SLU Urban Futures 2020

SLU Urban Futures in 2020

Offering an entryway to SLU's urban palette of knowledge and networks, linking disciplines and sectors and addressing global challenges with an urban landscape perspective:

• An essential result from the platform period 2017-2020 is Urbanscapes, a complementary web page that functions as an attractive gate to SLU Urban Furtures and SLU, making urban focused work easily accessible to and inclusive for plural audiences. Urbanscapes collects material from ‘across’ (often) isolated content fields, reflecting the inter- and transdisciplinary ambitions of the research platform, and revealing the extent of ongoing Urban work at a university not previously associated with this type of research and education. With more ‘freedom’ to present the Urban palette of SLU this new SLU Urban Futures communication initiative, invites for new engagements, provides a more living platform for sharing knowledge, and increases the visibility of SLU as relevant partner/actor in urban development and transformation.

To build and support transdisciplinary and urban transformative capacities UF offers different method labs:

• The Criticality Lab mobilizes discursive formats in education and through events to strengthen SLU’s urban research and to profile SLU as a partner in tackling the challenges of the urbanizing planet. As new scientific work modes need critical minds, the Criticality Lab offered its third course in Criticality for PhD students, funded by FUN. Due to the pandemic, this course was revised for digital delivery, virtually hosted by TU DELFT, and resulted in open discussion around developing new joint Criticality education offerings, which is considered a successful step towards establishing SLU as part of a European-wide platform for critical urban PhD education.
• The Synthesis Lab operates as a hub for methodological experiments in synthesis-driven knowledge generation. In 2020 the Synthesis Lab focused on documenting and synthesizing outcomes from its inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative research projects; the SLU Landscape “Living Lab” research project and the Strategic Synthesis project. The former studied SLU Landscape as an experiment, or ‘living lab’, to showcase and mobilize the potential of the Landscape field at SLU. The latter engaged with the process, value and tools of doing synthesis (differently) and identifying its significance in and for transdisciplinary work modes and habits of mind.
• The Futures Lab is a forum for interdisciplinary explorations of future research questions and societal challenges. The Futures Lab was realized as a 12-month long project in collaboration by SLU Urban Futures and SLU Future Food with the dual aim of
  • a) strengthening the capacity of the participants to work with a futures focus in research, education and collaboration;
  • b) explore how the future platforms could support multi- and interdisciplinary ways of working with a futures focus.
  • Next to initial seminars, several new collaborations in research and teaching, diverse publications and three researchers’ projects evolved:
    • 1) shrinking cities and green infrastructure in urban areas
    • 2) urban green represented in science fiction
    • 3) young framers view on agriculture and food production in the future

Established collaboration with SLU Global to further the internationalization of SLU Urban Future’s activities and critically assess and debate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

• The focus on processes of urbanization in low and middle-income countries forwards SLU Urban Future’s thematic focus on urban-rural and urban-hinterland dependencies and interactions. The collaboration responses to underrepresentation of the global south in questions of urban sustainability. This collaboration led to a scoping study of urban research connected to low and middle income countries (Report), launched a seminar series at end of 2020 to start continues collaboration in 2021, and supports the library services in adding to SDG 11 related publications. Within the thematic focus of projects relating to urban sustainability in the global south and a particular link to the SDG 11, the scoping study identified three interdisciplinary fields, where SLU has particular capacities to contributes; these are:
  • Urban Food Security
  • Participatory urban planning and public services
  • Climate resilience and energy

SLU received national and international visibility on stages of urban discourse and transformations:

• By SLU Urban Futures being represented at the world’s largest conference for sustainable urban development - the World Urban Forum in Abu Dhabi, which strengthened SLU’s position on the urban agenda and needed attention towards urbanization processes in and collaboration with the Global South.
• By SLU Urban Futures initiating and strengthening collaboration with research networks; such as at the JPI Urban Europe network, mainly based on the collaborative work within one of UF’s method labs on strategic synthesis.

SLU Urban Futures started a publication series with an international reach and a wide readership from plural disciplines and sectors beyond academy:

• The new format Urban Readings, started in response to cancellations of face-to-face events due to Covid19. The latter became a successful digital format that invites international scholars to write about contemporary issues within urban development and transformation. 10 articles got published in 2020.

SLU Urban Futures Hubs strengthened regional embeddedness and cross-faculty linkages:

• SLU Urban Futures established a campus-specific structure with campus hubs in Ultuna, Umeå and Alnarp that anchor the platform in the regions and at the different campuses. They serve as access points, internally, by establishing cross-faculty linkages, and externally, supporting trust and relationship building processes for collaborations. Activities and forums initiated through the hubs communicate, disseminate and co-produce knowledge, which strengthens SLU’s role as a relevant partner in sustainable urbanization & transformation. The hubs offer SLU Urban Future’s methodological expertise, network connections and knowledge capacities.

Download the statistics (pdf, in Swedish)