Introduction to a Research Agenda for Sustainable Cities and Communities

How can cities and communities around the world become more sustainable? What can we do as researchers to help them? As we move through the twenty-first century, these questions assume ever-greater importance. Many of the quickest wins for human and planetary health involve reimagining and reconfiguring cities. Activities that generate negative impacts like air pollution and poor health are concentrated in cities, as are the potential benefits of improving resource efficiency and liveability. It is cheaper, easier and more efficient to provide services to people who are concentrated in cities. This fact applies to green infrastructure, sustainable housing, high-speed broadband and low carbon transport alike. Because cities concentrate material and human resources as well as services and infrastructures they offer incredible opportunities to advance sustainability

Technological Innovation Systems for Biorefineries – A Review of the Literature

The concept of a bioeconomy can be understood as an economy where the basic building blocks for materials, chemicals, and energy are derived from renewable biological resources. Biorefineries are considered an integral part of the development toward a future sustainable bioeconomy. The purpose of this literature review is to synthesize current knowledge about how biorefinery technologies are being developed, deployed, and diffused, and to identify actors, networks, and institutions relevant for these processes. Several key findings can be obtained from the literature. First, investing more resources in R&D will not help to enable biorefineries to cross the ‘valley of death’ toward greater commercial investments. Second, while the importance and need for entrepreneurship and the engagement of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is generally acknowledged, there is no agreement how to facilitate conditions for entrepreneurs and SMEs to enter the field of biorefineries. Third, visions for biorefinery technologies and products have focused very much on biofuels and bioenergy with legislation and regulation playing an instrumental role in creating a market for these products. But there is a clear need to incentivize non-energy products to encourage investments in biorefineries. Finally, policy support for biorefinery developments and products is heavily intertwined with wider discussions around legitimacy and social acceptance. The paper concludes by outlining current knowledge gap

Smart and Sustainable Cities? Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities

Smart and Sustainable Cities? Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities provides one of the first examinations of how smart cities relate to environmental and social issues. It addresses the gap between the ambitious visions of smart cities and the actual practices on the ground by focusing on the social and environmental dimensions of real smart city initiatives as well as the possibilities they hold for creating more equitable and progressive cities. Through detailed analyses of case studies in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, India and China, the contributors describe the various ways that social and environmental issues are interpreted and integrated into smart city initiatives and actions. The findings point towards the need for more intentional engagement and collaboration with all urban stakeholders in the design, development and maintenance of smart cities to ensure that everyone benefits from the increasingly digitalised urban environments of the twenty-first century

Urban Sharing in Shanghai

This city report is the result of a Mobile Research Lab conducted online in Shanghai during spring 2020. The Mobile Research Lab involves a combination of methods, including case studies, interviews, observations, expert panels, and in-situ field work. This report presents insights gained by the Urban Sharing research team Oksana Mont (PI), Andrius Plepys, Yuliya Voytenko Palgan, Matthias Lehner, Steven Curtis, Lucie Zvolska and Ana Maria Arbelaez Velez

Urban Sharing in Toronto

“Urban Sharing in Toronto” explores the landscape of the sharing economy in the city context. This research is a result of a Mobile Research Lab conducted by 8 researchers from Lund university in 2019. Specific focus is on three sectors: sharing of space, mobility and physical goods. For each sector, we discuss the drivers and barriers to the sharing economy, the associated sustainability impacts, the potential impacts on incumbent sectors, and the institutional context of sharing. Then, attention is turned to the role of the city council in engaging with the sharing economy and specific governance mechanisms employed by the city council are described. Since the sharing economy is not sustainable by default, urban sharing organisations, city governments and incumbents all have important roles to play in ensuring that the sharing economy positively impacts cities and their citizens. In the face of negative perceptions and possible impacts of the sharing economy, we may need to be more deliberate in thinking in terms of scaling the sharing economy to the size, needs, and capacities of cities. In this report we provide five recommendations to the City of Toronto and its citizens.Insights contained within this report may support the City of Toronto and other Sharing Cities, as well as urban sharing organisations and third-party actors in Toronto and beyond in their strategic work with the sharing economy for sustainability

Sharing economy films

Six different films published on https://www.shareable.net/:-The roles of city governments in the sharing economy-Regulating the sharing economy in cities-How municipalities self-govern in the sharing economy-How municipalities provide for the sharing economy-How municipalities enable or disable the sharing economy-How municipalities govern the sharing economy through collaboratio

Share and Repair in Cities: Agenda for Research and Practice on Circular Urban Resilience

Share and repair organizations (SROs) have important implications for resource efficiency and socio-economic sustainability in cities, but their potential to contribute to long-term urban resilience has yet to be systematically investigated. Knowledge is scarce about how these nascent circular initiatives can provide building blocks for socio-economic recovery in the wake of recent crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the humanitarian crisis induced by the war in Ukraine, as well as what opportunities they may offer for delivering long-term resilience in cities. These crises bring societal urgency to such research.The aim of this chapter is to build a forward-looking agenda for interdisciplinary research and practice on circular urban resilience. We call for developing knowledge and theory on circular urban resilience, which would advance the understanding and explore relationships between the circular and sharing economy and urban resilience, thereby helping transform our cities towards resilience. This work is underpinned by four avenues for research and practice. There is a need for empirical evidence on the short-term responses of SROs to high-impact low-probability crises in different cities (Avenue 1) and on how municipalities around the world have engaged with SROs when responding to such crises (Avenue 3). This empirical account would help unpack the potential of SROs to support long-term resilience in cities (Avenue 2) and advance resilient urban systems by identifying pathways for municipalities to unlock the potential of SROs for long-term urban resilience (Avenue 4).Future research on circular urban resilience should not only trigger a fundamental shift in the conceptualization of share and repair strategies in light of urban resilience but also provide new ways for building resilient, just, and sustainable cities. Key messages to urban actors advancing sustainable cities and communities are to: 1) set urban resilience as a strategic goal; and 2) operationalize resilience and, when relevant, connect urban resilience and circular economy agendas."These changes mainly involve adding some commas for clarity and adjusting sentence structures

Sustainability framings of accommodation sharing

The existing research often overlooks the fact that accommodation sharing is not a homogeneous sector but comprises rental, reciprocal and free platforms. This paper aims to compare sustainability narratives held by operators and users of the three platform types with the narratives identified in the literature. First, drawing on framing theory, environmental, economic and social framings of accommodation sharing are mapped based on the extant literature and expert interviews. Second, sustainability framings of operators and users from the three types of accommodation sharing platforms are presented. The data is collected via 10 in-depth interviews and 86 responses to a qualitative structured online questionnaire. We find that current framings of sustainability implications of accommodation sharing vary among those who formulate them as well as among the three platform types. This has implications for the role of these platforms in advancing different types of sustainability