Papers by Lauren Withycombe Keeler
Urban Transformations
City governments and urban universities are well-positioned to play critical roles in advancing u... more City governments and urban universities are well-positioned to play critical roles in advancing urban sustainability transformations. However, in partnering, cities and universities often focus efforts on discrete sustainability-related projects, neglecting the development of long-term relationships and deep, inter-organizational ties that can allow for collaboration on lasting and transformational change. Yet, at both cities and universities there are often individuals who are deeply interested in developing better partnerships that contribute to the sustainability and livability of their communities. This research develops and tests an evidence-based and facilitated process to guide sustainability researchers and municipal practitioners in the development of transformational City-university partnerships for sustainability. The Audacious Partnerships Process was tested by four City-university partnerships including Arizona State University and the City of Tempe, Dublin City Univers...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This workshop report presents the results of a scenario creation process centered on the future o... more This workshop report presents the results of a scenario creation process centered on the future of aging in smart environments (FASE) in 2050, in a U.S. context. Hosted by the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and The Global KAITEKI Center of Arizona State University, with funding from The KAITEKI Institute of the Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation (MCHC), the first FASE workshop convened 36 diverse experts to integrate and direct their perspectives on how aging people and smart environments might perform and interact in 2050. This exploration of ageing in the smart environments of 2050 is both provocation and invitation. The scenarios are meant to challenge conventional wisdom about how the future may turn out and in so doing, make space for the reader to challenge their own assumptions and their preparedness for futures that don't look like the present. If you have thoughts on ageing in smart environments, please reach out to us. The future is of our making and we will find better futures together.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Socio-Technical Futures Shaping the Present, 2019
Discourses around innovation often unreflexively assume positive progress and the inevitable cont... more Discourses around innovation often unreflexively assume positive progress and the inevitable contribution of new technologies to the betterment of society. Little attention is paid to issues of sustainability—including intergenerational equity, justice, and socio-ecological integrity—and the complex ways that societal arrangements and sociotechnical regimes are intermingled. Innovation governance for sustainability needs to actively engage both responsible research and innovation and sustainability paradigms in order for science and technology to effectively serve societal and sustainability goals. There is an opportunity to utilize tools of foresight to raise the capacity of actors in innovation processes to consider alternative framings of progress and challenge the status quo. This chapter explores participatory scenario construction as a means to productively disrupt status-quo imaginaries. The Future of Wastewater Sensing, a participatory scenario study, is presented as a case ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Future of Wastewater Sensing workshop is part of a collaboration between Arizona State Univer... more The Future of Wastewater Sensing workshop is part of a collaboration between Arizona State University Center for Nanotechnology in Society in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the Biodesign Institute’s Center for Environmental Security, LC Nano, and the Nano-enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) Systems NSF Engineering Research Center. The Future of Wastewater Sensing workshop explores how technologies for studying, monitoring, and mining wastewater and sewage sludge might develop in the future, and what consequences may ensue for public health, law enforcement, private industry, regulations and society at large. The workshop pays particular attention to how wastewater sensing (and accompanying research, technologies, and applications) can be innovated, regulated, and used to maximize societal benefit and minimize the risk of adverse outcomes, when addressing critical social and environmental challenges.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Socio-Technical Futures Shaping the Present, 2019
Discourses around innovation often unreflexively assume positive progress and the inevitable cont... more Discourses around innovation often unreflexively assume positive progress and the inevitable contribution of new technologies to the betterment of society. Little attention is paid to issues of sustainability—including intergenerational equity, justice, and socio-ecological integrity—and the complex ways that societal arrangements and sociotechnical regimes are intermingled. Innovation governance for sustainability needs to actively engage both responsible research and innovation and sustainability paradigms in order for science and technology to effectively serve societal and sustainability goals. There is an opportunity to utilize tools of foresight to raise the capacity of actors in innovation processes to consider alternative framings of progress and challenge the status quo. This chapter explores participatory scenario construction as a means to productively disrupt status-quo imaginaries. The Future of Wastewater Sensing, a participatory scenario study, is presented as a case example to inform sustainability-oriented responsible research and innovation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Urban Geography
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
We continue to understand little about how to best design and operate transnational collaboration... more We continue to understand little about how to best design and operate transnational collaborations between universities to advance research and education for sustainability. This article explores general practices in transnational research and teaching that can provide information and inspiration for the sustainability field. The article follows a systematic review protocol and examines 46 articles involving 147 universities engaged in transnational collaborations. First, it presents the main features of these collaborations according to: (a) locations connected; (b) objectives pursued and subjects addressed; (c) implementation. Second, it discusses how reflecting on challenges and strategies encountered in these collaborations can support transnational sustainability research and education. The article concludes highlighting success factors for transnational collaboration, including: combining local and global considerations ; making effective use of digital technologies; capitaliz...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Futures, 2021
Abstract The population of the United States is getting older. Unlike other countries with aging ... more Abstract The population of the United States is getting older. Unlike other countries with aging populations, however, the state of aging in the United States is in crisis. Healthcare and social reforms will likely be necessary in the coming decades to address structural issues with retirement, socio-economic inequality, and the high cost of healthcare. In the meantime, AI-enabled smart technologies and environments are being rapidly developed to assist overwhelmed caretakers, enable access to healthcare providers, address isolation and depression among older adults, and provide mobility to and from essential services in sprawling suburbs and rural areas. This study utilizes a participatory, intuitive logics approach to construct scenarios of aging in smart environments in 2050 that illuminate the uncertainties, challenges, and opportunities presented by the coming confluence of two mega trends: an aging population and increasingly sensed people and environments. The results include four scenarios including descriptions and key features, and with narratives available in the appendix. In the discussion, we reflect on five provocations distilled from expert interviews to illustrate what aging might look like in 2050 from a variety of socio-economic vantage points and mediated by technological capabilities and arrangements born of differing policy, economic, and societal conditions.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Proceedings of IFoU 2018: Reframing Urban Resilience Implementation: Aligning Sustainability and Resilience, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Ambio, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Sustainability, 2018
