Empowering the future: building sustainable cities through education

This paper focuses on workshops on Sustainable Cities that took place in collaboration between Western Sydney University (WSU) and two schools. The result of this collaboration outlines wider lessons for teachers and urban planners. In the workshops, school students were exposed to hands-on experiences and learnt about major sustainability principles and how to build walkable communities were also discussed, and students were engaged in considering how these can be part of sustainable and net-zero cities. The results of these workshops were twofold: school students came away from the workshops with increased awareness of sustainability and more robust environmental action planning; and recommendations and insights were given on what works best to incorporate sustainability in the curriculum and to engage school students in constructive problem-solving dialogue. In this paper, the importance of facilitating these workshops is discussed to demonstrate how to partner collaboratively schools and universities in order to develop more impactful sustainability-oriented education research. The results show school-university partnerships can help empower the next generation with the knowledge, skills and energy needed to solve global sustainability issues.