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Cities with a car-oriented mobility system are significant consumers of energy and require drastic transformations in their structure and function to minimize their harmful impacts on environment and people and to achieve sustainability goals. To promote such sustainable transformations, municipal administrators need to act as change-agents. Because municipal governments are often not agile organizations, they tend toward incrementalism even in the pursuit of transformational goals. Therefore, there is a need in municipal governments to build individual transformative capacity so that municipal administrators can design, test, and implement plans, projects, and policies that are capable of transforming cities toward sustainability. This research presents a game-based workshop, “Stadt-liche Ziele” (AudaCity), that uses a backcasting approach to make municipal administrators build a sustainability strategy. I conducted a pilot study to test the effects of the game on municipal administrators’ confidence in their own ability and power to implement sustainability actions, a key determinant of transformative capacity. Five municipal administrators from Lüneburg, Germany, working on mobility issues, participated in a three-hour-workshop playing the game. Interviews and questionnaires were used before and after the workshop and participants’ contributions during the event were recorded to explore collective changes in confidence. Results indicate that the game increased participant confidence by rewarding collective success, breaking down an ambitious goal into achievable tasks, and acknowledging how administrators’ current actions already contribute to the goal.
The photographs focused on aspects of life and behaviors that have contributed to happiness in local communities. A website was created and a gallery event was mounted for public review and discussion. Gallery attendees and website visitors were asked to complete a survey to assess (1) gained knowledge of sustainability solutions, and (2) how effective a tool photography is as a means of sustainability solutions communication.
This visual medium allowed people think about how to incorporate sustainable community solutions into their own lives and may have changed people’s interest in, and thoughts about, overall sustainability and sustainable solutions. The survey results demonstrated that photographs can successfully communicate sustainability ideas. Specifically, viewers gained an increased awareness of how community and urban gardening can increase happiness, well-being, and sense of community. This visual approach can continue to be used to more successfully communicate additional sustainability solutions ideas and methods to the public.
Local food systems are now facing a new set of intersecting economic, social and environmental challenges. Recurrent socio-economic and biophysical changes put the sustainability of food systems at risk. There is an urgent need to develop knowledge-based tools or metrics to assess and monitor food sustainability and to identify pathways for food security and resource conservation. Stern Produce is a small scale, family owned business that has been serving our local Arizona community for a 100 years now since 1917. Essentially, it is a food distribution company that conducts wholesale supply of agricultural farm produce, dairy products and meat. Their mission is to supply the freshest fruits, vegetables and specialty food products with a first-class customer delivery experience. Recently, it has embraced the responsibility to conduct business in a manner that fosters societal resilience, invests in community wellness and environmental health. In order to do so, Stern has introduced an exclusive local food program in their organization named as the Arizona Fresh Together (AFT) program. The AFT program is intended to serve as a sourcing platform for the local restaurants and retail stores to procure sustainable food from our valley based local organic growers. This project, in partnership with Stern Produce’s Sustainability Manager, aimed to identify core comprehensive sustainability metrics to develop sustainability baseline indicators and assess the impacts of these indicators on the three tenets of sustainability: economy, environment and society, in addition to human health and wellness. By formulating these metrics, Stern Produce acknowledges the significance of transparency in their business operations and changing their business model towards a triple bottom line orientation. Based on the findings, the project assisted Stern in identifying the intervention points and facilitated cross departmental engagement in the AFT program in order to encourage value added business operations.
This report describes the process by which I created a concise but comprehensive online source of information about best practices in sustainability for urban planners. The goal of the project was to provide accessible information that would help planners in ways that help them comprehend and implement sustainable solutions to common planning problems that are found throughout the United States. To create the website, I researched methods for communicating clearly to planners, took a graduate course in communicating about sustainability, and drew on information that I had compiled on sustainable solutions for transportation, economy, water, green space, and governance.