Technical solutions dominate the sustainability transition, but social changes are also needed. Making people’s lifestyles more sustainable is a key issue. Here, nudging and citizen participation, two popular strategies for influencing the choices people make in their daily lives, can play a role. Nudging and citizen participation are usually used separately. We have developed a method—the sustainability walk—that combines these two strategies.
The sustainability walk makes it possible to plan for sustainability through meaningful encounters between experts and the people who live in the area set to undergo change.
Sustainable community planning requires different types of knowledge and knowledge holders. Expertise on how environments can be designed to influence the choices people make is important. But local expertise, meaning knowledge about everyday life in different parts of the community, is also significant. A sustainability walk provides a space where these types of knowledge and knowledge holders can come together.
Exploratory Place Development
What everyday choices does a place encourage?
How can a place be transformed to encourage more sustainable everyday choices?
Examining a place through these questions can be valuable for place-making and community planning. The Sustainability Walk facilitates community planning and place-making by combining local knowledge and expert insight to develop urban spaces and living environments that encourage sustainable everyday choices.
Why go on a walk together?
Walking is an effective way to facilitate constructive dialogue between residents and experts. By moving through, using, and physically exploring a place, differences in perspectives and values can come to the surface and be discussed. When participants in a sustainability walk experience the place together, they can gain insight into how the place encourages certain behaviors and discourages others. A walk draws on the experts’ general knowledge and makes it more concrete, while at the same time the residents’ everyday knowledge can be both challenged and utilized to redesign the place.
A sustainability walk is a way to generate ideas for improvement tied to a specific place. At the same time, the concrete connection to an urban space and discussions about behaviors there can contribute to shared learning and an understanding of sustainable transition in general.
About the project
This work was conducted as part of the research project “Sustainable Urban Lifestyles through Nudging and Citizen Participation,” supported by Viable Cities (2021–2022), and further developed within the framework of Mistra Environmental Communication (2023).
Team
The “sustainability walk” method was developed by Martin Westin and Sofie Joosse, researchers at SLU; Fanny Möckel, then a research assistant at SLU; Elin Wärm, then a student at SLU; and Joakim Lindmarker, an architect at the independent planning firm Urban Minds.
