Anders Utrecht: Postcapitalist mapping for sustainable futures in the Utrecht Region
See the project website here.
Building a network of community-based initiatives and grassroots organisations that offer an alternative to sustain communities and transform society towards sustainability.
Grassroots and community-based initiatives are sources of social innovations to challenge and transform dominant assumptions about sustainability transformation. As examples of alternative economies, these initiatives can offer new imaginaries and practices for urban settings as a structural alternative to top-down market-driven and technology-based sustainable transformation. These bottom-up initiatives implicitly or explicitly problematise capitalist practices and potentially suggest a radical turn in sustainability transformation.
The primary aim of the project is to build a platform to facilitate collaboration between community-based initiatives, grassroots organisations and academics interested in the sustainability transformation of urban spaces. Through a networking and mapping activity, this collaborative research will be the first step to strengthen a local community of scholars and activists interested in co-producing knowledge and practices around urban sustainability transformation through a postcapitalist perspective.
The network will be visible through a map directory and a series of podcasts hosting the representatives of the community-based initiatives and grassroots organisations. By developing collaborations with urban stakeholders to tackle sustainability challenges, our project brings an innovative methodological/transdisciplinary sustainability agenda to the Transforming Infrastructures for Sustainable Cities hub at Utrecht University. The project opens up a space for bottom-up, activist and critical perspectives about sustainable cities within the transdisciplinary framework of postcapitalism to envision and experiment with the alternative practices of sustainability transformation.
Collaboration
The project brings together innovative and critical research expertise from the fields of environmental governance, media studies and organisation studies: