Urbanization continues to be a transformative process globally, affecting ecosystem integrity and the health and well being of people around the world. Although cities tend to be centers for both the production and consumption of goods and services that degrade natural environments, there is also evidence that urban ecosystems can play a positive role in sustainability efforts. Despite the fact that most of the urbanization is now occurring in the developing countries of the Global South, much of what we know about urban ecosystems has been developed from studying cities in the United States and across Europe. We propose a conceptual framework to broaden the development of urban ecological research and its application to sustainability. Our framework describes four key contemporary urban features that should be accounted for in any attempt to build a unified theory of cities that contributes to urban sustainability efforts. We evaluated a range of examples from cities around the world, highlighting how urban areas are complex, connected, diffuse and diverse and what these interconnected features mean for the study of urban ecosystems and sustainability.

Public participation in local decision-making processes has numerous purported benefits. Yet, realizing these benefits requires a citizenry that is able and willing to participate in meaningful ways. High schools are ideal venues for civic education but rarely teach local collective action, citizen engagement, and self-governance, focusing instead on personal responsibility, knowledge of political institutions, and information on electoral processes. This article reports on a citizenship education project in a high school in Phoenix, Arizona. The program engaged students from all grade levels in a participatory budgeting (PB) process – to our knowledge, the first School PB in the U.S. The study asked to what extent student engagement in PB contributed to democratic learning necessary to actively engage in public debates and decision-making processes. The findings suggest that deliberative processes that engage students in decision-making can develop civic competencies, and among available strategies, PB is particularly effective. The study also found that the impact of informal democratic learning through PB increases significantly when it is paired with formal learning in the classroom.

Cities around the world are facing an ever-increasing variety of challenges that seem to make more sustainable urban futures elusive. Many of these challenges are being driven by, and exacerbated by, increases in urban populations and climate change. Novel solutions are needed today if our cities are to have any hope of more sustainable and resilient futures. Because most of the environmental impacts of any project are manifest at the point of design, we posit that this is where a real difference in urban development can be made. To this end, we present a transformative model that merges urban design and ecology into an inclusive, creative, knowledge-to-action process. This design-ecology nexus—an ecology for cities—will redefine both the process and its products. In this paper we: (1) summarize the relationships among design, infrastructure, and urban development, emphasizing the importance of joining the three to achieve urban climate resilience and enhance sustainability; (2) discuss how urban ecology can move from an ecology of cities to an ecology for cities based on a knowledge-to-action agenda; (3) detail our model for a transformational urban design-ecology nexus, and; (4) demonstrate the efficacy of our model with several case studies.

In this paper, we discuss the theoretical relationships among interacting global change risks, valued livelihood goals, and adaptation limits. We build from research on the impacts of multiple and interacting global change risks in lesser-developed countries and seek to understand household adaptation limits in agrarian communities. We ask: What are valued livelihood goals among smallholder farmers in Northwest Costa Rica? How do socio-economic determinants of adaptive capacities determine their ability to meet these goals in the face of the impacts of interacting global change risks? Our data were based on focus groups, interviews, survey responses from 94 smallholder farmers, government statistics, and published literature. We analyzed our data using qualitative content analysis and quantitative logistic regression models. Our analysis showed that farmers perceived rice production as an identity, and that they were being forced to consider limits to their abilities to adapt to maintain that identity. We found that farm size, cattle ownership, years spent farming, and household income variety were determinants of their abilities to remain in rice production while maintaining sufficient levels of livelihood security. We also showed that for those households most vulnerable to water scarcity, their ability to successfully adapt to meet valued livelihood goals is diminished because adaptation to water scarcity increases vulnerability to decreased rice-market access. In this way, they become trapped by the inability to reduce their vulnerability to risks of the interaction between global changes and therefore abandon valued identities and livelihoods.

Problem- and project-based learning (PPBL) courses in sustainability address real-world sustainability problems. They are considered powerful educational settings for building students’ sustainability expertise. In practice, however, these courses often fail to fully incorporate sustainability competencies, participatory research education, and experiential learning. Only few studies exist that compare and appraise PPBL courses internationally against a synthesized body of the literature to create an evidence base for designing PPBL courses. This article introduces a framework for PPBL courses in sustainability and reviews PPBL practice in six programs around the world (Europe, North America, Australia). Data was collected through semi-structured qualitative interviews with course instructors and program officers, as well as document analysis. Findings indicate that the reviewed PPBL courses are of high quality and carefully designed. Each PPBL course features innovative approaches to partnerships between the university and private organizations, extended peer-review, and the role of knowledge brokers. Yet, the findings also indicate weaknesses including paucity of critical learning objectives, solution-oriented research methodology, and follow-up research on implementation. Through the comparative design, the study reveals improvement strategies for the identified challenges and provides guidance for design and redesign of PPBL courses.

