Learning through renovations for urban sustainability: the case of the Malmö Innovation Platform

This article investigates the relevant hands-on challenges creating a supportive learning environment when projects in the area of sustainable urban renewal are used for educational activities. The focus of this article is the Malmö Innovation Platform, which brings together municipal, business, academic and community actors to build a joint innovation capacity in the renovation of existing apartment buildings in Southeast Malmö in Sweden. The Malmö Innovation Platform provides diverse real-time learning environments in a local context, by combining physical and virtual spaces, allowing students to experience that moving towards urban sustainability is an iterative process and there are few straightforward solutions. In the Malmö Innovation Platform, the main learning processes are learning-by-discovering, learning-by-interacting, and learning-by-experimenting.