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Motivational Background:
With this seminar we want to close gaps between conceptual ideas of sustainable development, trends in the international discussion of green/ alternative urban systems and the actual scientific basis/ the findings of the international research community, particularly from the emerging sustainability science as well as transition research.
Learning Goal: We provide a scientifically coherent basis in order to understand, integrate and evaluate current dominant as well as alternative developments in society, economics and technology, particularly for the urban system background and the grand sustainability challenge.
The seminar will be based on scientific presentations, group works/discussions and the interactive mapping and correlation of results and upcoming questions, in order to provide you with profound knowledge about sustainability science, especially for the urban system background. Based on this knowledge, we will deduce new/ innovative development and planning processes and discuss how enabling factors can be used effectively for the purpose of establishing/developing new ways/examples of urban transition management towards sustainability.
In a first step the seminar will thus provide essential insights in the emerging frameworks and findings of sustainability science in a practical and concrete way. Generally the seminar will build its concept upon fundamental principles of and strategies derived from modern ecological science (Ecosystem Services Approach, Ecosystem Approach, as well as Ecological Economics). Doing so, system capacity based (socio-cultural, socio-economic and industrial) developments become more tangible for the background of so called “strong sustainability models”.
In a second part the seminar will transfer the lessons learned to sustainable development perspectives of urban systems and give answers how those transitions can be understood, planned and measured. Crucial issues reflected are amongst others:
- Why are cities critical key players in the field of a global sustainable development?
- How can cities be mobilized on the way towards a transformation of our socioeconomic system, oriented on long term social and ecological capabilities?
- How can we extract use of typical “urban advantages” (industry, knowledge, density, accessibility, social and business networks, technological infrastructures and means etc...) to make cities actually the most sustainable form of human living?
In a final phase enabling factors for the desired transitions are identified and discussed, that could effectively trigger alternative pathways for worldwide urban systems, understood against be background of an integrative Quality of Life Approach (QoL). The seminar concentrates therefore beside profound theoretical state of the art literature research on concrete case studies from cities and urban systems all over the globe. In the seminar we therefore favourite a bilateral strategy both on so called hard and soft skills/ leverages, respectively push and pull factors, for sustainable urban transition management: technological (e.g. smart city strategies) as well as socioeconomic (e.g. sharing economies) and socio-cultural aspects (e.g. transition town movement). |
