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The acceleration of urban sustainability transitions: a comparison of Brighton, Budapest, Dresden, Genk, and Stockholm

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 12:25 authored by Franziska Ehnert, Niki Frantzeskaki, Jake Barnes, Sara Borgström, Leen Gorissen, Florian Kern, Logan Strenchock, Markus Egermann
City-regions as sites of sustainability transitions have remained under-explored so far. With our comparative analysis of five diverse European city-regions, we offer new insights on contemporary sustainability transitions at the urban level. In a similar vein, the pre-development and the take-off phase of sustainability transitions have been studied in depth while the acceleration phase remains a research gap. We address this research gap by exploring how transitions can move beyond the seeding of alternative experiments and the activation of civil society initiatives. This raises the question of what commonalities and differences can be found between urban sustainability transitions. In our explorative study, we employ a newly developed framework of the acceleration mechanisms of sustainability transitions. We offer new insights on the multi-phase model of sustainability transitions. Our findings illustrate that there are no clear demarcations between the phases of transitions. From the perspective of city-regions, we rather found dynamics of acceleration, deceleration, and stagnation to unfold in parallel. We observed several transitions—transitions towards both sustainability and un-sustainability—to co-evolve. This suggests that the politics of persistence—the inertia and path dependencies of un-sustainability—should be considered in the study of urban sustainability transitions

Funding

ARTS - Accelerating and Rescaling Transitions to Sustainability (DRIFT lead); G1281; EUROPEAN UNION; 603654 - ARTS

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Sustainability

ISSN

2071-1050

Publisher

MDPI

Issue

3

Volume

10

Page range

612

Department affiliated with

  • SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • The Sussex Energy Group Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2018-03-08

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2018-03-08

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2018-03-07

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