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 to analyse urban sustainability discourses based on media data. In particular, we are interested in the rise and fall of different topics, who positions themselves in which way and in the stories that are told about urban sustainability over time. We also look back - how has the discourse around urban sustainability developed over time?
We focus specifically on the governance of sustainable transport systems at the moment #, 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.
Here you can:
- Explore our data in detail in an interactive web application (updated daily)
- Get a quick overview over recent articles in the media discourse about urban sustainable transport in Zürich (updated daily)
- Find out how relevant organisations have positioned themselves over time regarding key issues in urban sustainable transport by browsing automated actor reports
- Read up on the conceptual foundations and technical documentation of our processing pipeline.