Our Mission

The California Center for Sustainable Communities (CCSC) tackles the hard questions behind California’s sustainability transition. We provide policy-engaged research, data, and strategies that address the complex realities of energy, water, and urban infrastructure – putting people and place at the center of systemic change.

We serve as a resource for policymakers, community stakeholders, environmental advocates, journalists, and residents navigating California’s urban future.

What Sets Us Apart

We are bidirectional translators. Our interdisciplinary team – ethnographers, sociologists, geographers, data scientists, policy analysts, GIS specialists, and engineers – interprets technical systems for communities and translates community realities back to agencies and policymakers. We don’t stop at the city’s edge.

This is genuinely transdisciplinary work requiring horizontal collaboration – where quantitative and qualitative insights carry equal weight, where researchers with different backgrounds engage in dialogue, debate, and discovery. While other modelers often exclude human behavior and social dynamics, we put people back in. We understand that energy, water, and transportation systems are intertwined with social, political, and environmental processes, and we approach them from that complexity.

We don’t chase short-term solutions or begin with techno-optimist visions of green hydrogen, carbon capture, or imaginaries of limitless growth. We ground-truth policy change against lived reality, engaging in the minuteness of infrastructural systems while tracing their far-reaching impacts. We are recapturing the word “realistic” – focusing on conditions and systems that exist today. Only through rigorous process does actual understanding emerge.

Our Approach

We exist in a governmental world, but we also interrogate what it means to govern and what it means to “improve” socio-environmentally in systematic ways. Our window into these questions is infrastructure—the physical and social systems that shape urban life.

• Policy-engaged research that demystifies complex infrastructural systems
• Coupled socio-technical analysis examining cities and infrastructure as metabolic processes with far-reaching impacts
• Strategies for problems without easy solutions, focusing on conditions and systems that exist today
• Critical inquiry into what it means to govern, to “improve” socio-environmentally, to build realistic futures.
• Careful and ethical engagement with public decision-making processes

Our Values

• Equity and environmental justice
• Transparency in policy, programs, and systems
• Demystification of technical complexity
• Honoring place and people in all our work

Our Focus Areas

Electricity, Water, Cities, Infrastructure, Urban Metabolism, Urban Planning, Energy Systems, Transportation, Governance, Resilience