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.

The last half-century of urban transport planning is defined primarily by accommodating personal cars. This may be changing. New transport technologies and devices that are more human-scaled have developed, particularly over the past few years, and have fueled prospects to dislodge the primacy of cars. The efficacy of these newer and human-scaled vehicles, however, is bounded by the networks that are available—networks which are defined by the rights of way on which they travel (links) and destinations at the terminal location of a trip (nodes). Both are important. The overwhelming majority of planning efforts to better accommodate human scaled vehicles has focused on network links for these new modes. Less attention has been devoted to how site design and planning at nodes impedes or supports human-scaled transport. Efforts to help transport networks evolve, and their corresponding systems, will be compromised if only some parts to the networks adapt while others remain idle. Options to support first and last mile legs of transit are important, but have limited value when the first or last few feet are largely impermeable to anything but driving. We argue that lack of attention to developing human-scale nodes is important and lack of action will eventually bound capacity. We therefore point to rationales and avenues for reforming site development guidelines.

Better sidewalks, more bike lanes, and multi-modal cross-sections of streets present the “much-turned-to” remedy for progressive transport planning efforts. Recent editions of National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) guidelines are evidence of this. These guides largely focus improvements to street and the emphasis on such links in a transport system come at the expense of focus on nodes. Improvements to terminal locations such as apartment complexes, shopping centers, schools, municipal buildings and more are often not considered. For travelers accessing such sites via foot or bicycle, at issue is that site entrances are generally wired only for automobiles, as is travel within it. Consider auto-only-oriented drop-off zones, seas of parking lots, curb cuts long enough to accommodate multiple lanes of traffic and more. These conditions render such nodes as mostly impermeable for these other forms of travel.

The features that make these places impermeable for human-scaled travel are prescribed by the regulations that city officials enact (or have enacted some years ago). Mandated rules in zoning regulations, building codes, and site planning guidelines hold court here. For any substantial change in transport, whether mode choice, congestion or emissions, to have effect, these site characteristics are important. Yet, they have mostly been considered in a peripheral manner against the body of transport and land use scholarship. This essay demonstrates the need for new site design guidelines to steer such developments in ways that allow a human-scaled transport network to develop. Considering the city as a canvas, city codes lack prescriptions to design—and more importantly, redesign—these spaces in ways that are supportive of human-scaled travel.

To support our argument that development nodes are important components to an evolving transport system, we present rationales for new site design guidelines that will help steer actions in ways that allow a human-scaled transport network to develop. Site planning elements interface in many ways with the larger transport system and are too often left off the table. Our aim is to help lay the foundation for a new generation of site design guidelines that will help old standards (e.g., Lynch and Hack, 1984) evolve. A new generation of site planning manuals, supported by new research into these issues, are needed and poised to address human-scaled movement that supports both permeability to sites and comforting travel within them (e.g., how should a half-acre parking lot be transformed to allow safe cycling access?).

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.

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.