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, which ran between 2021 and 2025.

In the project, we developed automated models to analyse urban sustainability discourses based on media data. In particular, we were interested in the rise and fall of different topics, who positioned themselves in which way and in the stories that are told about urban sustainability over time. We also looked back - how did the discourse around urban sustainability develop over time?

We focused specifically on the governance of sustainable transport systems, as an exemplary area of sustainability discourses within cities. We focused on the city of Zürich, but generally provide open source tools and documentation for others to extend the scope of analysis along our lines of inquiry.

On this website you can: