Innovative Community Building: Inclusion of Gender, Ethnicity and LGBTQ Rights in Urban Sustainability Work

Inclusion of diverse groups has fundamental importance for building innovative, sustainable communities.

Not the least, leaders within civil society have often played important roles in bottom-up initiatives for local community-building. But what is required for this to succeed in practice?

This project aims to produce practical knowledge on how to create better institutional conditions for inclusion by examining the mechanisms and consequences of creative collaboration in three contexts: initiatives to build sustaiable communities by confrontating gender-based violence, antiracist community-organizing, and care collectives for elderly LGBTQ persons.We develop a novel framework by building on theories of collective reflection, nonviolent communication and care.

We apply, test, and reformulate this framework through empirical research, to develop a practice-based theory of inclusive community-building.

Through discourse analysis of online media and social media content, we map different ideas on what inclusion means and what it requires.

We then explore how these ideas are put in practice through three in-depth case studies: a local group opposing violence; an anti-racist community center; and a queer elderly care collective.

Situated in different institutional environments, these case-studies allow us to examine how practices and institutions interact to generate inclusion and innovate contributions to sustainable development.