation, and neighborhood regeneration.
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