What is UrbanScapes?

UrbanScapes is a 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 a 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.

With this site SLU Urban Futures wants to

• inspire SLU researchers and teachers to include urban and transdisciplinary perspectives in their projects
• encourage new collaborations/projects, within and outside of SLU
• engage wider audiences in exploring perspectives on sustainable urban development
• highlight methods, creativity, and new approaches in research and teaching
• link research to important and relevant societal issues related to the urban.

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 and devoted to questioning

The site builds on questions relevant to examining Urbanscapes, formulated from different perspectives. We also encourage questioning with a dynamic approach to organizing the content of the site; the same story may be tagged one way today, and a different way tomorrow. We’re not disorganized, we’re highlighting that any urban question can be seen from multiple vantage points.
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. 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.