Bottom up urbanism : Exploring the potential of bottom up initiatives as to encourage pro-environmental behaviour change and action

Abstract: It has been widely acknowledged that environmental damage and changes in the global climate can be attributed to human activities. In their attempt to deal with these issues, current top down approaches to mitigate climate change not only have limited efficacy, but also fail at changing people’s behaviour. In this thesis, we argue that bottom up initiatives can be more successful at engaging people in pro-environmental behaviour change and action than the current top down strategies. The potential of bottom up actions to encourage such change and action is first assessed in literature. A more specific perspective of bottom up initiatives is looked at in which pro-environmental behaviour is encouraged and observed through the lens of urbanism. A practical event on sustainability, co-organized by the authors of this paper at KTH Campus, is then taken as a case study to test and verify if bottom up actions can bring about change in behaviours and generate public engagement in public spaces. The results show that bottom up actions have great potential to reach the community and engage people into sustainable practices. As it was positive and solution-oriented, but also accessible, participative and fun, the event easily attracted people’s attention and interest. The stimulating environment then facilitates the process of sharing and learning information and consequently, it also increases the chances of influencing behaviour change and action.