Co-creating sustainable urban futures – A primer on Transition Management in Cities

This book provides rich knowledge on how to understand and actively contribute to sustainability transitions in cities and urban areas – and offers the opportunity to become actively engaged in working towards sustainable futures of cities.

Cities always face challenges and have the role to be fast paced problem solvers. Finding the right approaches to tap into the potentials of cities and reroute their development pathways towards sustainability and resilience is paramount. The governance of urban sustainability transitions requires new strategic environmental planning processes that integrate diverse sources of knowledge and perspectives, make ‘glocal’ connections between local urban challenges and broader global, national and regional macro-developments and enable pragmatic decisions in a context of complexity and uncertainty.

This challenges urban practitioners and scientists alike to take up a process-content thinking and to reflect on how to navigate societal complexity while mobilizing innovative and transformative societal potential towards action for sustainability. At the same time, tactical urbanism (manifested in action-based networks, civil society initiatives and planning actions) is a way to localize global solutions but also to create and design solutions at human scale from cities to deal with climate change.

This unique book provides rich knowledge on how to understand and actively contribute to sustainability transitions in cities and urban areas. The book offers the opportunity to become actively engaged in working towards sustainable futures of cities. Readers of this book will be equipped to understand the complexity of urban sustainability transitions and diagnose persistent unsustainability problems in cities. Urban planners and professionals will build competences for designing transition management processes in cities and engaging with multidisciplinary knowledge in solution-seeking processes.

The heart of the book marks the variety of very different local case studies across the world – including, amongst others, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, La Botija in Honduras, Sydney in Australia and Cleveland in the US. These rich studies give inspiration and practical insights to planners on how to create sustainable urban futures in collaboration with other stakeholders.

The case studies and critical reflections on applications of transition management in cities offer food for thought and welcome criticism. They also introduce new lenses to understand the bigger picture that co-creation dynamics play in terms of power, (dis-)empowerment, legitimacy and changing actor roles. This will equip the readers with a deep understanding of the dynamics, opportunities and challenges present in urban contexts and urban sustainability transitions.

The book was supported by the SUSTAIN project, the MUSIC project and the IMPRESSIONS project.

Citation
Frantzeskaki, N., Hölscher, K., Bach, M., and Avelino, F. (2018). Co-creating sustainable urban futures – A primer on Transition Management in Cities, Springer.

Read more
Purchase the book here.

Date
maart 19, 2018