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project

Emerging Sustainability

17 September 2007 - 16 September 2010

PI/s in Exeter: Dr Robin Durie

Funding awarded: £ 37,350

Sponsor(s): EPSRC

Project webpage(s)

Emerging Sustainability

About the research

Sustainability is a key challenge for modern social systems. This project will explore sustainability as an emergent property of the interactions between and among people, societies, technologies and the built and natural environments. We will investigate the conditions and factors which allow or hinder the emergence of sustainability in domains including health, organic agriculture and urban water systems. More significantly, the project will experiment with open source knowledge space as a method of facilitating the emergence of new knowledge about complex systems. We hypothesise that open source interaction between theoretical and methodological developments in complexity theory and expert and practitioner knowledge in specific domains will lead to rapid and unanticipated advances in both fields.

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council