Collecting building blocks for sustainable and just cities — Insights from the “Berlin” Arena
Good things happen when you bring together curious and passionate minds over the topic of sustainable and just cities.
On March 18th and 19th, UrbanA’s virtual “Berlin” Arena on Governance for Sustainable and Just Cities gathered over 60 city-makers from diverse backgrounds.
Here, ‘governance’ refers to all the formal and informal political processes (involving communities, civil society, public, and private actors) that aim to enable and direct collective action.
One challenge facing governance for sustainable and just cities is ensuring that justice concerns are consistently integrated into political processes, rather than being an afterthought left to specialists. At the “Berlin” Arena we asked, how can we address this?
Two days’ worth of discussions produced a colourful flurry of digital sticky notes, capturing insights that will be used as building blocks for UrbanA’s emerging political agenda for sustainable and just cities.
Since the concept of governance can be broad, three initiatives for sustainability and justice in Berlin (BürgerEnergie Berlin, Changing Cities, and Donut For Berlin) were invited to provide a concrete starting point for conversations:
Diversity and inclusion
Diversity and inclusion was a hot topic for all three Berlin initiatives. Small-group chats helped to brainstorm ideas, including collective decision-making processes and lowering participation barriers.
In general, the conversations confirmed that diversity and inclusion are key to successful initiatives for sustainable and just cities.
However, participation in local initiatives for sustainable and just cities was still seen as an endeavour for society’s more privileged. Therefore, accessible language, innovative and genuine participatory processes, and creating bridges between different groups of people were seen as important measures for ensuring that sustainability initiatives are as inclusive as possible. Some fun examples included using art and games for engaging children and young people, and using traffic-free block parties as a “living experiment” for collecting residents’ visions for their neighborhoods.
Small is beautiful
Furthermore, in keeping with the Arena’s focus on the local level, most agreed that small is beautiful when it comes to action for sustainable and just cities. Local level initiatives were perceived as very important for innovation and trust-building, producing outcomes that can catalyze widespread change when translated between places.
Moreover, the (bike) lane to long-term and large scale change is paved with these smaller successes. Participants felt that municipal or smaller scale initiatives with visible outcomes help sustain engagement and commitment over the long-term. They also create a sense of belonging and community, which can mitigate feelings of burnout. For example, BürgerEnergie Berlin strives to balance between small, short-term projects with quick and graspable successes and larger long-term ones that require continuous efforts over a longer timeframe. Such a focus can help maintain a sense of empowerment, agency, and ownership for those involved — an important theme that was revisited in many discussions.
Creating partnerships, building alliances, and tapping into networks
Creating partnerships, building alliances, and tapping into networks were heralded as other essential elements of governance for sustainable and just cities. For the Berlin groups, this means consulting with experts, connecting with other similar-minded initiatives, and working with municipalities to achieve their goals.
Experiences of Arena participants similarly echoed the importance of collaboration, especially through clear and authentic communication between municipalities and community groups.
Often faced with the challenge of adversarial politics and ideological divides, participants expressed that these actors should meet in the middle by reaching into each others’ spheres. For example, by engaging in both formal processes and informal neutral spaces to listen and learn.
Enabling Governance Arrangements
The threads weaving through these Berlin initiatives continued into later sessions on the specific Enabling Governance Arrangements developed by the University of Freiburg. These Arrangements helped structure the conversation around governance in an instructive style. For example, some breakout-groups dove into an Arrangement called ‘Commit to a meaningful participation process’, while others focused on one called ‘Tap into community networks’. These group discussions provided supporting concepts, illustrative examples, and points of critique. In the Participation group, for example, people highlighted the centrality of trust in participation processes, and suggested concrete actions that they could take in their own work, such as co-designing research proposals with affected groups to engage them from the onset. These inputs are currently being incorporated into the Arrangements in an effort to make them rooted in real-world experience and knowledge also of those who attended the Arena.
Knowledge in new places
The broader ambition for this accumulated knowledge is to create a political agenda for sustainable and just cities which can be applied in different places. But the task of sharing knowledge and lessons between different contexts is not so easy. To engage with this, participants shared their experiences learning from other places in the past. Most groups stressed the value of personal and dynamic learning processes, for example through networks connecting similar initiatives. Additionally, when knowledge is being applied in a new setting, it was seen as necessary to involve all affected stakeholders in an intentional process that adapts the knowledge to their needs and interests.
Participants called for several changes to the way that knowledge is generated, shared, and put into action in new places. Among many ideas was firstly an improved research-action-policy interface, with better collaboration between academics, experts, activists and others to adapt an idea to a specific place. Secondly, better knowledge dissemination practices by creating spaces like UrbanA that allow for accessible exchange and learning and to act as safe spaces enabling free communication. And thirdly, a change in mindset that appreciates failure.
Sharing lessons from failed projects, including mistakes made or obstacles faced, was seen as a great opportunity for learning.
So-called ‘sanitized stories’ and spaces that exclude this information were regarded as unhelpful. Although regrettably they are still commonly used for sharing sustainability best practices.
The “Berlin” Arena has reaffirmed that any political agenda aimed at integrating sustainability and justice concerns in urban governance needs to be grounded in community-based methods and include a critical perspective on the knowledge it conveys. More fundamentally, it needs to be accompanied by a wider set of changes to the way cities learn from each other.
Thank you again to all participants of the event for the valuable inputs and enjoyable company! In case you missed it, here’s our previous blog post with a summary and recordings of the event.
If you have a minute to follow up on these important discussions, please check out the Enabling Governance Arrangements and other materials on our UrbanA Wiki pages. Your thoughts are very welcome either directly via comments on the UrbanA Wiki, on the Communities For Future forum, or personally via email to the arena hosts (spaeth@envgov.uni-freiburg.de).
Finally, stay tuned for our full report on governance for sustainable and just cities that will be published in fall this year.
