Quality of life, participation and resource conservation through social diffusion of sufficiency practices in urban neighbourhoods (SuPraStadt)

Endbericht

Authors: Lars-Arvid Brischke, Miriam Dingeldey, Jutta Deffner, Immanuel Stieß, Tilmann Hüppauff, Marcel Hunecke, Moritz Niermann, Michaela Bonan

The sustainable transformation of cities requires harmonising the needs of residents for high-quality urban spaces, access to resources, usage options for goods and services and social participation with the ecological requirements of sustainability. Sufficiency stands for the organisation of proportionality in social relationships with our fellow human beings and the environment. It consists of changes in consumption patterns, everyday routines, social and cultural practices through to fundamental changes in lifestyles and economic practices that contribute to remaining within the Earth's ecological carrying capacity. Sufficiency practices in urban neighbourhoods can be, for example, the shared use of space, new forms of local cooperation, offers for the extended use of goods, the promotion of local mobility or self-provided, jointly organised services, which by definition represent a more ecologically compatible and often cheaper alternative to market-mediated access to goods and services.

At the centre of the ‘SuPraStadt’ project was the transdisciplinary collaboration with three real-world laboratories, each in an urban district in Heidelberg, Dortmund and Kelsterbach, with three different lead actors: a civil society initiative in Heidelberg, the municipality in Dortmund and a housing industry company in Kelsterbach, each of which took the main initiative for the conception, implementation and diffusion of sufficiency practices. The diffusion of these practices was reinforced by dialogue processes between the local actors and the research team as well as by interventions from within the project and was subsequently analysed and partially evaluated. In all three real-world laboratories, communication and cooperation processes between civil society, local authorities and housing companies were initiated and consolidated to support the long-term diffusion of the tested practices beyond the neighbourhood.