Sara Borgström

Associate Professor in Urban Green Space and Landscape Management
Docent in Sustainable Urban Development. 
PhD in Systems Ecology/Natural Resource Management

How can we, through long-term collaboration, create, manage and utilise cities’ multifunctional green spaces so that they promote biodiversity, health and well-being, and social-ecological resilience? 

Through knowledge co-creation across disciplines, professions, levels of society, and between actors of different kinds, which is the core of my approach in research, teaching and collaboration. It is a necessity for us to be able to deal with today's challenges.

Through a strong relationship with nature. We care about what we have a relationship with, which is why my current research is focused on how we can strengthen people's relationship with nature, especially in cities.

Multifunctional landscapes * Knowledge co-creation * Sustainable urban development * Social-ecological resilience * Nature-human relationships

My research is applied and interdisciplinary, using social-ecological systems thinking, biosphere sustainability, and resilience as a framework. The starting point is that urban nature is of crucial importance for sustainable urban development by supporting biodiversity, climate adaptation and health. I work to develop knowledge about the increasingly multifunctional, green-blue infrastructure of growing cities in order to improve its planning, management and use in a socially and ecologically sustainable way. The research is qualitative and takes place in close collaboration with public, civil and private societal actors. I develop methods for collaborative knowledge creation, partly as a research methodology, partly as a method for landscape management.

Within the project Health-Promoting Forests, I focus on the collaborative knowledge creation process between the municipality, forest owners and users in an urban forest, which will lead to practical management that promotes health.

Within the project Citizens Science Lab for Urban Biodiversity, I explore the potential of citizen research to strengthen commitment to and knowledge about urban diversity. The knowledge that is developed will be of great importance for the implementation of the EU's nature restoration law in Swedish cities.

Within the Mistra Sport & Outdoors project, I was responsible for research and collaboration in the Stockholm region. In that work, I coordinated a learning group with local and regional actors and based on research on co-management of landscapes, the handbook Sustainable Places for local collaboration in multifunctional landscapes was developed.

Brief history
Defended my PhD thesis in systems ecology/natural resource management at Stockholm University with an interdisciplinary thesis that examines how traditional nature conservation in Sweden has been implemented in the urban landscape. The interest in sustainable urban development, landscapes and especially the importance of nature, was already aroused during geography studies, which were followed by biology studies with a clear focus on environmental science, ecology and natural resource management. The research became very applied, and recurring collaborations with various actors in society became a matter of course.

After the doctoral degree, the research was broadened to landscapes other than the city, their management challenges in Sweden and internationally, e.g. ecological restoration (Restore), ecosystem-based management (Ekoklim, BEAM) and transition processes (ARTS). The commitment to challenge-driven research grew, and in the projects, I became the driving force in communication initiatives that greatly involved society. In addition to scientific publications, there are therefore reports, handbooks and other material as well as events for the exchange of knowledge, for a broader target group. With this, the interest in collaborative knowledge creation methods grew (e.g. CO City, Mistra Urban Futures Stockholm).

The following year, my research focused again on landscape management in cities, with a focus on their green-blue infrastructure (CoNature, Enable, ISSUE, GreenAccess). These projects investigated the challenges and potential of multifunctionality in urban landscapes and developed analytical methods and tools for co-management in a sustainable and resilient way. Within these projects, Stockholm was the main study area, and therefore, I founded JustUrbanGreenLab, a platform for easily accessible information about the knowledge being developed.

For 10 years, I was part of the group that developed social-ecological systems analysis in urban landscapes at the Stockholm Resilience Centre/Stockholm University. I brought that perspective with me to the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, where I was given an important role as a representative of the ecological aspect of sustainable urban development. I actively worked to include this aspect in research projects, collaborations and teaching and developed a portfolio of teaching materials on the subject. Creating lectures, exercises, seminars and outdoor teaching that explain the importance of functioning ecosystems to different target groups in an engaging and target-group-adapted way is an important part of my work.

Pillars of my teaching:

• Challenge-driven and in collaboration with external partners
• Interdisciplinarity
• Competences for working with sustainable development
• Interactive

Subjects I teach and supervise in:

• Landscape management through collaboration
• Multifunctional green structures in cities
• Sustainable urban development
• Natural resource management and conservation
• Biodiversity, ecosystem services and nature-based solutions in policy and practice
• Socio-ecological systems and resilience
• Recreational ecology and outdoor life planning/practice