Smart-U-Green
Governing conflicting perspectives on transformations
in the urban rural continuum
Landscape conflicts
Analyze conflicting perspectives on
urban landscape quality
Policy controversies
Analyze and evaluate local policy-making using sustainability indicators of urban landscape quality
Governance
Develop and explore innovative options for governance to be operationalized in experimental area-development strategies
About Smart Urban Green
Urban landscapes witness major transformations that affect urban landscape quality as well as the quality of life. Some transformations are desirable, such as transition to urban sustainability, some are inevitable, because of major changes in economy or culture. Transformations in urban landscapes come with intractable controversies, uncertainties and complexities, involving multiple actors. They also stimulate the bottom-up emergence of alternative ideas, practices and networks that confront urban planning regimes with the challenge to adopt more organic, collaborative and transformative forms of governance with local governments, local businesses, citizen initiatives.
News
Biodiversity in decline, a global challenge
The latest report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – an intergovernmental body inspired by the IPCC – is a global warning about the rate acceleration of extinction of species. The data come from an ecosystem assessment over the last fifty years (Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005) and are explained by…
Fight for a sustainable world
News chronicle the French “Gilets Jaunes” movement in France since its beginning in November 2018, following a proposal for carbon taxation in front of ecological issues. The action was intense on the roundabouts of the rural areas neglected, that is to say the areas not well connected to the urban large areas and not really…
The multi-level-governance of landscape
Christoph Görg (2005) considers that main landscape issues are urban-sprawl and traffic infrastructure, that lead to erosion of biological diversity and conflicts of landscapes’ uses. Following the author, governance issues are related to interconnection between politics of scale and natural conditions of place, because top-down process is insufficient. Issues are related to articulation between social…
