Sustainable place-shaping

The overall aim of the Marie Curie ETN programme SUSPLACE is to train ESRs in innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to study sustainable place-shaping practices. SUSPLACE will provide excellent and innovative research training on SUSTAINABLE PLACE-SHAPING and offer attractive career opportunities as researchers, change agents, connectors and intermediates in collective forms of sustainable place-shaping on different scales, at various institutes such as local and regional governments, NGOs, consultancies and private sustainability businesses. SUSPLACE will provide knowledge-exchange opportunities through cross-border and cross-sector mobility of researchers, to better prepare them for the current and future societal challenge of development, integrating themes such as food, energy, climate and resources which are unfolding in places. Sustainable place-shaping is seen as a way to strengthen the participation, collaboration, collective agency, self-efficacy and leadership of people, engaging in places. The integrative challenge is to embark upon a revised and more embedded conceptualization of place — as a dynamic and contingent ‘meeting place’ for ecologies, economies and communities, incorporating both fixities and flows of resources, people and goods and services — in order to meet the ‘grand aims’ of sustainability.