ABSTRACT
Addressing complex sustainability challenges has encouraged a growing interest in community-university partnerships and collaboration. Transdisciplinary knowledge co-production (TKC), a form of practice-oriented research, is committed to embedding pluralistic forms of knowledge into various aspects and stages of research. This paper explores how a TKC orientation, and a combination of academic and practitioner ideas, knowledge and experience, shaped the governance and research design of transdisciplinary knowledge co-production research project, Visionary Communities, embedded in a marginalised neighbourhood in Toronto, Canada. The first stage of the project involved 8 months of aligning academic and community perspectives to address governance and role issues, determining rules of engagement, a theory of change and a combined set of objectives and engagement principles. Academic researchers’ ideas of sustainability as an emergent property of discussions of desired futures (procedural sustainability), generative of net positive outcomes (regenerative sustainability) and embedded in social and institutional practices (normalising sustainability) contributed conceptual underpinnings of the project. Equally, the project’s community partners’ experience working in and with community contributed a framework for understanding communities as a relational ecosystem of collective assets, formalised as the Connected Community Approach. Weaving academic and practitioner approaches together led to four major reframing and reimagining moments of the Visionary Communities project: finding and sharing resources, project development, combining theoretical frameworks and making climate change/sustainability co-benefits.