New workshop cards help urban gardeners turn sustainability ideas into concrete steps
Urban Ecology
Urban gardens in your neighborhood could become real engines of change if the people running them had a practical toolkit for turning big-picture ecological thinking into concrete next steps.
Planning for a more sustainable community often gets stuck because the ideas are too abstract for ordinary people to act on. This research created a set of cards used in workshops that guides groups through imagining a better future and then figuring out specific steps to get there. The tool was tested in urban garden communities and was designed so anyone, not just experts, can use it.
Key Findings
The Resilience Compass translates academic Social-Ecological Systems theory into tactile, accessible card prompts usable by non-expert community members.
The method was iteratively developed and tested across two urban garden workshop contexts: Shanghai and Auckland, in 2025-26.
The tool combines backcasting (working backward from a desired future) with resilience principles to scaffold both visioning and action-planning in a single facilitation session.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers developed a card-based workshop tool called the Resilience Compass that helps everyday community members plan local sustainability transitions, tested in urban garden projects in Shanghai and Auckland.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
The Resilience Compass: A New Method for Navigating Community-Scale Transition Pathways
To address the implementation gap in community-scale Transition Design (TD), this paper introduces the Resilience Compass, a novel card-based facilitation method integrating Social-Ecological Syste...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
Was this useful?
Want to tell us more? (optional)
Thanks for the note!
Something went wrong — please try again.
Too many submissions. Try again in an hour.
Urban Tree Canopy Reduces Heat-Related Mortality by 39% in European Cities
Trees in your local park or street aren't just pretty — they are literally keeping people alive during heatwaves, and planting even a modest number of the ri...