The four pathways below offer different ways into the symposium’s central question: how sustainable worlds are imagined, designed, inhabited, maintained, and transformed.
They move from climate and ecological change, to built environments and infrastructure, to food, tourism, mobility, and everyday systems, to health, aging, care, and collective wellbeing. Together, they invite participants to think across the environmental, spatial, social, material, and human systems through which futures are sustained or placed at risk.
The pathways are not intended as fixed boundaries. We welcome proposals that sit between them, challenge them, or use them as starting points for emerging questions, experimental methods, and new forms of sustainability research and practice.
This pathway explores the ecological and climatic conditions shaping sustainable futures. It invites work on climate impacts, mitigation, adaptation, biodiversity, environmental justice, ecological resilience, environmental governance, and the changing relationships between human and more-than-human worlds.
It also welcomes inquiry into hidden risks, uneven vulnerabilities, local responses, planetary limits, and the social, political, and ethical questions raised by environmental change.
This pathway focuses on the material and spatial systems through which sustainability is designed and lived. It welcomes contributions on architecture, planning, infrastructure, housing, cities, landscapes, construction, energy, public space, and the built environments that shape everyday life.
It invites reflection on how design decisions, spatial arrangements, technologies, materials, and infrastructures can support more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable futures.
This pathway considers the everyday systems through which sustainability is practiced, consumed, circulated, and experienced. It invites work on food systems, agriculture, consumption, tourism, leisure, travel, mobility, local economies, cultural practice, and the social infrastructures of daily life.
It also opens questions about how people, goods, practices, and places move through systems of production, exchange, recreation, care, and environmental impact.
This pathway addresses sustainability as a question of human wellbeing across the life course. It welcomes work on health systems, public health, aging societies, care infrastructures, disability, intergenerational futures, community wellbeing, prevention, access, and the social conditions that support flourishing lives.
It also invites reflection on how sustainable futures depend not only on ecological resilience, but on durable systems of care, health, equity, and social support.
Taken together, these pathways position Imagining Sustainable Worlds as a forum for work that is ecological, spatial, social, material, and deeply concerned with collective wellbeing. The symposium is intended to support dialogue across fields that often share concerns with resilience, sustainability, care, and long-term futures, but approach them through different methods and traditions.
Imagining Sustainable Worlds brings together Common Ground Research Networks concerned with how environmental, spatial, food, mobility, health, aging, and wellbeing systems shape collective futures.
The participating Networks connect work across sustainability, climate change, constructed environments, food studies, tourism and leisure, aging, health, and society. Together, they create a shared space for fields that often overlap in practice but are separated by professional, institutional, or disciplinary boundaries.
For 2027, On Sustainability Research Network serves as the host Network, helping shape this year’s emphasis while inviting exchange across the wider sustainability ecology of Common Ground.