Chapter 5 The souvenirs of communism: missed opportunities for sustainable development innovations in the enlarged European Union

One autumn morning in the early 1990s a group of professionals from Slovakia and the Czech Republic arrived at the vast Open University (OU) campus in Milton Keynes, UK to be trained to teach the OU’s environmental courses in their countries. As the bus drew up to the campus, their jaws dropped at the sight of car parks surrounding university buildings filled with some 2,000 cars. ‘So we came here to learn how to protect the environment?’ sighed one of the Slovak visitors.