Urban and regional planning with the young generation - collective and intergenerational learning encouraging sustainability transformations (URGENT)

 

In the transdisciplinary URGENT project, funded by the Academy of Finland  (9/2019-8/2023), we study whether and how bringing together urban and regional planning with formal education and education for sustainable development may create innovate and scalable transformative pathways to more sustainable societies. We ask how planning processes - when approached as a call for dialogue between schools and planning institutions - could support empowering learning of students, teachers and planners as well as researchers, and how such transformative learning and its outcomes can be measured.

We base the URGENT project on participatory action research approach, and co-develop sustainable education and planning, both theoretically and practically, through dialogue between researchers, planners and schools. We will use qualitative and quantitative

methods to analyse the impact of these new means in eliciting progress towards sustainability, and the potential of the new practices to contribute to sustainability transformation in the society at large. This will open up new transdisciplinary scientific avenues and support the educational and planning scholars to transform their dialogue in order to renew science in the face of sustainability challenge.