Projects as a speciation and aggregation mechanism in transitions: Bridging project management and transitions research in the digitalization of UK architecture, engineering, and construction industry

Sociotechnical transitions are mostly seen in the literature as processes where actors and technologies in small niches peripheral to an organizational field, accumulate momentum, scale up, aggregate, and eventually bring about large-scale regime change. Foundational examples include the British transition from sailing ships to steamships and...

Designing adaptable consumption: A new practice to foster food system transitions.

In recent years, more designers have been engaging in transitions for which design activity is used to develop innovations that steer change. However, little is known about how designers develop innovations to foster change along a desired transition path. In this short paper, we explore how designers can develop joint innovations that steer a...

Circling the square: Governance of the circular economy transition in the Amsterdam metropolitan area

Circular economy (CE), the new ‘buzzword’ in urban and regional studies and policy debates, is about shifting from a linear production process towards a circular one in which the generation of waste is minimised, materials circulate in ‘closed loops’, and waste is not considered a burden but rather a resource that brings new economic...

A Call for Value Literacy in Port City Transitions

Over the last decades, values have been re-addressed in planning, policies, businesses, heritage and education. While these fields seem to agree on the importance of values, it is often unclear what actors mean by values, and how they use these values to shape decisions. A decade after a global financial crisis, in the midst of a global pandemic...

Why novel sanitary systems are hardly introduced?

Innovations are required in urban infrastructures due to the pressing needs for mitigating climate change and prevent resource depletion. In order to address the slow pace of innovation in urban systems, this paper analyses factors involved in attempts to introduce novel sanitary systems. Today new requirements are important: sanitary systems...

Analysing the role of visions, agency, and niches in historical transitions in watershed management in the Lower Mississippi River

This paper analyses five major transitions in watershed management in the Lower Mississippi River from the early 19th century to the present. A conceptual framework is developed for analysing the role of visions, agency, and niches in water management transitions and applied to a historical case on water management in the Lower Mississippi...

Circular Cities: Mapping Six Cities in Transition

Urbanisation and climate change are urging cities to chart novel paths towards sustainable futures. Many cities are turning to the alluring 'circular economy' (CE) concept to guide this redirection. The CE concept re-imagines how flows of resources moving through economies might be 'closed'. Here, we explore this new 'circular city' agenda by...

Strategic competences for concrete action towards sustainability: An oxymoron? Engineering education for a sustainable future

In the current discourses on sustainable development, one can discern two main intellectual cultures: an analytic one focusing on measuring problems and prioritizing measures, (Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), Mass Flow Analysis (MFA), etc.) and; a policy/management one, focusing on long term change, change incentives, and stakeholder management ...

Human factors of transitions in automated driving: A general framework and literature survey

The topic of transitions in automated driving is becoming important now that cars are automated to ever greater extents. This paper proposes a theoretical framework to support and align human factors research on transitions in automated driving. Driving states are defined based on the allocation of primary driving tasks (i.e., lateral control,...

Studying transition dynamics via focusing on underlying feedback interactions: Modelling the Dutch waste management transition

The emerging need for societal transitions raises the need for a better understanding of the dynamic nature of large scale societal systems, and therefore the development of an analytical approach for drawing dynamic conclusions based on system’s dynamic mechanisms, feedback relationships and interacting components. The objective of this study...