Category Archives: Blog

Bringing (more) sustainability to cities: 5 golden rules

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    How are cities putting sustainable urban development into practice?


    Here are 5 golden rules from URBACT’s City Lab.

    The second URBACT City Lab took place in Brussels (BE) on 2nd and 3rd July 2019: “How are cities putting sustainable urban development into practice?” was the core question that drove us through general and specific considerations in the fields of Air Quality and Mobility, Energy Transition and Climate Adaptation and Sustainable Food Systems. When seeking to feed into the work of the updated Leipzig Charter, it appeared that on the one hand sustainability is still a complex paradigm to get into and embed for a city, but on the other, cities are leading the way in what can be done.

    Here are 5 golden rules for cities to become sustainable.

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    How cities can accompany consumer change practices

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      Who hasn’t tried to get rid of old habits, whether in relation to the way we eat, sleep, interact with each other, work, travel, or do sports? Who hasn’t ever faced the difficulty of moving away from anchored routines to newly adopted ones? Who has ever struggled to unravel the complexity of the psychological but also social, technological and infrastructure-related mechanisms that make it difficult to transition?

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      L’impact des initiatives citoyennes sur la résilience locale

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      Dans quelle mesure les initiatives citoyennes ont un impact sur la résilience locale? De quelles initiatives parlons-nous, de quelle résilience s’agit-il, à quel impact nous intéressons-nous ?

      1. LES INITIATIVES CITOYENNES

      Cette analyse se base sur deux objets d’étude principaux – les Quartiers Durables Citoyens (QDC)en les intégrant dans  plus largement dans une étude des « initiatives citoyennes », dont voici quelques ébauches de définitions empruntées à des recherches précédentes. Continue reading →

      Implementing social innovation at city level: learnings from Amsterdam, Gdansk and others

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      Getting to know Gdansk and its inhabitans and vice-versa. Source: Maciej Moskwa/TESTIGO.pl

      Getting to know Gdansk and its inhabitans and vice-versa. Source: Maciej Moskwa/TESTIGO.pl

      In these times of democratic crisis, Social Innovation as a baseline paradigm for city governance is more than even needed. Its power and potential for change is strong as reminds us the recent murder of the Mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz.

      The question which appears then relates to the ways we can concretely implement and operationalise social innovation: as a paradigm and as individual and collective projects. Continue reading →

      Lien entre dynamiques locales, résilience, et collaboration

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      En quoi les dynamiques locales contribuent-elles à la résilience de la ville (y compris en ce qui concerne leur impact environnemental) ?

      Lorsque l’on s’intéresse à l’impact des dynamiques locales sur la résilience de ces entités, il est important de distinguer deux éléments : premièrement, la résilience est un concept qui s’applique à l’analyse des systèmes. La ville doit donc être comprise comme un système, un écosystème. Un tel écosystème des villes est composé de relations flux d’énergie, eaux et matières (Ecole de Chicago) mais aussi de toute une écologie urbaine, composée d’interactions urbanistiques, sociales, économiques, culturelles, … Ce sont ces écosystème que les perturbations des villes affectent. Continue reading →