The MUTUAL project investigates how municipalities can move beyond the institutionalized pressures of growth-driven development to place social and ecological wellbeing at their core.

Municipalities are on the front lines of today’s major challenges. With limited resources, they must provide infrastructure and social services, address growing inequalities, and urgently reduce their environmental footprint while adapting to a changing climate.

But there is a deeper tension: the systems many cities rely on to stay afloat such as attracting investment, growing the tax base, and competing with neighboring towns may actually be making these challenges harder to solve in the long run.

Through place-based research in Freiburg (Germany) and Grenoble (France), we explore how cities navigate these pressures in practice and what it would take to structurally anchor social and ecological wellbeing at the heart of local governance..