The Impact of Negotiating Sustainability in Urban Neighbourhoods

CITYSUN explores and presents a process for transitioning urban neighbourhoods to sustainability, whilst empowering its citizens to develop concepts of decent life that respect the Sustainable Area Budget (SAB) of the town. The project uses the concept of SAB (a method similar to the quantitative Ecological Footprint concept) in a design-oriented approach, going beyond the state of the art in supporting citizens and experts as they embed their ideas and interests into competing, multiple, whole town scenarios. In CITYSUN participants discover the consequences of diverse urban interventions, as their effects reverberate through city-system scenarios. Through engaging them in a serious game- playing process, the project generates strong-sustainability scenarios. The quest is for each emerging scenario to take account of the many desires and competing interests within the town's or neighbourhood's SAB. The multiple scenarios that CITYSUN develops side-by-side, present the opportunity for combining the best aspects from different sustainability scenarios that are quantitatively and systemically sound, whilst being generated by a rich, interactive societal process.