Karlsruhe Transformation Center for Sustainability and Cultural Change
The vision - why a Karlsruhe Transformation Center?
Our society is facing diverse and far-reaching processes of change. This involves a transformation of our way of life and economy towards future viability and sustainability in all areas of life. In order to meet this challenge, the Quartier Zukunft team wants to break new ground and expand its range of tasks. With new topics such as consulting and education, KAT is increasingly addressing companies, educational institutions and local authorities.
With the KAT, we are creating an institution of change
KAT combines research, education, consulting and process support. It shapes, researches and accompanies the development towards a culture of sustainability. The aim is to build bridges together in order to overcome social boundaries, individual interests and outdated structures. It develops interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary action and orientation knowledge for the Great Transformation and at the same time provides concrete, practical contributions for this. The Karlsruhe Transformation Center gives our work in the Quartier Zukunft a larger framework and aims to expand our approach of combining science and practice and extend it to seven fields of action, which also include the Quartier Zukunft, which is being continued and expanded by the KAT.
The fields of action
KAT will focus on the following closely related and fruitful tasks and objectives:
Innovation and action: KAT initiates change and cooperatively develops and tests social, technical, economic and other contributions to sustainable development in all areas of life.
Research: KAT conducts sustainability, transformation and transformative research. It conducts long-term research into change processes and the conditions for a successful major transformation and links the knowledge acquired in an application-oriented manner back to basic research.
Experimental space: KAT opens up, develops, maintains and advises spaces for experimentation. Although Karlsruhe is the central experimental space with the "Quartier Zukunft", actors elsewhere are also supported in opening up experimental spaces.
Education: KAT - in combination with other stakeholders and (educational) institutions - provides education for sustainable development in the university sector, for schools and the general public.
Advice: With its expertise and real-world lab experience, KAT advises other institutions, transdisciplinary projects, initiatives and actors (especially from science, municipalities and civil society).
Understanding and networking: It promotes the networking of a wide variety of actors (e.g. technical and social pioneers of change) in multifaceted collaborations (scientific-public-private partnerships).
Reflection and contemplation: In a restless and increasingly fast-paced world, KAT also offers spaces for reflection and retreat, a refuge for pioneers of change. Deceleration and resonance are essential concerns of the KAT.
In addition to its external activities, the Karlsruhe Transformation Centre is also explicitly dedicated to an "internal culture of sustainability" and wants to assert the claims that are pursued externally in its vision and objectives internally, within its own organization, and thus become an authentic and attractive organization for its employees. Self-determined work is a central element here.
Engine for sustainable developments
Over the next few years, the Karlsruhe Transformation Center will become a locally, regionally, nationally and internationally effective center for sustainable development that demonstrates how sustainability can be lived now in a way that affirms life and the future.
Further information
- To the KAT website
- The institutional background of the KAT is the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
- To the ITAS News "Karlsruhe Transformation Center is founded"
