Montreal: Seeds of transformation to a better future
Overview
Understanding transformations towards sustainable pathways is of key importance given the unprecedented and cumulative social and ecological crises in the world today. Luckily, as people recognize these problems, they engage in efforts to change the world around them. This matters because we need hopeful stories and concrete examples of change to motivate us to build a better future. Experimentation in change-making allows us to learn how to be more sustainable in practice. What may seem marginal or crazy today may end up shaping the future! These bottom-up sustainability initiatives are sometimes called seeds.
Seeds are existing, innovative, and potentially transformative projects that work with diverse ideas not yet dominant in society to bring about a better future. The seeds approach recognizes that many of tomorrow’s solutions are already present today in a nascent form. People all around the world self-organize to deal with challenges that their communities face. Examples of seeds include the rise of the sharing and circular economy, rethinking public spaces, reshaping transportation, and urban agriculture.
Project Lead: Karina Benessaiah
Collaborators: E Bennett, Olivia St-Laurent, Sophie Weider, Lea Vadez, Marilou Binder
Approach
The seeds approach started with a global level inventory of great ideas and projects that may help us change the future, see Seeds of Good Anthropocenes. The Montreal branch of this larger project emphasizes the need for place-based research on seeds and transformations because whether a seed is transformational depends greatly on context. Our goal is to understand how an ecosystem of change emerges and grows and those are inherently rooted in particular places with their own dynamics.
Why study seeds with a place-based approach in mind? These seeds seem to hold important keys to transformation to sustainability. But we know little about how such transformations happen in particular places and for particular people. What strategies do these seeds employ to bring about change? How do these sustainability initiatives scale up or amplify? What are the implications?
The key question driving our project is how do seeds, alone or together, interact to create an ecosystem of change that will push us towards just and sustainable pathways?
Our Montreal seed project is oriented around three main topics:
1) Scaling and Interactions
2) Justice and Equity
3) Assessing impact or success