Putting sufficiency into practice: Transdisciplinary sufficiency research in urban development: The Hafen-Ost real-world laboratory in Flensburg, Germany

The evaluation of real-world laboratories is crucial. Since not only successes but failures and obstacles can provide information about the conditions for transformation, it is appropriate to also examine difficulties in a methodologically guided way.

The port in Flensburg, Germany, has shaped the city’s identity. Globalisation and deindustrialisation have seen the northern German port on the Baltic Sea lose its economic importance. The city of Flensburg is currently planning to build a new district on a huge redevelopment site. The idea is to create a district with an infrastructure that promotes and enables lifestyles that use resources and land sustainably. The real-world laboratory on sufficiency-oriented urban development described and evaluated here aimed to better understand the process of implementing sufficiency policies and their effects, and to develop the knowledge and skills needed for sufficiency-oriented policymaking. The real-world laboratory is a collaborative project between members of the city administration and academics from the Europa-Universität Flensburg. The evaluation shows both the difficulties of putting sufficiency policies into practice and their potential for sustainability.