Hanna Weiber Post moves on to new challenges

What was your experience working within one of SLU’s future platforms?

– Working for SLU’s Future Platforms means striving to understand the whole of SLU – its researchers, subjects, networks, external partners, and areas of expertise – and identifying where these can cross-pollinate to address complex, long-term sustainability challenges. It’s no easy task. Encouraging transdisciplinary research within a system designed for monodisciplinary science, and working with urban issues at a university known for agricultural sciences, has been a challenge – but a rewarding one.

– SLU Urban Futures has always acted as a change agent: unafraid to try new approaches, ask difficult questions, encourage new connections, and broaden perspectives. The Future Platforms create space for new ways of thinking, and foster a culture of courage and curiosity. It’s been meaningful to be part of something bigger – a movement built on collaborations that grow over time, building trust, relationships, and shared understandings. In the long run, these are the foundations for new knowledge to emerge.

What were the questions you engaged with most?

– Before joining SLU, I worked a lot with sustainable food systems, and I was really happy to join SLU Future Food in their podcast 'Meat: The 4 Futures' during a project year. But what I’ve always been most passionate about is nature and green spaces in and around urban areas – and how natural environments and biodiversity are connected to human health. (That’s essentially all four Future Platforms on one plate!)

What were your personal highlights?

– That’s a difficult question! Things that pop up now are the ‘Eye for Science’ exhibition, creating an article about child-friendly cities and play biotopes, together with colleagues, or the latest exhibition about UrbanScapes – that has been on tour from Alnarp, to Umeå and Ultuna. I also enjoyed creating the website UrbanScapes.slu.se – a place where we wanted to extract and bring forward all the urban at SLU, or “SLU's urban palette of knowledge and networks” as we call it on the site. But my two main highlights are my wonderful colleagues and the incredible work environment. Alnarpsparken has a special place in my heart and I have become good friends with several trees there, especially the hanging beech and some of the oldest oaks. I will definitely come and pay them a visit from time to time.

How can urbanscapes be a way forward to tackle our sustainability challenges?

If you mean the term urbanscapes – it might be a confusing one at first, but when you understand that it highlights the presence of multiple co-existing perspectives within one field of vision, encouraging broader connections and a more holistic way of thinking, you might realise it’s a useful concept when addressing complex sustainability challenges.  

That said, for those who aren’t already in the habit of adding -'scape to everything (I look at you landscape architects), it might be a term you need to warm up to.
Words can mean a lot and have the power to create real change. Being skeptical of new words is natural, but sometimes it's worth trying to get to know them.

If you mean the website urbanscapes, I think it’s a place that could be created, recreated, and reshaped a hundred times over. It offers a great opportunity to develop creative ideas, highlight material that is otherwise not so visible, and bring together knowledge and publications from various locations and trusted sources — served on one platter – promoting the valuable urban knowledge at SLU, and maybe finding new collaborations and ideas.

What do you think should be the urban questions SLU needs to focus on in the near future?

Easy: Climate-resilient child-friendly cities. As a university rooted in the relationships between people, nature, and landscapes, SLU is uniquely positioned to explore how child-friendly cities can also be climate-resilient cities. By connecting expertise in ecology, urban greening, landscape architecture, and environmental psychology, SLU can help shape urban environments that support both the well-being of future generations and the ecosystems they depend on. It’s a natural extension of SLU’s mission to contribute to sustainable, healthy, and inclusive societies. SLU has fantastic researchers and excellent expertise here, and child-friendly urban planning has long been one of the SLU Think Tank Movium's focus areas, through a government assignment. 

I would be very happy to see a mix of sustainable food systems in there, and children involved in the management of urban forests! Of course I am also thinking of the older populations, the lonely, often isolated. Those with difficulties reaching green spaces. In the future, maybe that's you. Fortunately, child-friendly cities usually mean healthy landscapes for everyone, young and old.