Research-practice criteria for urban sustainability transformations

Authors

Elizabeth Cook - The New School, David Iwaniec - Georgia State University, Nancy Grimm - Arizona State University, Olga Barbosa - Universidad Austral de Chile

Body

Transformation research and practice is at the heart of the sustainability agenda to foster action for global change. Researchers, funders, practitioners, and decision-makers are seeking frameworks and evidence to guide the development of transformation initiatives. However, current definitions of transformation focus mainly on fundamental, irreversible change. Yet, this definition of big change is inadequate to design and implement initiatives for intentional transformations where sizeable investments are being made in transdisciplinary programs for transformational change. Though transformational change is not always intentional, we focus on deliberate transformations. Deliberate transformations are imperative to achieve the sustainable visions that our future generations deserve. We demonstrate the variation in existing framings of sustainability transformations and present a new synthesis of seven criteria to provide direction for framing and implementing future transformational changes. In addition, we synthesize exemplary strategies from recent Requests For Proposals (RFPs) for urban sustainability transformations to inform a richer discussion on how transformational change is currently framed with practical criteria about the capacity, process, and outcomes for transformational change. We offer these criteria to inform the development of sustainability transformations with a broad social-ecological-technological approach to bring clarity to the frameworks and knowledge needed to implement them.
Keywords:sustainability transformations, futures, scenarios, urban

Sessions