Successful careers in sustainability are determined by positive real-world change towards sustainability. This success depends heavily on professional skills in effective and compassionate communication, collaborative teamwork, or impactful stakeholder engagement, among others. These professional skills extend beyond content knowledge and methodical expertise. Current sustainability programs do not sufficiently facilitate students’ acquisition of such skills. This article presents a brief summary of professional skills, synthesized from the literature, and why they are relevant for sustainability professionals. Second, it presents how these skills have been taught in an undergraduate course in sustainability at Arizona State University, USA. Third, it critically discusses the effectiveness and challenges of that exemplary course. Finally, the article concludes with outlining the lessons learned that should be incorporated into future course offerings.

n public planning processes for sustainable urban development, planners and experts often face the challenge of engaging a public that is not familiar with sustainability principles or does not subscribe to sustainability values. Although there are calls to build the public’s sustainability literacy through social learning, such efforts require sufficient time and other resources that are not always available. Alternatively, public participation processes may be realigned with the sustainability literacy the participants possess, and their capacity can modestly be built during the engagement. Asking what tools might successfully align public participation with participants’ sustainability literacy, this article describes and evaluates a public participation process in Phoenix, Arizona, in which researchers, in collaboration with city planners, facilitated sustainability conversations as part of an urban development process. The tool employed for Visually Enhanced Sustainability Conversation (VESC) was specifically designed to better align public participation with stakeholders’ sustainability literacy. We tested and evaluated VESC through interviews with participants, city planners, and members of the research team, as well as an analysis of project reports. We found that the use of VESC successfully facilitated discussions on pertinent sustainability issues and embedded sustainability objectives into the project reports. We close with recommendations for strengthening tools like VESC for future public engagements.

This study examines the distributional equity of urban tree canopy (UTC) cover for Baltimore, MD, Los Angeles, CA, New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Raleigh, NC, Sacramento, CA, and Washington, D.C. using high spatial resolution land cover data and census data. Data are analyzed at the Census Block Group levels using Spearman’s correlation, ordinary least squares regression (OLS), and a spatial autoregressive model (SAR). Across all cities there is a strong positive correlation between UTC cover and median household income. Negative correlations between race and UTC cover exist in bivariate models for some cities, but they are generally not observed using multivariate regressions that include additional variables on income, education, and housing age. SAR models result in higher r-square values compared to the OLS models across all cities, suggesting that spatial autocorrelation is an important feature of our data. Similarities among cities can be found based on shared characteristics of climate, race/ethnicity, and size. Our findings suggest that a suite of variables, including income, contribute to the distribution of UTC cover. These findings can help target simultaneous strategies for UTC goals and environmental justice concerns.

Working towards sustainable solutions requires involving professionals and stakeholders from all sectors of society into research and teaching. This often presents a challenge to scholars at universities, as they lack capacity and time needed for negotiating different agendas, languages, competencies, and cultures among faculty, students, and stakeholders. Management approaches and quality criteria have been developed to cope with this challenge, including concepts of boundary organizations, transdisciplinary research, transition management, and interface management. However, few of these concepts present comprehensive proposals how to facilitate research with stakeholder participation while creating educational opportunities along the lifecycle of a project. The article focuses on the position of a transacademic interface manager (TIM) supporting participatory sustainability research and education efforts. We conceptualize the task portfolio of a TIM; outline the capacities a TIM needs to possess in order to successfully operate; and propose an educational approach for how to train students in becoming a TIM. For this, we review the existing literature on TIMs and present insights from empirical sustainability research and educational projects that involved TIMs in different functions. The article provides practical guidance to universities on how to organize these critical endeavors more effectively and to offer students an additional career perspective.

The objective of articulating sustainability visions through modeling is to enhance the outcomes and process of visioning in order to successfully move the system toward a desired state. Models emphasize approaches to develop visions that are viable and resilient and are crafted to adhere to sustainability principles. This approach is largely assembled from visioning processes (resulting in descriptions of desirable future states generated from stakeholder values and preferences) and participatory modeling processes (resulting in systems-based representations of future states co-produced by experts and stakeholders). Vision modeling is distinct from normative scenarios and backcasting processes in that the structure and function of the future desirable state is explicitly articulated as a systems model. Crafting, representing and evaluating the future desirable state as a systems model in participatory settings is intended to support compliance with sustainability visioning quality criteria (visionary, sustainable, systemic, coherent, plausible, tangible, relevant, nuanced, motivational and shared) in order to develop rigorous and operationalizable visions. We provide two empirical examples to demonstrate the incorporation of vision modeling in research practice and education settings. In both settings, vision modeling was used to develop, represent, simulate and evaluate future desirable states. This allowed participants to better identify, explore and scrutinize sustainability solutions.