Progetti di ricerca

Over the last 25 years, the European Union has been solidly committed to making its cities and local communities more sustainable. Indeed, European communities, cities and regions have engaged in Local Sustainability Transition (LST), making the EU a laboratory for sustainable solutions, including… Leggi tutto the socio-technical aspects of transition. LST has been extensively studied by European SSH researchers, experts, and practitioners, using “the case study” as a privileged tool for investigating context- specifc transitions towards environmentally sustainable socio- technical systems. However, despite the production of a massive corpus of knowledge on LST in Europe, there are still several difculties in the real exploitation of such knowledge for further research purposes. Among them it is worth mentioning: the fragmentation of knowledge and data (as case studies are scattered across a multitude of projects or institutional repositories or websites); the lack of archives to store and preserve knowledge and data produced; the lack of sufcient attempts to organise data collected and knowledge produced across cases (e.g. by producing indexes or metadata); the difculty of cumulating data on the same cases from different studies. In summary, despite the unprecedented work of analysis of LST conducted over the last two decades by SSH, the knowledge produced is difcult to access and use and it risks even being wasted, as the potential of using these data for future research (e.g. diachronic or cross- case research) or practical applications (e.g. learning by other communities or municipalities) remains untapped. In this context, the overall objective of the project is developing a “Case Studies Atlas of Local Sustainability Transition - CASTAL”, i.e. a new digital research object collecting case studies (mainly licensed in CC by) and making them Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), thus contributing to Open Science and EOSC, by enabling future research and the exploitation of research results by researchers from SSH and other disciplines, and from local authorities, businesses and citizens.