Franziska Ehnert

The burdens and benefits of, as well as the recognition and participation in sustainability transformations remain unequally distributed across rural/urban, global South/North communities, leading to spatial injustices and peripheralization. The Summer School 2025 addresses this spatial unevenness from a diversity of justice perspectives, widening...

Complex sustainability challenges call for transformative spaces where participants are encouraged to move away from conventional thinking. Arts-based and embodied practices can enable new encounters with the world and new forms of meaning-making. We introduce the Theatre of the Innova(c)tors, an interactive theatre tool that encourages reflexivity...

In a context of complex and unprecedented challenges, innovations in governance are called for to embrace uncertainty and contingency. As a novel form of governance urban experimentation is intended to foster innovation and promote societal change. Building on the concepts of reconfiguration and multiplicity, scholars direct attention towards the m...

Urban sustainability transitions research has emerged as a prominent field of study since the late 2000s. This chapter traces the historic evolution of the field, offering a concise overview of key debates. It defines key terms, explores epistemological entry points and examines methodological implications of studying urban sustainability transitio...

Transformative research pushes the boundaries of science with a strong focus on engaging with societal problems. Transdisciplinary research provides us with the knowledge and tools to work together with a set of diverse societal actors in addressing these societal problems. But, how just are these practices? We came together in a summer school orga...

How can we re-integrate knowledge generated in real-world laboratories (RWLs) into societal practice? In the RWL “Dresden – City of the Future 2030+”, the re-integration of knowledge was central to the research design. In this Workshop Report, we focus on facilitation methods for knowledge re-integration into societal practice. This is to guide tra...

Disruptions (systemic disturbances) are crucial to initiate and accelerate sustainability transformations of large-scale social systems (be they socio-ecological, socio-technical, or socio-institutional). Their emergence, characteristics and effects strongly relate to the role of agents who aim to disrupt and transform the status quo, and which thu...

Urban experiments intervene in selected sites to initiate transition processes. But how do the socio-spatial characteristics of these sites affect urban experiments and vice versa? We address this question by focusing on everyday habits and their reciprocal relationship with the socially produced space that surrounds them. Using conceptual analysis...

In recent years, scholars from diverse research communities have become greatly interested in the experimental turn within the social sciences and economics. A rapidly emerging field within the literature on experimentation is investigating urban experimentation to promote sustainability transitions. Emphasising the situatedness of experiments, suc...

Durch die projizierte globale Erwärmung werden sich Hitzeextreme verschärfen. Vor allem in den Städten wird die Lebensqualität der Stadtbevölkerung unter sommerlichen Hitzewellen leiden. Im Projekt HeatResilientCity werden bewohnerorientierte Hitzeanpassungsmaßnahmen an Gebäuden und im städtischen Freiraum entwickelt und geprüft sowie Empfehlungen...

Urban transitions and transformations research fosters a dialogue between sustainability transitions theory an inter- and transdisciplinary research on urban change. As a field, urban transitions and transformations research encompasses plural analytical and conceptual perspectives. In doing so, this field opens up sustainability transitions resear...

The recent literature on intermediaries in urban sustainability transitions has studied their role as a translator between innovative niches and incumbent regimes. In urban sustainability transitions, intermediaries from both civil society and public institutions seek to bridge diverging world views and communicate innovative lessons learned back t...

Efforts to achieve a more sustainable development of cities and communities are enduring. Municipalities promote sustainable development, for example, by drawing up sustainable develop-ment plans, within the framework of guideline processes, future workshops and citizen participation, as well as by applying spe-cialized concepts, for example, in th...

n Anbetracht wachsender Umweltprobleme haben Wissenschaftler die Begriffe der „Grenzen des Wachstums“ (Meadows u.a. 1972) und der „Grenzen des Planeten“ (planetary boundaries) ge-prägt (Rockström u.a. 2009; Steffen u.a. 2015). Sie argumentieren, dass tiefgreifende Transforma-tionsprozesse nötig sind, um eine nachhaltige Entwicklung innerhalb der pl...

City-regions as sites of sustainability transitions have remained under-explored so far. With our comparative analysis of five diverse European city-regions, we offer new insights on contemporary sustainability transitions at the urban level. In a similar vein, the pre-development and the take-off phase of sustainability transitions have been studi...

Nature based solutions are amongst other practices that transition initiatives work with when intervening in their place and change its fabric. Focusing on the actors establishing, driving and scaling these solutions in and across cities, we come to evince that nature-based solutions have transformative social impact since they mediate new social r...

Urban sustainability transitions have attracted increasing academic interest. However, the political-institutional contexts, in which these urban sustainability transitions unfold and by which they are incited, shaped, or inhibited, have received much less attention. This is why we aim at extending previous studies of sustainability transitions by...

Wandlungsprozesse in Richtung einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung sind für die Gesellschaft eine politische Herausforderung, denn sie stellen bestehende Machtverhältnisse infrage, rütteln an bestehenden Strukturen und Institutionen und bringen auf diese Weise Gewinner sowie Verlierer einer solchen Transformation hervor. Diese Herausforderungen lassen si...

As one of the results of the ARTS research and analysis work and on the basis of numerous practical examples of innovative agency, the brochure "Sustainable living in Dresden" aims to provide orientation points and building blocks for the development of Dresden as a future-oriented sustainable urban society. The document is primarily aimed at all a...

Als ein Ergebnis des dreijährigen europäischen Forschungs- und Kooperationsprojektes ARTS (Accelerating and Rescaling Transitions to Sustainability) und aufbauend auf zahlreichen praktischen Beispielen innovativer Handlungsweisen will das vorliegende Dokument Orientierungspunkte und Bausteine für eine Entwicklung Dresdens zu einer zukunftsfähigen S...