What is UrbanScapes?
UrbanScapes is a new website created by SLU Urban Futures, a strategic platform at SLU with a mission to develop and strengthen transdisciplinary research, education and collaboration in sustainable urban development. UrbanScapes functions as a complementary website to slu.se and an attractive gateway to SLU’s urban palette of knowledge and networks. This synthetic web will bring forward a selection of urban focused work, across faculties, departments and programs – making it more accessible to plural audiences.
The purpose of this site is
- to inspire SLU researchers and teachers to include an urban and transdisciplinary perspective in their projects
- to encourage new collaborations/projects, within and outside of SLU
- to expand the reach and engage wider audiences, exploring various perspective via questions (updated on a continuous basis)
- to highlight methods, creativity, new approaches in research and teaching.
An exploration of what Urbanscapes can be
Urban futures today need a larger vision of the ‘urban’, encompassing much more than big cities, and densely built-up urban cores. To ponder the meaning of urban today is to think about a complex spatial and socio-ecological system impacted by urbanisation processes. Researchers looking into today’s urban environments start to re-imagine the urban question from diverse scientific, sociological and humanistic vantage points. They invite discussions about relationships between the built-up and the not built-up. At SLU Urban Futures, ‘urbanscapes’ can include water cycles, vegetation systems, open spaces, materials of all sorts, people’s practices and imaginaries, collective and individual memories, mobility patterns, and much more.
A framework based on questions
The site builds on questions relevant to examining Urbanscapes, formulated from different perspectives. If you have ideas for new questions, please send them to urbanfutures@slu.se.
A continuously evolving website
This is a living website striving to create novel relations between perspectives and stimulate transdisciplinary capacity building. Content pieces are selected by the SLU Urban Futures’ editorial group and published on a continuous basis. If you want to share with us relevant articles, links, reports or other kinds of content, please send them to urbanfutures@slu.se.
Contact
E-mail: urbanfutures@slu.se
Go to the main website of SLU Urban Futures.
Follow SLU Urban Futures on social media.