Pekka Jokinen

Developing the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of urban environments is challenging due to the complex and interconnected nature of the context and objectives. In order to be successful in this challenging environment, professionals working in the urban development arena should have a holistic understanding of the different pillars of sustainable development, as well as various competencies and skills. This paper looks at sustainable urban development (SUD) from the perspective of the skills and competencies required and identifies effective pedagogic practices that could help educate future professionals. In particular, we explore interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning, reflective thinking, and experiential learning, which are needed for understanding various aspects of a complex phenomenon, collaborating with professionals from different fields and coming up with novel and constructive ways of solving complex problems. We first examine these through reviewing and analyzing relevant literature on education for sustainable development, with a focus on SUD. Then, we explore the application of these approaches in practice by describing and analyzing a newly introduced degree program at Tampere University, Finland.

High meat consumption appears regularly in sustainability discourses but finding practical tools for reduction has proven to be challenging. The rise of social media has opened up new pathways to structure political spaces where grassroots initiatives for experiments can take place. Our paper examines how consumer-citizens started experimenting with vegetarian foods in the context of an innovative Finnish meat reduction social media campaign called Meatless October during its kick-off year in 2013. The focus is on participants’ perceptions of the campaign and reflections of the experiment process. We analyzed participants’ blog posts by using a qualitative content analysis. Our results show that the participants were often strongly motivated by the campaign’s sustainability frame. They also saw the campaign both as a communal challenge and an opportunity for political action, sharing know-how and experiences with the other participants. In everyday life, participants’ main focus and worry were in being able to prepare tasty and healthy vegetarian foods, and they were positively surprised by their ability to learn these skills. Participants typically attributed both success and failure in experimenting to their individual capabilities. Overall, our study suggests that the campaign’s public context pushed private practices towards change by facilitating the experimenting process.