Evaluating and Managing the Energy Transition Towards Truly Sustainable University Campuses

This thesis is about the current role of university campuses to contribute to a fair and sustainable transition towards a low-carbon society. The fundamental argument is that there is a serious gap between the aspiration of higher education institutions in relation to sustainability and the current reality. Whilst formally moving towards sustainability within their curricula and resources management, universities are still immersed in all the complexity, the uncertainty, the scarcity of resources and the leading green-washing paradigm of the cities they are in. This thesis uses the Politecnico di Torino as the main case study, compared with universities in Italy, the UK, Japan, and Mexico, to answer the following questions: (1) What are universities doing in their sustainability efforts that has the potential to be measurable and transferable? And (2) How can we evaluate if universities are truly sustainable? This thesis treats university campuses as small cities nested in bigger cities; heterotopies expressing otherness and maintaining reciprocal relationships within the context. It is proposed that the immediate impacts deriving from educating and practising a wiser use of waste, water, energy and the built environment in universities help to create long term effects toward resilient, fair, and environmentally aware communities. Comparable clusters of universities, bottom-up management schemes and transferrable lessons for the wider urban and global practices are presented and discussed across the different case studies. To facilitate the dialogue between the economic, the social and the environmental fields of action, embedded within university’s sustainability metrics and the attempts to operationalise urban resilience determinants in the campus management, this thesis helps in tailoring appropriate assessment methodologies and operative strategies towards truly sustainable university campuses

What if We Adopt a Resilience Thinking Approach in the Urban Governance for Emission Reduction?

55th Congress of the European Regional Science Association: "World Renaissance: Changing roles for people and places", 25-28 August 2015, Lisbon, Portuga

Shared narratives and individual paths towards inter/transdisciplinarity in research centres for urban sustainability

Funding Information: This research was funded by TrUST—Transdisciplinarity for Urban Sustainabilty Transition. TrUST is research project and researchers’ platform that aims at understanding how to achieve a more efficient and effective inter- and transdisciplinairity for urban sustainability transition in current higher education institutions. Find out more at http://ww.trustcollaboration.com . Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).Inter/transdisciplinarity (ITD) is a pillar of sustainability studies, often presented as the way to conduct research and practice especially in conflictual and politicised real-world stakeholder constellations. Several studies emphasise the need to consider the communicative processes through which it is put into practice. However, there is still a dearth of research that explores the meanings key actors associate with ITD and how they account for the material, practical and communicative facets of their everyday experience. This work seeks to collect the voice of leaders of inter/transdisciplinary research centres, identify shared repertoires used to interpret their experience in the field, and reflect on how shared narratives could inspire or impede researchers engaged in ITD. A discursive analysis was applied to 23 semi-structured interviews conducted with leaders of research centres on urban sustainability. Results identified diverse interpretative repertoires used to define ITD and to interpret the barriers that, in the eyes of these key actors, have to be crossed to become ITD researchers. These elements are combined into three main narratives used by participants to position themselves and the researchers involved in ITD. Despite being functional to self-representation, these shared narratives contribute towards depicting ITD as an individual escape, and interdisciplinary research centres as sanctuaries of a sort, thus paradoxically preserving the status quo. A third narrative advocates structural shifts and is coherent with the need for deeper changes and persistent recognition of ITD in sustainability studies.publishersversionpublishe

Headline reflections - SHAPE ENERGY Call for Evidence

SHAPE ENERGY launched an open Call for Evidence over April-July 2017 aimed at identifying current understandings of and future priorities for energy research from a wide range of researchers and other stakeholders including those from policy, industry, NGOs and beyond. Questions included a focus on the use of energy-related Social Science and Humanities in energy policy. This was an important mechanism to seek broader input into our work at the start of the Platform, and new perspectives on the problems and solutions SHAPE ENERGY will consider. This is now being published as a complete set of evidence submitted, together with headline reflections on the results, which will feed into construction of the SHAPE ENERGY Research & Innovation Agenda 2020-2030 as well as the implementation of other upcoming Platform activities

Envisioning green solutions for reducing the ecological footprint of a university campus

This paper aims to report strategies towards a green campus project at Politecnico di Torino University, a 33,000-students Italian higher education institution (HEI), and estimate the avoided ecological footprint (EF) of different scenarios accounted for open spaces. Design/methodology/approach A consumption-based study has been developed to analyse the current EF of the main campus site. Data were collected from different departments and administrative units to identify the measure of the pressure exerted by the campus activities on the ecosystem. Then, possible scenarios were accounted for open spaces along five different design layers: energy, water, landscape, food and mobility. Acting on the spaces by means of biophilic design and user-driven design requires complex considerations on university’s anticipated future needs and a wide-ranging evaluation of the most appropriate pathways forward according to all university stakeholders, far beyond the mere accounting of avoided EF. Findings A reduction of the 21 per cent of the current EF can be achieved through the solutions envisaged in the green campus project along the open space layers. Moreover, universities have the opportunity to not only improve the sustainability of their facilities but also demonstrate how the built environment can be designed to benefit both the environment and the occupants. Research limitations/implications The acknowledgement of predicted behavioural change effects is a question left open to further researchers on methods and indicators for social impact accounting and reporting in truly sustainable university campuses. Originality/value This is the first research that estimates the EF of an Italian HEI. The research represents also an innovative approach integrating the EF reduction scenarios in the design process of the new masterplan of open spaces, trying to identify the connection between environmental impact reduction and improvement in users’ perception

