The project Creative Communities for Sustainable Lifestyles (CCSL) is part of the Task Force on Sustainable Lifestyles, supported by the Swedish Ministry for Sustainable Development, within the United Nations 10 Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production (Marrakech Process).

CCSL investigates the possible links between grass roots innovations and the promotion of sustainable lifestyles. More precisely, it discusses the potentialities of collaborative everyday life creativity (the creative communities) in generating and diffusing new and more sustainable ways of living in the urban environments.

Examples of creative communities initiatives are: self-managed services for the care of children and the elderly; new forms of exchange and mutual help; alternative mobility systems; socialising initiatives to bring cities to life; networks linking consumers directly with producers, etc.

In 2007 CCSL has investigated created communities in Europe, Brazil, India and China.

CCSL AFRICA has been launched in June 2009 in Johannesburg during the ARSCP-5 (5th African Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production) with the challenge of verifying if this attitude exists and is workable in Africa. And if yes, discuss what would be the form and particularities that these concepts can assume in the African continent, with a special focus on its emerging urban societies. And, moving from the promising cases, verify how to make them more accessible, effective and replicable.

In the next 12 months, CCSL AFRICA intends to organise of a series of workshops in different African regions, targeted to local NGOs and civil society organisations, researchers and government actors, in order to confront creative communities and promising cases that have been focalised around the world so far with local African cases and experiences. It also aims at empowering and inspiring other communities to take action towards sustainable lifestyles by showing real cases that are done by normal people.

The first workshop is planned to take place on February 2009 in Cape Town, South Africa. Other three other workshops are foreseen to take place in other African countries in the following months. The project methodology involves collecting local cases and discussing those with local experts in a process organized in partnership with African design schools.