Sustainable Cities: Inspirational Case Studies

Winners of a UK sustainable development award scheme describe their hands-on approaches to sustainable development in diverse fields such as travel and transport, buildings, food and entrepreneurship.

The Sustainable City Awards were established in 2001 and the chapters highlight the winners´ missions, the specific sustainability challenges they address, their solutions and experiences with their implementation, and their thoughts about future development.

The short and easy-to-read book shows how the award winners translated a complex and contested concept like sustainability into creative and innovative approaches to either adapt their current practices or develop new ones. This allows readers to explore the relevance sustainability has for different types of businesses and business collaborations, from family-run companies with a long history and tradition to newly founded community-driven initiatives. 

Some projects deal with well-known sustainability challenges, like GrowUp Urban Farms, which minimize environmental impacts while producing food for a growing population using aquaponics, and Nampac Plastics, which focuses on waste reduction in its production of high-density polyethylene bottles, e.g. through product innovation and the optimization of work processes. Other winners began to view specific products (e.g. power transformers) or locations (e.g. a climbing centre) with a sustainability lens, which opened up space for significant changes in their companies’ practices. What characterizes all the projects in this book is the positive attitude to combining sustainability goals with those of their business, which is also reflected in the tools they promote, such as gamification software, online platforms and training centres.

Book note prepared by Julia Wesely