The same old story – or not? How storytelling can support inclusive local energy policy

Local energy policy agendas require commonly defined desirable future visions and collective agenda-setting to spur collaborative action. However, methods designed for multi-stakeholder engagement often do not sufficiently open up deliberative processes to all voices, and efforts to envision desired futures built from current local energy challenges are usually designed by and oriented towards specialists. With this paper, we aimed to explore how the theoretical strengths of storytelling for supporting local policy processes play out in practice. We contrast what the literature states about the potential of storytelling for solving complex challenges and facilitating collaborative processes to the lessons learnt from actually using storytelling in a set of 17 multi-stakeholder workshops across 17 European countries run as part of the H2020 SHAPE ENERGY project. The workshops were each designed around a tangible local energy policy challenge. We found storytelling has unique strengths in terms of enabling significant (un)learning regarding stakeholder relationships, allowing participants to step into others’ perspectives, keeping hold of diversity, and the use of ‘we’ in stories leading to concrete future initiatives. We also note specific learnings about when these outcomes may not be achieved, for example due to fears, traditions, hierarchical structures, as well as the need for sufficient time for planning, facilitator training and stakeholder invitations. We conclude that as an innovative, playful and flexible methodology, storytelling can undoubtedly be a valuable additional tool for policymakers where there is a desire for deliberative stakeholder involvement, and appetite to tailor approaches to local contexts

Energy efficiency and using less – a social sciences and humanities annotated bibliography

The challenge: * Technological progress and changes in energy supply are not sufficient for a transition to a low-carbon energy system; demand also needs to be considered. Energy efficiency and reducing total consumption - the topics of this bibliography - are typical elements of a demand side approach. * The uptake of energy efficient technologies, and understanding how we might use less energy, represent big challenges for researchers, policymakers, practitioners and end-users themselves. The aim: * European energy policy has so far mainly relied on research from Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Energy-related Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) have been significantly underrepresented. This bibliography aims to discuss different disciplinary perspectives on energy efficiency and using less and to demonstrate their relevance for energy policy. Coverage: * A major focus of this bibliography is on behaviour and behavioural change. The bibliography highlights the diversity of end-users and their needs, the impacts they experience, abilities, as well as the range of sites where energy is consumed. * It also looks at how SSH research addresses more structural elements of demand - such as markets, institutions, and policy - and how these interact. Key findings: * There is no such thing as a one size fits all approach; different disciplines frame the problems of energy efficiency and using less differently, and do not always agree. Economics is very highly represented in research about energy efficiency, closely followed by Sociology. Other disciplines such as Urban Studies and Industrial Design are slowly becoming part of the work. * Most disciplines focus mainly on mainstream types of users and use. Fewer studies focus on the exceptions - deviants, others, non-users or energy poor, excessive users - or low-energy practices such as sleep, music making or sports. * Electricity is the main focus of most social science research on energy use and efficiency, possibly due to a focus on monitoring savings which is more difficult for gas and energy for hot water use. * There is an overrepresentation of work on feedback devices and smart meters, in contrast to more everyday technologies such as water heaters or washing machines. Several studies urge for more study of this everyday material culture because it strongly shapes how users can engage in using less or using more efficiently; some technologies are simply built to have high energy use. * Less research is done on the responsibility of stakeholders (other than the end-user) for the energy transition, especially the market. It is argued that markets are not neutral or depoliticised, but bear responsibility for the energy transition too. * Dominant areas of research include: a focus on the gap between awareness and actual energy behaviour action; and rebound effects, which may arise when increased energy efficiency leads to lower costs for energy which in turn may lead to increased energy consumption. * New areas of research include new demand side initiatives, services/business models and markets such as peer-to-peer, DIY, and community approaches to engagement. * Most demand side approaches in the policy domain focus on cost reduction, education and communication. Insights from Social Sciences such as Sociology, Anthropology, Urban studies, Ethics, and Science and Technology Studies see less uptake in the policy domain

True Green and Sustainable University Campuses? Toward a Clusters Approach

Campus greening is often the first step universities take towards sustainability. However, the diffusion of sustainability reporting methodologies and rankings is still at an early stage, and is biased in mainly measuring energy efficiency indicators while omitting basic features enabling meaningful comparisons among centers or addressing social (users) aspects related to long term sustainability transitions. This paper aims to introduce a critical perspective on sustainability university frameworks through: (i) a review of current Campus Sustainability Assessments (CSAs); (ii) performing and comparing the results obtained from the application of two internationally recognized CSAs (namely, Green Metric and ISCN) to two case studies (the Politecnico di Torino, in Italy, and the Hokkaido University, In Japan) and, finally, (iii) proposing a new CSA approach that encompasses clusters of homogeneous campus typologies for meaningful comparisons and university rankings. The proposed clusters regard universities’ morphological structures (campuses nested within city centers versus outside of a city compact ones), climatic zones and functions. At the micro scale, the paper introduces the need for indicators beyond measuring pure energy efficiency, but which are attentive to local and societal constraints and provide long-term tracking of outcomes. This, better than a sheer record of sustainability priority actions, can help in building homogenous university case studies to find similar and scalable success strategies and practices, and also in self-monitoring progress toward achieving truly sustainable university campuses