Ecosystems of learning for urban sustainability transformations

Research on spatial planning for urban sustainability transformations has highlighted the importance of local actors in catalyzing radical urban change through experimental projects. However, the task of generating knowledge on the basis of such exemplary projects is increasingly placed upon learning intermediaries – organizations operating across governance scales to aggregate knowledge from a diverse set of actors and network configurations.
Nevertheless, research on urban transformations has not given such learning processes much in-depth analysis, especially in relation to the activities of intermediaries. Accordingly, one cannot simply assume that learning automatically will take place, especially when considering these processes’ inherent social complexity.

To better understand these dynamics there is a need to attend to the organizational arrangements that aim at facilitating learning – as well as a need to follow up on whether such learning actually takes place. It is further important to improve the capacity to learn in relation to urban sustainability transformations, i.e. – to ‘learn to learn better’ in the pursuit of pathways towards sustainable urban futures.

The purpose of this project is therefore to use qualitative social science and coproduction methods to critically investigate the learning ecosystems of sustainable urban development and, moreover, how these systems can effectively be improved to support urban sustainability transformations in Sweden.