Understanding and tracking urban sustainability discourses

This website provides the documentation and background for the sustainability.discourses project at the Digital Society Initiative of the University of Zürich.

We develop automated models based on digitally available data (media texts, homepage hyperlinks, open government data…) to analyse urban sustainability discourses. In particular, we are interested in the rise and fall of different topics, who is included and not included and what narratives are drawn up around urban sustainability. We also look back - how has the discourse around urban sustainability issues developed over time?

We focus specifically on the governance of sustainable transport systems, affordable housing, climate adaptation and mitigation, and urban green areas. At this stage, we focus on the city of Zürich, but we plan to either extend our models to different Swiss cities or provide the open source tools for others to do so.

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