The project-partnership cycle: managing city-university partnerships for urban sustainability and resilience transformations

Abstract

Cities across the globe are striving to produce viable solutions to pressing urban sustainability and resilience problems. Despite aspirations, municipal governments often need additional support in terms of knowledge, capacity, or resources to achieve transformations. Partnerships between cities and universities are one mechanism for co-producing knowledge and achieving sustained progress on complex challenges. When properly structured and effectively managed, city-university partnerships (CUPs) are purported to increase transformative capacity in city administrations and support actions which accelerate urban transformations; but these outcomes are not always achieved. As CUPs grow in numbers, there is a pressing need to identify which principles and practices facilitate transformation. Therefore, we used iterative reflective focus group sessions to develop in-depth case studies of five sustainability and resilience CUPs across three countries. The CUPs were cross-compared to explore the partnership dynamics and management practices that aid progress towards transformative goals. Observations were then related to transformative capacity typologies, and mapped to the newly described project-partnership cycle – which is useful for the management of transformative partnerships.

Unpacking Smart Campus Assessment: Developing a Framework via Narrative Literature Review

“…In addition, city-university partnerships (CUPs) for urban sustainability create a co-knowledge capacity for handling complex challenges in urban transformation [123]. Finally, universities lead the transition to conservation through a commitment by management and students toward sustainability involving six factors for implementing conservation on campuses, comprising the campus' way of life, governance, conservation curriculum, and pro-conservation approaches [124].…”