The Framing of Urban Sustainability Transformations

Abstract

Transformational change is not always intentional. However, deliberate transformations are imperative to achieve the sustainable visions that future generations deserve. Small, unintentional tweaks will not be enough to overcome persistent and emergent urban challenges. Recent scholarship on sustainability transformations has evolved considerably, but there is no consensus on what qualifies transformational change. We describe variations in current discussions of intentional sustainability transformations in the literature and synthesize strategies from funding institutions’ recent requests for proposals for urban sustainability transformations. Research funding initiatives calling for transformational change are increasingly common and are an important driver of how transformational change is articulated in research-practice in cities. From this synthesis, we present seven criteria for transformational change that provide direction for framing and implementing transformational change initiatives.

The Landscape of Envisioning and Speculative Design Methods for Sustainable Mobility Futures

“…Recently, "community visioning" to describe pictures from the future had been utilized [146,148], involving citizens to develop state transportation plan, which was before traditionally in the domain of government and transportation professionals. Other examples of such alternative visions are walking and cycling urban transport systems for the year 2030, informed by 'utopian thinking' [149] and visions for users' behavioral changes towards electric vehicles [2,150]. [151] claims that visioning exercises enable illustrating possible transition paths towards sustainability with concerns that experiences are seen solely as enthusiastic experimentation.…”

“…The high urgency of sustainability and related urban and transport planning actions need to be contrasted with the fact that human mobility is a domain with increasingly higher uncertainty and complexity [1][2][3]. In particular, rapid development of urban mobility technologies is an important source of such uncertainty [4][5][6].…”

What Does Urban Transformation Look Like? Findings from a Global Prize Competition

“…This is particularly important because a 'transformation' paradigm is beginning to take hold in research, policy and funding practice, often without grounding in sound evidence. More than one billion dollars are already being invested in urban transformation research and implementation [11], and much of the needed urban transformation should occur in regions of the world where evidence is scantest [6,43].…”

“…Our contribution to this emerging community of practitioners is aligned with a recent call for strategic extensions and alternative research methods to complement and push the horizon of the existing empirical knowledge base and methodological repertoire [8,9]. It is also responsive to cautions surrounding the 'elasticity' in how the concept of 'transformation' is used, having entered policy and practice without consensus and empirical grounding, and little guidance for implementation in all three spheres of practice, research and funding [10][11][12]. Our research is informed by an initiative at the World Resources Institute, namely, the WRI Ross Prize for Cities (hereafter, 'the prize'), a global award for transformative projects that have ignited sustainable changes in their city.…”

Urban transformative capacity: From concept to practice

“…Correspondingly, also funding agencies that already offer dedicated support for research and capacity development aimed specifically at urban transformations do not provide comprehensive orientation yet, even though they appear to converge over some criteria (cf. Iwaniec et al 2019).…”