Urban planning based on resilience principles - Stockholm Resilience Centre

Urban planning based on resilience principles - Stockholm Resilience Centre

Together with Stephan Barthel, Johan Colding, Hanna Erixon, Henrik Ernstson (me), Carl Kärsten, Lars Marcus, and Jonas Torsvall we have created and idea for how to build in the area known as Albano in Stockholm. This area is set to be developed by Stockholm University to expand its campus with some 100 000 square meter of teaching and research facilities, and even housing for students and researchers.

Using general social-ecological system thinking we have striven to find concrete articulations of this theory in urban design. This has meant to develop buildings, urban food gardens, experimental climate change gardens, and wetlands so as to sustain and even increase ecological processes like pollination and seed-dispersal. But also to come with ideas on how institutions and scale-crossing social networks for social learning about ecological processes can be nurtured. The aim was to create a suggestion that could resonate with different interest groups and respect or develop the ecological, social and cultural-historical dimensions of this site.

The area is highly contested, partly since it lies in the National Urban Park, see my two publications on the civil society struggle to protect this green/blue space, 1) "Social movements and ecosystem services" and 2) "Weaving protective stories". Our Stockholm Urban Ecology group at Stockholm Resilience Centre has been doing a lot of work the last years on the park, see e.g. publications by Stephan Barthel, Johan Colding and Jakob Lundberg, and Sara Borgström, and Thomas Elmqvist et al.