ARTS (Accelerating and Rescaling Transitions to Sustainability) is committed to understanding the role and impact of transition initiatives in cities and examining the conditions that can aid accelerating change towards a sustainable low-carbon society.
New initiatives, ideas and products change the way we relate to one another and to our environment, as well as the way we define and fulfil our needs. They create opportunities for experimenting and learning, which can help our societies transition towards greater sustainability. Transition initiatives drive this movement, acting as the pulse of change; they innovate and demonstrate how we can live sustainably.
This raises some critical questions:
The ARTS research project has the following research aims:
ARTS is an integrated, inter- and trans-disciplinary project with a clear methodology of examining how a diverse set of transition initiatives can be coupled and rescaled in order to speed-up their delivery and impact on multiple low-carbon domains in 5 case study regions across Europe: Brighton in UK, Budapest in Hungary, Dresden in Germany, Flanders in Belgium and Stockholm in Sweden. Each region has citizen bloggers who provide regular blog posts about sustainability initiatives in their city. The developed acceleration governance approach and modelling platform aim at improving decision making and cost efficiency of policy response, supporting social learning and in turn, at speeding-up the implementation of the EU's Sustainable Development and Biodiversity Strategies.
