New techniques and measures to reach the EU-climate targets of 20% CO2 reduction in 2020 were increasingly available and implemented. However, to mainstream these techniques in urban policy and consider them business as usual, tech alone is not enough. A transition to innovative thinking about urban planning was needed, in which all stakeholders were involved.
The MUSIC project (Mitigation in Urban Areas: Solutions for Innovative Cities) aimed to catalyze and mainstream carbon and energy reduction in urban policies, activities and the built environment. Cities offered the opportunity for decisive local action to address sustainability challenges. Many cities recognized this and adopted ambitious targets and agenda’s.
However, city officers were confronted with the limitations of their policy instruments that were available to them, apparently insufficient to deal with the complexity of the sustainability challenges. Moreover, aiming for a sustainable future was about finding fundamental new ways of thinking, working, planning and organizing, which was impossible to ‘command-and-control’. In the meantime citizens, businesses, NGO’s and institutions across all kinds of domains and scale-levels made daily decisions that could contribute to a sustainable future of the city. How could city officers tap into this potential and trigger this alternative ways of thinking and doing?
Experimenting, integrating and mobilizing
For the MUSIC project, the cities of Aberdeen (UK), Ghent (BE), Ludwigsburg (DE), Montreuil (FR) and Rotterdam (NL) worked on this ambitious aim in three parallel ways: by implementing pilot projects; by developing a Geospatial Urban Energy Information and Support System to integrate energy in urban planning (assisted by Henri Tudor); and by applying the Transition Management approach to mobilize stakeholders to take action for CO2 reduction, assisted by DRIFT.
Following the Transition Management approach, the cities created an informal but well-structured setting in order to bring diverse group of change-agents together. In a series of meetings, the participating change-agents explored and framed the challenges, drafted joint visionary images and elaborate transition paths and agenda for a low-carbon future of the city. This guided the search for strategies to transform existing structures, mind-sets and practices and the realization of new projects, collaborations and experiments. In this way the local government was able to build upon the transformative capacity of citizens, businesses, institutions and other organisations. Moreover, the change agents gained the opportunity to think and work beyond business as usual and take ownership of the process.
