Oikodrom Theory |

Oikodrom promotes sustainability as a process

Sustainability is a local, informed, participatory balance-seeking process, operating within a Sustainable Area Budget, exporting no harmful imbalances beyond its territory or into the future, thus opening the spaces of opportunity and possibility.

Sustainability is a local process: it happens at a specific place – the living environment of a settlement within its region, including living patterns and creativity of the tenants.

Sustainability is a participatory process: it needs informed, empowered, gender sensitive human actors who are the stakeholders in the sustainability negotiation process.

Sustainability is a balance-seeking process: it models alternative future scenarios, taking into account the classical triad of sustainability: economy, ecology, socio-culture , complemented by the context of built environment.

Sustainability creates spaces of possibilities: sustainability considers the future as an open space where socio cultural life quality, economic equity, and ecological needs converge towards balance.

When starting the local sustainability processes, the team generates theses and theories for the emerging research field of sustainability. Thereby we discuss the role of the scientists, and work on future scenarios and a common vocabulary – the thesaurus of sustainability. Sustainability research has its local expressions, and participation of dwellers is indispensable. The combination of local and scientific expert knowledge assures sustainability oriented solutions.

Oikodrom combines trans- and interdisciplinary research for sustainable settlements

Interdisciplinary cooperation is a basic precondition for sustainability research: The complexity of societal, economical and material processes demands for scientific knowledge of several disciplines in order to support present and future sustainability oriented changes. “The world has problems, but universities have departments”: already in the year 1999, Brewer criticised sciences for their detachment from their research objects. Since then, many concepts were developed to solve upcoming complex societal issues. Today, Science must be ready to meet the public and to collaborate with society members on relevant issues. Transdiciplinarity is seen as one way towards it: “Transdiciplinarity is always related to something, it is connected with concrete societal problems and means a higher quality of a research process by integrating practice experience” (Jahn 2005: 32, trans. i.M.). Another example of a transdisciplinary research definition: “The core idea of transdisciplinarity is different academic disciplines working jointly with practitioners to solve a real-world problem” (Klein et al. 2001: 4).

Oikodrom facilitates stakeholder involvement

Communication is both a question of language and of mutual understanding.For this process, specific integration tools are needed. Within Oikodrom studies, the team has worked out a range of methods and tools in order to support these complex tasks. Developing a research-design that takes into account the different approaches of the participants and enables an integrative approach: this is part of our scientific strategy. The multicultural research network around Oikodrom strengthens the global approach to the complex issue of sustainability.

The interdisciplinary research process focuses on given societal and environmental local systems, from small neighbourhoods and villages to big towns and cities. Participation in research processes is the alliance between scientific and non scientific knowledge: participation is an involvement of an interested or concerned public on site. Oikodrom sees this approach as crucial for a sustainability process: sustainable development can not be ordered, it must be negotiated.