Sustainability Gym — Mona Steinhäußer

Companies on Venlo’s business parks are aware that they need to actively address the challenges caused by climate change. However, their perspectives on these challenges can be very different. A motorcycle shop, a bank office and an insurance company, for example, may experience the effects of climate change in very different ways. As direct neighbours, how can they find a starting point for working together?

Behavioural change

One joint initiative was a study carried out by HAS University of Applied Sciences. This resulted in a range of practical measures, such as green roofs, pergolas, swales and trees. These kinds of interventions can help reduce the effects of heat stress, flooding and air pollution in the short term.

However, successful climate adaptation requires more than changes to the physical environment. It also requires changes in the behaviour of both businesses and consumers, organisations and individuals. From an artistic perspective, Mona Steinhäußer wants to support the development of a more sustainable business park, with a particular focus on behavioural change. She sees the biggest obstacle to lasting change in the everyday patterns and routines of businesses and people. In her view, routines only change when it becomes clear that they no longer lead to success, including business success, or when old structures are replaced by a more successful system.

Workout sessions

Businesses are not independent organisations that think for themselves; they are made up of the people involved in them. The routines of all these people are shaped by learned reflexes and instincts. Changing fixed patterns, and therefore retraining these reflexes, requires a great deal of extra energy from our bodies. This energy is easier to activate in an environment that is different from our usual surroundings. A new environment is not connected to old routines and can therefore provide different triggers and experiences.

Mona Steinhäußer wants to create these new triggers and experiences through a Sustainability Gym: a clearly defined but accessible workout space at Kantorenpark Noorderpoort. The workout – or ‘out of work’ – sessions will combine utopian thinking exercises with physical experiences. From there, participants can reconnect with their surroundings and their physical qualities. The aim is to break down the complexity and abstract nature of climate change into smaller visions of the future that can become part of the daily routines of employees working on the business park.