The urgency of climate change and other sustainability challenges makes transferring and scaling ... more The urgency of climate change and other sustainability challenges makes transferring and scaling solutions between cities a necessity. However, solutions are deeply contextual. To accelerate solution efforts, there is a need to understand how context shapes the development of solutions. Universities are well positioned to work with cities on transferring solutions from and to other cities. This paper analyses five case studies of city–university partnerships in three countries on transferring solutions. Our analysis suggests that understanding the interest, the action on sustainability, and the individual and collective sustainability competences on the part of the city administration and the university can help facilitate the transfer of sustainability solutions across contexts. We conclude that the nature of the city–university partnership is essential to solution transfer and that new and existing networks can be used to accelerate progress on the 2030 United Nations Sustainable ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Sustainability: The Journal of Record, 2017
Abstract While federal action on climate change and renewable energy development has lagged in th... more Abstract While federal action on climate change and renewable energy development has lagged in the United States, cities are undertaking ambitious sustainability initiatives. Motivation often flows from a resilience mindset—how cities can prepare for and be resilient to future shocks. The conflation of sustainability and resilience jeopardizes the success of sustainability efforts and limits their scope. Institutionalizing sustainability in city governments requires building capacity for city leadership to link sustainability and resilience objectives. This article builds on previous work in sustainability education to demonstrate how key competencies, or ways of thinking, in sustainability can be adapted for use with city leadership. The article introduces a novel board game entitled Future Shocks and City Resilience as a method for creating an interactive educational environment that facilitates learning while contributing to cultural change within a city administration. The game was played with leaders...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2017
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Sustainability Science, 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy, 2013
ABSTRACT Quality criteria for generating future-oriented knowledge and future scenarios are diffe... more ABSTRACT Quality criteria for generating future-oriented knowledge and future scenarios are different from those developed for knowledge about past and current events. Such quality criteria can be defined relative to the intended function of the knowledge. Plausibility has emerged as a central quality criterion of scenarios that allows exploring the future with credibility and saliency. But what exactly is plausibility vis-à-vis probability, consistency, and desirability? And how can plausibility be evaluated and constructed in scenarios? Sufficient plausibility, in this article, refers to scenarios that hold enough evidence to be considered ‘occurrable’. This might have been the underlying idea of scenarios all along without being explicitly elaborated in a pragmatic concept or methodology. Here, we operationalise plausibility in scenarios through a set of plausibility indications and illustrate the proposal with scenarios constructed for Phoenix, Arizona. The article operationalises the concept of plausibility in scenarios to support scholars and practitioners alike.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2015
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Environmental Management, 2013
In Phoenix, Arizona and other metropolitan areas, water governance challenges include variable cl... more In Phoenix, Arizona and other metropolitan areas, water governance challenges include variable climate conditions, growing demands, and continued groundwater overdraft. Based on an actor-oriented examination of who does what with water and why, along with how people interact with hydro-ecological systems and man-made infrastructure, we present a sustainability appraisal of water governance for the Phoenix region. Broadly applicable to other areas, our systems approach to sustainable water governance overcomes prevailing limitations to research and management by: employing a comprehensive and integrative perspective on water systems; highlighting the activities, intentions, and rules that govern various actors, along with the values and goals driving decisions; and, establishing a holistic set of principles for social-ecological system integrity and interconnectivity, resource efficiency and maintenance, livelihood sufficiency and opportunity, civility and democratic governance, intra- and inter-generational equity, and finally, precaution and adaptive capacity. This study also contributes to reforming and innovating governance regimes by illuminating how these principles are being met, or not, in the study area. What is most needed in metropolitan Phoenix is enhanced attention to ecosystem functions and resource maintenance as well as social equity and public engagement in water governance. Overall, key recommendations entail: addressing interconnections across hydrologic units and sub-systems (e.g., land and water), increasing decentralized initiatives for multiple purposes (e.g., ecological and societal benefits of green infrastructure), incorporating justice goals into decisions (e.g., fair allocations and involvement), and building capacity through collaborations and social learning with diverse interests (e.g., scientists, policymakers, and the broader public).
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 2011
Sustainability problem constellations related to sea-level rise, desertification, poverty, lack o... more Sustainability problem constellations related to sea-level rise, desertification, poverty, lack of education, pandemics, or military conflicts result from complex, dynamic cause–effect chains. Elements of the problem constellation exist at different scales (local to global) and interact with one another across those scales. Inertia and reinforcing feedbacks are likely to aggravate these problems, threatening the integrity and viability of our social–ecological systems in the long term. Public discourse largely focuses on the adverse effects of these ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
4 ENVIRONMENT WWW. ENVIRONMENTMAGAZINE. ORG VOLUME 53 NUMBER 2 concern for profit above all, lack... more 4 ENVIRONMENT WWW. ENVIRONMENTMAGAZINE. ORG VOLUME 53 NUMBER 2 concern for profit above all, lack of transparency in government–business relations, and uninformed and uninterested consumers—these are some of the key factors that we must consider if we are to fully understand what happened in the Gulf of Mexico and why it happened. One might argue that its occurrence was inevitable because of the mismatch between human capacity and technological complexity, as Charles Perrow demonstrated ...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Lauren Withycombe Keeler