Designing foresights by communities: a new groundbreaker role for strategic design

In order to humanize forecasting, communities have been proposed to activate and enlarge a collective ability of foresight. To better understand how communities relate to collective foresight abilities, this article untangles its critical modes, roles and social media involved. Based on a fine-grained analysis of 10 community practices, we...

Editorial: Solutions to water crises (related to actual interventions)

Self-Management of Housing and Urban Commons: New Belgrade and Reflections on Commons Today

The concepts of collective management of housing and urban spaces are being revisited within the contemporary discussions about community-driven approaches and practices and, in particular, related to the revitalization of residential neighbourhoods. This research identifies the concepts of self-management and social ownership of housing in the...

Participatory approaches in the adaptive reuse of two Dutch private-led cultural heritage projects: role of the local communities

There is increasing debate concerning citizen participation in the reuse and transformation of heritage sites. However, the question of why and how participatory approaches are explored in private-led heritage adaptive reuse receives limited attention. The paper shows why the communities should play an essential role in the adaptive reuse of...

A Mega-Nourishment (Sand Motor) Affects Landscape Diversity of Subtidal Benthic Fauna

The Sand Motor is a very large (20 million m³) nourishment constructed along the coast in The Netherlands. The huge volume of sand is redistributed along the coast by natural forces stemming from tidal currents and waves. For environmental evaluation of this large construction, the benthic subtidal fauna has been sampled prior to...

A conceptual model-based approach to explore community livelihood adaptation under uncertainty for adaptive delta management

Delta communities worldwide are facing a multitude of challenges in their life and livelihood. In many developing countries, improving the quality of life and livelihood is a key challenge. While development is a central goal of delta planning in such countries, the effectiveness of planning is challenged by uncertain changes in climate and...

Transition Initiatives as Light Intentional Communities: Uncovering Liminality and Friction

The Transition Network is a global grassroots network that supports community-led resilience in the face of global change. This paper reports on an ethnographic study of one of its longest-running projects, Transition Town Lewes (TTL) in the United Kingdom. The aim of the study is to analyse TTL as a community. More specifically, we ask two...

Creating Community for Early-Career Geoscientists

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the European Geosciences Union (EGU) play central roles in nurturing the next generation of geoscientists. Students and young scientists make up about one quarter of the unions’ active memberships [American Geophysical Union, 2013; European Geosciences Union, 2014], creating a major opportunity to include...

Collectivity and the Post-war European Shopping Centre

This paper puts forth the hypothesis that notions such as ‘collectivity’, ‘play’ and ‘community’ – buzz words of the post-war discourse on architecture and urbanism – were often important elements in the design and conceptualization of post-war shopping centres in Western Europe. To investigate this hypothesis, the paper focuses on three...

Distribution of Cultivated and Uncultivated Cyanobacteria and Chloroflexus-Like Bacteria in Hot-Spring Microbial Mats