RP3011: Community Carbon Reduction and Wellbeing Enhancement

_{Peer Reviewed Research Publications}

RP3011: Journal Article: Sharing cities for urban transformation: narrative, policy and practice

Commercial sharing platforms have reshaped the transportation and housing sectors in cities and raised challenges for urban policy makers seeking to balance market disruption with community protections. Transformational sharing seeks to strengthen the urban commons to address social justice, equity and sustainability.

This paper uses Transformative Social Innovation theory to develop a comparative analysis of Shareable’s Sharing Cities Network and Airbnb’s Home Sharing Clubs. It argues that narrative framing of the sharing economy for community empowerment and grassroots mobilisation have been used by Shareable to drive a “sharing transformation” and by Airbnb through “regulatory hacking” to influence urban policy.

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RP3011: Journal Article: Direct impacts of an urban living lab from the participants’ perspective: Livewell Yarra

Urban living labs have emerged as transition arenas for undertaking process-oriented and reflexive experiments in the multi-stakeholder governance of sustainability. This paper evaluates Livewell Yarra, an urban living lab in Melbourne, Australia, that brought together academic researchers and community actors to engage in experiments for low-carbon living. This paper evaluates transition team experiments in governance of the lab itself and community experiments in carbon reduction that took place in people’s homes and small group settings known as decarb groups. This paper’s primary research question is: what are the direct impacts of urban living lab experiments from the participants’ perspective? The research methods utilised include action research, asset-based community development, participatory co-design and most significant change research.

This paper evaluates experiments in low-carbon living through data collected via stories of change from participant interviews. The results indicate that experiments in urban living labs create opportunities for social learning and empowerment, but also raise issues of leadership and ownership of transition governance. The findings suggest that Livewell Yarra could have benefited from clearer agenda setting and continuous monitoring to feedback results. The paper concludes by suggesting future research directions that utilise the operational processes of transition management to support experiments in urban living labs.

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RP3011: Conference paper: Asset mapping and social innovation for low carbon communities

This research uses asset mapping as a method to reveal the latent knowledge, interests and skills of Livewell participants and mobilise these strengths to meet carbon reduction goals. Participatory co-design is being used to enable participants to develop social innovations for carbon reduction in their local community which could take the form of community gardens, active transport or neighbourhood-based sharing initiatives. This paper provides an overview of the Livewell Yarra trial and its theoretical underpinnings and explores how asset-based approaches and social innovation can build capacity for groups to take individual and collective action to reduce carbon emissions for their own benefit and that of the wider community. Paper presented at the 8th Making Cities Liveable Conference, Melbourne, 2015

liveable cities paper 2015 darren sharp final (593769 PDF)