GUST: The Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions

European cities face a pressing challenge – how to provide economic prosperity and social cohesion while achieving environmental sustainability? In response, new collaborations are emerging in the form of urban living labs. The Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions (GUST) project aims to examine, inform, and advance the governance of sustainability transitions through Urban Living Labs, which are proliferating across Europe as a means for testing innovations.

Urban Living Labs are sites developed to design, test, and learn from social and technical innovation in real time. Individual cases have been studied, but limited work has been done to understand how Urban Living Labs work across different national contexts, and how we can scale-up their impact and share lessons across European cities.

The GUST project results into a systematic framework for evaluating the design, practices, and processes of Urban Living Labs and for conducting comparative analysis of their potential and their limitations. New insights into the governance of urban sustainability and improvements to the design and implementation help Urban Living Labs to reach their full potential.

Do you want to learn more about the GUST project?  Read the GUST Handbook, visit the GUST blog,  find out more about the activities and ambitions of the GUST team, or watch this introductory movie:

Duration of the project
At DRIFT he GUST project runs from October 2014 until 2016.

Funding
The project is funded by JPI Urban Europe.

Partners
The GUST project is a collaboration of four research institutes: Lund University (SWE), Durham University (UK), Joanneum Research (AUT) and DRIFT (NL).

DRIFT Team
Niki Frantzeskaki, Frank van Steenbergen, Derk Loorbach