Experimenting with Sustainability in the city?

Students develop their own real-world experiments with a focus on sustainability

What opportunities do real-world experiments offer for testing solutions to sustainable development in cities, and how can they contribute to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? In early July, around a dozen students from the Eucor Universities of Basel, Karlsruhe, Freiburg and Strasbourg gathered for a hybrid block course at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The course aimed to explore urban environments through the lens of the SDGs and to develop ideas for real-world experiments based on these insights.

Prof. Dr. Daniel Lang and Dr. Annika Weiser from the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) at KIT provided the framework as teachers: Embedded in the Real:labor festival taking place at the same time, they encouraged the students to adopt a new perspective on their city. With this new outlook, the students developed ideas for addressing the sustainability challenges they observed through practical experiments.

Experiencing the city with every step and reflecting on it through the SDGs

The so-called “Urban Transect Walks”, which the students embarked on the first day formed the basis for their work this week: In small groups, they set out to walk from one point in the city to another in as straight a line as possible, intentionally collecting and documenting as many impressions as possible. These experiences were incorporated into the definition of relevant sustainability challenges. On the second day, they were supported in their contextualization by an input from Fabia Willi and Dr. Marc Frick from the University of Basel, who had also offered a Eucor seminar in the context of the SDGs in February. The analysis of the “walks” revealed insights into the individual cities in which the students were on the move: from Karlsruhe to Freiburg, Basel and Zurich to Lyon and Dammam in Saudi Arabia. The international comparison in particular made it clear where sustainability challenges in Upper Rhine cities and worldwide are similar or different.

From the solution idea to implementation in a real-life experiment

From day three onwards, the focus shifted to implementation: What constitutes real-world laboratories and real-world experiments in the context of transdisciplinary research? What is needed to transform an idea into a practical experiment? What does it take to turn an idea into a real-world experiment? And which of the identified sustainability topics are particularly suitable? Each group designed a real-life experiment and presented it in a pitch on the last day of the Real:lab festival:  How can we use games in public spaces to enable more encounters between people in the city? How does the availability of public toilets influence the accessibility of a city - and how can it be increased? How can street spaces be upgraded and the quality of life improved by (temporarily) removing them from use by cars? How can we test the potential that lies in unused or neglected city squares? And how can we use real-world experiments to test large-scale infrastructural changes such as vehicle-to-grid structures, in which electric vehicles feed excess electricity back into the grid to stabilize the electricity network?

The students' presentations showed the range of possibilities for using real experiments in research. At the same time, they provided valuable insights for the practical implementation of solutions. Some of them are already exchanging ideas with real-world laboratory researchers at KIT - so perhaps we will soon see some of the real-world experiments developed being put into practice?