New Agendas under Planetary Urbanisation
Context
What perspectives are emerging for the diverse agricultural territories around the globe that support contemporary cities? The discussions on urban sustainability have mostly focused on cities and urban regions, while not properly observing agricultural territories that are similarly exposed to rapid and far-reaching urban transformation processes. This development actively shapes the landscape of both cities and linked agricultural areas with massive social and environmental implications, opening a research gap for “agri-urbanism”.
Project description
The project aims to fill this gap by analysing selected processes of extended urbanization in agricultural territories in Europe and Asia in three typical forms: operationalized landscapes of industrial agriculture, peripheral mountainous regions, and enclosed and fragmented agricultural landscapes in extended metropolitan regions. The project combines detailed qualitative analysis with quantitative geospatial analysis and modelling to link the social, political, and cultural aspects of urbanization to changes in land use patterns, soil ecosystems, and ecosystem services. The extended metropolitan region of Zurich serves as the central case and reference model. Three additional comparative studies (Delhi, Johor and Arcadia) support a generalisation of the findings. The project involves and interdisciplinary group of researchers and consists of different work packages with the aim of developing large-scale design solutions and governance strategies.
The first work package investigates the processes of extended urbanisation in agricultural areas. The second work package – conducted by researchers of the PLUS group – analyses urban transformation and ecosystem services by assessing the temporal and spatial variation of land use patterns. Researchers of the PLUS group investigates the trajectories of urbanisation and its influence on ecosystem services supply and demand over time. This work package aims at assessing the ecosystem services and urbanization trajectories in the Zurich case study area using historical land use data and important drivers of land use change. A detailed analysis of these changes provides the necessary information for creating a fine-scale “agri-urbanism” landscape typology based on the assessment of ecosystem services and other land use relevant information in an iterative process between machine learning techniques, the designs produced by the architects and inputs from the scientists. Finally, this allows investigating the trajectories of these typologies and deriving management as well as policy recommendation for securing ecosystem services supplied by these typologies. The third work package develops a socioecological assessment methodology that should help spatial planning with tackling the issue of soil ecosystem services. Lastly, work package four serves as an integration platform of the results of the previous packages, and aim at providing concrete design and governance proposals.
Project Team
Prof. Christian Schmid (D-ARCH, ETHZ)
Assoc. Prof. Milica Topalovic (D-ARCH, ETHZ)
Prof. Dr Christoph Kueffer (HSR Rapperswil / D-USYS, ETHZ)
Prof. Dr. Adrienne Grêt-Regamey (D-BAUG, ETHZ)
Prof. Dr Johan Six (D-USYS, ETHZ)
Prof. Dr Stephen Cairns (FCL, SEC / D-ARCH, ETHZ)
Assoc. Prof. Dr Nancy Couling (Bergen School of Architecture)
Dr Nikos Katsikis (University of Luxembourg)
Ass. Prof. Naomi Hanakata (NUS, Singapore)
Matteo Riva
Kevin Vega
Karoline Kostka
Funding
Future Cities Lab (FCL) Global is a research collaboration between ETH Zurich and the Singapore universities – National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) – with support from the National Research Foundation (NRF). It operates under the auspices of the Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC).
Duration
June 2021 – June 2025
Contact
Website
https://fcl.ethz.ch/research/new-urban-agendas-planetary-urbanisation.html