INVITATION FOR INTERNATIONAL INTERNS FROM THE PATEL INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY ON SUSTAINABILITY AND SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITIONS Cities can be cradles for innovation and sustainability transitions. They are places where slow and fast transitions are initiated and accelerated as well as test-‐beds and seedbeds for innovations. Cities have social, ecological and technological assets that are essential for economic and social development locally and globally; there is thus an imperative for balancing their efforts for continuity and prosperity while ensuring a livable space for their citizens. Increasing policy attention is put on the processes of change that take place in cities and for cities to drive the way to improved livability and resilience. This shows the diversity of opportunities and conditions in cities, where challenges such as urbanization and globalization contribute to the pressure for rerouting current development pathways towards sustainability and resilience. Urban studies scholarship offers insights about how pressures of globalization and urbanization may affect current livability standards in cities and also problematize on the implications of an abrupt transition of cities due to unpreparedness in face of climate change, demographic changes, ageing and a cascade of financial crashes. Finding the right approaches to tap into the potentials of cities and reroute their development pathways towards sustainability and resilience in the context of the particular challenges individual cities face is paramount. The governance of urban sustainability transitions requires new strategic planning processes that integrate diverse sources of knowledge and perspectives, make ‘glocal’ connections between local urban challenges and broader global, national and regional macro-‐developments and enable pragmatic decisions in a context of complexity and uncertainty. This challenges urban practitioners and scientists alike to take up a process-‐content thinking and to reflect on how to navigate societal complexity while mobilizing innovative and transformative societal potential towards action for sustainability. In view of our research and education focus on cities and sustainability transitions, we offer two thematic foci for internships on two of our pioneering urban research projects: -‐ ARTS project -‐ GUST project ARTS – Accelerating and Rescaling Transitions to Sustainability (www.acceleratingtransitions.eu) The focal unit of analysis of ARTS project will be innovative activities and related actor-‐networks that are fundamentally changing energy, food, shelter and mobility provisioning patterns at the scale of a city or region, situated within a wider European context. ARTS will explore how lessons from these initiatives can be drawn for broader transitions to sustainable low-‐carbon European societies. Specifically the ARTS consortium aims to investigate and deepen our knowledge on the following research gaps that relate to the key conditions that can be associated to acceleration of transitions (also) in the context of cities and regions, namely: synergy, diversity, speed of change, inclusivity, knowledge dissemination and social learning. We will explore these conditions based on a diverse set of transition initiatives in five transition regions across Europe in an inter-‐ and transdisciplinary way: Brighton, Budapest, Dresden, Flanders, and Stockholm. These transition initiatives act upon low-‐carbon challenges and have started to transform (to a limited extend) structures, cultures and practices in the domains that impact the low-‐carbon challenge at hand. In the transition regions mentioned above, different transition initiatives take action across multiple
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