Collaboration is key to the smart sustainable cities of the future

Climate change, a growing population and increased urbanisation place great demands on our cities. Meeting these challenges requires collaboration to develop smart cities. But what does a smart city really mean and how do we create one? A smart city is a sustainable city. A city in which people want...

Perennial crops for sustainable agriculture

“We cannot cultivate crops the way we do today if we want to create truly sustainable agriculture. We must be open to using other types of crops than annual crops and we must move away from the narrow use of monocultures”, says Lennart Olsson from the Lund University Centre for...

How do we achieve global goals for sustainable development in practice?

The global Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 2015 point towards a new way of working with development issues. In their research, Magdalena Bexell and Kristina Jönsson from the Department of Political Science at Lund University are studying issues concerning responsibility and legitimacy that arise as...

Can activist politicians be agents of change?

Can social movements maintain their sustainable ideals when they transition to political power? Mine Islar, Assistant Professor at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies, LUCSUS spent all of 2016 conducting a field study on Barcelona en Comú, a platform of several social movements, to find out. She chose to study...

The role of the individual in sustainable urban development

In her research, Maria Johansson studies how we as individuals experience our environment, but also how we behave. In their latest project, she and a group of researchers want to develop simple methods that can be used in community planning to better capture individuals’ wishes and responses to planned changes...

Collaborative research to speed up the sustainable transition of cities

The Governance of Urban Sustainability Transitions (GUST) research project is soon coming to an end. It has explored the concept of Urban Living Labs, and has involved four research organisations and cities in Sweden, the UK, Austria and the Netherlands. One outcome from the project will be a handbook full...