Systems approaches for urban transitions

Welcome to the 'Systems Approaches for Urban Transitions' course!

All lectures will take place on Wednesdays from 9:00-11:00, followed by exercise/project sessions from 11:00-13:00, both held in GC D0 386.

This section serves as your central hub for all essential course information and key project resources. Here you will find the coursebook, course syllabus, group project guidelines and schedule, assessment criteria for the oral exam, and course introduction slides.

Teacher: Maria Anna Hecher, HERUS
Guest speaker: Darius Karácsony

This lecture will introduce the course, providing an overview of its key elements, including the course content, group projects and its assessment. We will then welcome our special guest speaker Darius Karácsony who will offer a unique perspective on the social impact of urban infrastructure through the lenses of philosophy and poetry.

Darius Karácsony studied Architecture and Urbanism in Zurich, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro, with additional training at Diller+Scofidio and OMA New York. After graduating from ETH Zurich, he taught design studio and lectured on architectural drawing at EPFL. To study Renaissance art, he lived in Florence and Rome before returning to Switzerland to lead a design research program at EPFL, where he initiated a collaboration with the Brain Mind Institute. As a member of the British School of Archaeology at Athens, he recently completed a treatise on the poetics of architecture and co-directed a landscape archaeology project. 

Teacher: Maria Anna Hecher, HERUS

This lecture provides an introduction to systems thinking as a crucial framework for understanding and addressing complex urban challenges. It explores the core principles of a system, delves into the interdisciplinary nature of sustainability science, and presents practical concepts and tools to analyze urban systems and to identify high-leverage interventions for positive change. 

Guest speaker: Anna Pagani, King’s College London

Systems thinking can be a powerful tool for understanding complex problems like the pervasive, global housing crisis. By examining the key interconnections within the UK housing sector, this session will explore how systems thinking, especially in participatory settings, can challenge received wisdom and foster dialogue around the issues, goals, and interventions needed to provide homes for all within planetary boundaries.

Anna Pagani is a Senior Lecturer in Engineering at King’s College London. Her research, teaching, and engagement lie at the intersection of systems thinking, housing justice, and degrowth. In her work, she engages stakeholders in co-designing systemic interventions to achieve housing for all within planetary boundaries. With a background in Architecture and Building Engineering, Anna has studied and worked in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, China, and the UK.
Following in the footsteps of internationally recognised women in the field, she was the speaker for the 2024 Athena Lecture Series at ETH Zurich. Her work was also chosen for the Plenary Session of the International System Dynamics Conference 2024. Anna is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, a member of the Post-growth Planning cluster of the UCL Bartlett School of Planning, and of the Postgrowth Cities Coalition. In 2025, she joined the multidisciplinary built environment think tank ‘The Edge’.

Teacher: Claudia R. Binder, HERUS

This week focuses on analyzing transitions of urban systems. It first conveys what an (urban) transition is, and how it plays out at the urban level​. Thereby, we study the example of "Transition Towns". Second, we dive into a conceptual framework for analyzing urban transitions and apply this framework to the case of Paris. Finally, we look into how (urban) transitions can be steered applying the concept of "Transition Management".

Teacher: Claudia R. Binder, HERUS

This lecture examines the value of metaphors in urban analysis, elucidating their power and utility as tools for systemic thinking. You will understand four urban metaphors in depth and study their value from a systems perspective. You will critically scrutinize their advantages and disadvantages in relation to their application to sustainability transitions. Finally, we will work to derive and quantify key indicators for each metaphor and use them to compare different cities. 

Teacher: Maria Anna Hecher, HERUS

This lecture explores the variety of actors (from civil society to the public sector) that drive urban transitions, emphasizing the foundational role of niche innovations and their ability to contribute to transformative change. You will identify the unique, dual nature of social innovations and investigate practical strategies cities can use to foster their development.

Teacher: Maria Anna Hecher, HERUS

This lecture will examine various approaches used to foster social innovation in cities. We will differentiate between grassroots movements and social innovations, evaluating their unique contributions to sustainability transitions. We then analyze the necessity of achieving social acceptance at political, community, and market levels for innovations to succeed. Building on this, we dive into the complex ways individual consumption behavior is shaped by social and institutional contexts, and conclude by covering strategies to develop effective demand-side behavioral change interventions. 

Teacher: Beate Jessel, LAND

In this lecture, we will first take a look at how ecological systems and social and technical systems are interconnected and why multifunctional approaches are necessary for urban transformation processes. You will learn what the ecosystem services approach can contribute to systems approaches for urban transitions under these two premises and how it can be integrated into relevant analyses. A case study will help us to specifically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of considering ecosystem services in socio-ecological transformations of urban areas. 

Teacher: Beate Jessel, LAND

Infrastructures are essential for enabling, maintaining or improving living conditions in urban systems. Beyond the usual focus on grey infrastructure, in this lecture we will discover the potential that green and green-blue infrastructures offer for designing sustainable urban systems. Social infrastructure is also an important factor. Above all, however, the various types of infrastructure should be systematically linked to create synergies. Three case studies illustrate how this linking can be achieved on a large scale.

Teacher: Beate Jessel, LAND

In this lecture, we will delve deeper into the approach of linking grey, blue-green, and social infrastructures in urban systems to achieve multiple benefits. We will illustrate how streets can be transformed from mere transport routes into vibrant spaces. Furthermore, transformation processes should increasingly focus on activating the numerous “grey” potentials within cities to make them more effectively and diversely usable. 

Teacher: Simon Montfort, HERUS

This lecture introduces how cities operate within multi-level governance systems and what this means for their ability to take climate action. Students explore the growing role of cities in global climate governance, experience collective-action and free-riding dynamics through a negotiation game, and learn why cities can drive sustainability transitions in areas such as land-use, mobility, and local services while remaining constrained in system-level domains like energy, building standards, and finance. The session clarifies how different governance types shape city autonomy and provides a foundation for analyzing the opportunities and limits of urban climate policy. 

Teacher: Simon Montfort, HERUS

In this lecture, we examine how various climate solutions - behavioral, political, infrastructural, technological, and nature-based - can be implemented across different types of urban environments. Drawing from empirical evidence, we will assess what city leaders and policymakers can learn about tailoring strategies to context-specific challenges. The lecture connects these solutions to earlier discussions on urban challenges and uses a leverage points perspective to identify where transformative interventions are most effective. 

Guest speaker: Anton Sentic, Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Urban Living Labs and Real-World Labs are increasingly utilised to enable and accelerate urban sustainability transitions, using co-creation processes involving multiple stakeholders in real-life settings to implement, test and scale social and technical innovations supporting alternative system configurations. The strong practice orientation of such labs comes with its own challenges - high context dependence and heterogeneous stakeholder networks are among the many factors influencing their development and effective management. Drawing on multiple years of experience in and with (Urban) Living Labs including the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg and the WinLab Living Lab in Winterthur, Anton will reflect on experiences and best practices in setting up and co-managing Urban Living Labs, focusing both on structural and process factors, and in particular on stakeholder empowerment and enabling co-creation and co-design. 

Anton Sentic is a senior research associate and lecturer at the Institute of Sustainable Development of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. With a background in sustainable business management and Transition Studies, Anton is working on the interface between Transitions concepts and Living Labs, exploring the role of protected experimentation in developing socio-technical innovations and supporting systemic change processes in the SWEET SWICE and SWEET Lantern consortia as well as multiple smaller local and regional projects. He has been a member of the Sustainable Transitions Research Network Steering Group from 2019-2025 and is currently working with the European Network of Living Labs in the Research, Harmonization and Transition Super Living Labs working groups.