Buijten & Schipperheijn Motief Amsterdam !is book aims to investigate possible ways of realising a high quality of life combined with a sustainable way of living. !e author studied the worldview, values and behaviour patterns of four long-existing communities: the Amish, Hutterite, Franciscan and Benedictine communities. !ese communities o"er interesting values and principles that lead to a rel...

Ethnic communities living in formidable agro-climatic situations are well acquainted with natural resources and their sustainable management from time immemorial. The uneven topographic situation compels them to conduct a number of trial and error practices with nature and thereby the communities developed numerous locally suited the best practices and technologies. Owing to the significance of...

Social Tapestries views participatory sensing as the principal supporting technology to enable grass-roots groups and communities to track and act on information about their local environment. In this article, we report on our experiences with a low-cost open source hardware and software platform, which we specifically developed for this task. We describe how we employed this platform to suppor...

Organic agriculture in Colombia has the potential to transform the Colombian agricultural landscape, provide sustainable and dignified livelihoods mainly for small rural growers, peasants and indigenous communities across the nation. These communities are usually located in large rural reserve areas, native forests or in available fallow land. As a tropical country with abundant natural resourc...

Within industrial ecology, there is a substantial community focusing on life cycle assessment (LCA) and corresponding tools and methods. Within the field of supply chain management, an increasing community is converging around sustainable supply chains. These two communities study the same underlying systems, but bring different perspectives to bear. We review seven issues that arise at this in...

In this paper, we describe an approach for Open Collaborative Design of sustainable engineering solutions in critical problem domains. ThinkCycle is a student-led initiative established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2000. The initiative was developed to support cooperative and sustainable design for challenges of critical impact, particularly those related to the environ...