On a sunny autumn morning, John Thackara is huddled with groups of students at The Hub Halifax, and both the setting and the audience couldn't suit him better. A global guru of sustainable design, Thackara is in the city for 4 Days, an event its organizers have billed as "a civic engagement unconference, focused on how design can foster forward-thinking growth."

Thackara, who calls himself a "contract cross-pollinator," endorses what he calls "collaborative innovation." The Hub, an office and meeting space in the city's downtown that's available to members on a pay-for-what-you-need basis, bills itself as "a place for creative collisions." Thackara has challenged the students, all from NSCAD University, to work on projects that will enhance a city by focusing on its assets. "Instead of looking at cities as a collection of buildings, John looks at the systems," says Matthew Hollett, who teaches design at NSCAD. That's why at one table a group is crouched over computers working on how to use wind, a fairly steady feature of this hilly oceanside city, as an element of a sustainable-energy system.

The British-born, France-based Thackara, 58, isn't a pie-in-the-sky dreamer, nor does he prescribe any one solution to urban ills. Instead, he believes it's a mistake to try to impose a solution on a community. "Telling people what to do or exhorting them to be good seldom works, especially in the field of sustainable design," he writes in the online journal What Matters. Thackara helps people develop their own grassroots solutions in collaboration, but they determine what works best for them. The goal is to find better ways to do daily activities, but not to develop the solutions in isolation. To that end, throughout 4 Days Thackara visited several locations, including the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) and the new Halifax Farmers' Market site, to share stories about sustainability and collect tales to share elsewhere.

Thackara is interested in people who are working on car sharing, local food distribution, and water capture; he brings his insight from the more than 40 countries where he has given presentations and from events and projects he has directed across Europe and India, among other international locales. He tells people about Montpellier, an hour from where he lives in the south of France, which now has a car-free city centre. He discusses the "Lewes pound," a local-currency scheme in southern England aimed at bolstering the local economy. He mentions groups of artists revitalizing a rundown section of Berlin.

The big idea that Thackara will be taking away from 4 Days is that of the NSCC. Situated across Halifax's harbour in Dartmouth, on a site with a sweeping view of the city, when the NSCC's Waterfront campus opened in 2007 it was a poster child for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). Now the campus will be the site of the Centre for the Built Environment, a 120,000-square-foot facility scheduled to open in the summer of 2010. The centre incorporates just about every renewable technology available: solar panels; a solar hot-water system; wind turbines; geothermal heating and cooling; a green roof to reduce cooling demand and increase water absorption; and bio-walls with indigenous plants on the outside and exotic ones inside. "The centre is more than a building; it has the power to affect real change," says NSCC president Joan McArthur-Blair. "It's already bringing private and public partners together, generating applied research projects, and influencing students who will go on to build a greener economic future for the province."

Thackara applauds all of that, and he finds even more to praise about the NSCC network. "Every single course, no matter what it is, starts with environmental stewardship," he says. That's exactly the kind of integrated thinking approach Thackara wants people to consider as they look for practical, sustainable ways to improve their communities.