Why Scapes?
Why is SLU Urban Futures introducing focus areas in research in the form of Scapes?
Today we inhabit a rapidly urbanizing world that poses considerable challenges to society as it strives toward sustainable urban transformation. Overcoming sustainability hurdles requires communication and collaboration between many research areas and societal perspectives, at levels previously unimagined.
As Professor Thaisa Way points out:
For the SLU Urban Futures platform, supporting sustainable urban transformation starts with transgressing historically established, institutionally entrenched lines separating research disciplines and societal arenas. It recognizes that today’s most pressing research questions are complex and multi-focal, encompassing many interrelated topics, issues and areas of concern, prompting researchers to learn to work in new ways. At Urban Futures, we call these novel, compound modes of knowledge production research ‘scapes.
Framing research ‘scapes
Framing research ‘scapes (instead of traditional research topics) begins with adopting a landscape perspective on urban sustainability; it means re-imaging urban transformation questions from multiple scientific, sociological and humanistic vantage points. This is because the Landscape field draws on knowledge-generating methods and practices from natural science, social science, humanities and the creative arts. It cross-fertilizes and synthesizes scientific, cultural, spatial, historical and regulatory understandings.
Read more at the UrbanScapes - a separate website created by SLU Urban Futures that acts as a complement to slu.se and a gateway to SLU's urban palette of knowledge and networks. This synthetic website will showcase a selection of urban-focused work, across faculties, departments and programs – making it more accessible to multiple audiences.
*Way, Thaisa, “Urban Site as Collective Knowledge” in Site Matters: Strategies for Uncertainty through Planning and Design, ed. Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns (Routledge, 2005) p,224