Enabling the City

de Josefine Fokdal, Olivia Bina, Prue Chiles, Liis Ojamäe, Katrin Paadam

"Enabling the City is a collaborative book that focuses on how interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary processes of knowledge production may contribute to urban transformation at a local level, striking a balance between enthusiastic support for such transformational potential and a cautious note regarding the persistent challenges to the ethos as well as the practice of inter- and transdisciplinarity. The rich stories reflect on different research and local practice cultures, exploring issues such as ageing, community, health and dementia, public space, energy, mobility cultures, heritage, housing, re-use, and renewal, as well as more universal questions about urban sustainability and perhaps most important, education. Against this backdrop, aspirations for the 21st century are related to the international, national and local agendas expressed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and in the New Urban Agenda (NUA), raising fundamental questions of how to facilitate development. Lessons learned from these studies are translated into a framework of conditions and qualities crucial to collaborative processes, highlighting aspects of transformative learning, competences and dispositions and ways of knowing, critical in any collaborative and participatory process"--