Within the theme of regional sustainable development, CSTM focuses on the emerging interrelatedness between rural and urban areas in spatial, temporal, and sectoral perspectives. This links to the fact that cities occupy up to 60 times as much space outside their limits as within. Population growth, migration, and changes in lifestyles, preferences and consumption patterns confront us with extremely complex situations. Rivalry within and between regions can also easily lead to unwanted distributional effects and even exclusion.
Existing rurban challenges illustrate that balance is needed between market mechanisms and governance in the organization of sustainable social, technical and biophysical systems. We need to elaborate spatial and social implications of ‘rurbanization’ alike and assess and rethink institutions and governance in order to deal with contemporary challenges—and opportunities—in rurban settings. CSTM and other sections of the Department of Technology, Policy and Society team up in developing a Rurban innovations platform. Insights are needed upon the roles of 1) markets, bottom-up interactions and self-organization and 2) collective, multiscale and spatially relevant public and private decision-making, while dealing with the rural-urban interaction between technological innovation, society and the biophysical system in the contexts of sustainability, climate change and resilience.
CSTM’s emphasis is upon how contemporary innovations such as energy transition, evolving mobility and location patterns, climate adaptation, carbon sequestration, bio-circular economy, sustainable farming and food influence rurbanization, and how systems of rules that structure social and spatial organization (e.g., laws and regulations, policies, networks and boundary organizations, as well as values and preferences at multiple levels of human agency) can be improved.
In collaboration with regional stakeholders, practices, trends and impacts in diverse social and technological settings are evaluated and outlooks and improvements are developed. The knowledge from this socio-spatial sustainability analysis will feed novel educational programs, foresight exercises with stakeholders, as well as regional policy designs and programmes.
Key publications
Mohammadzadeh, L., Ghanian, M., Shadkam, S. , Özerol, G., & Marzban, A. (2021). Application of a land use change model to guide regional planning and development in the south basin of the Urmia Lake, Iran. Environmental earth sciences, 80(17), [545]. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-021-09837-7
Andriamihaja, O. R. , Metz, F., Zaehringer, J. G., Fischer, M., & Messerli, P. (2021). Identifying agents of change for sustainable land governance. Land use policy, 100, [104882]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104882
Özerol, G., Dolman, N., Bormann, H. , Bressers, H. , Lulofs, K., & Böge, M. (2020). Urban water management and climate change adaptation: A self-assessment study by seven midsize cities in the North Sea Region. Sustainable Cities and Society, 55, [102066]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2020.102066
Current projects
- The role of informal practices in convivial post-growth rural lifestyles, 2019-2024
Socio-economic precarity in Japan’s shrinking society has given rise to a range of alternative lifestyles that reject contemporary ideas of work and market dependency. One common feature of these “convivial” lifestyles are informal food practices (IFPs) and ways of food self-provisioning, such as gardening, wild food procurement, and food processing and sharing. Despite many modern-day pressures for them to disappear, IFPs continue to exist for a reason, but explanations as to why this is the case are lacking. This research will catalogue the range and diversity of IFPs performed as part of convivial lifestyles in rural communities popular with in-migrants as sites of experimentation with rural living. This will clarify how IFPs 1) contribute to peoples’ well-being and livelihoods as well as 2) inform and improve policy and planning related to IFPs to strengthen local food economies. Results will create a new research space on social practices, well-being, and food policy.
More information
Project information in KAKEN database: https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-19K15931/
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- Social system and policy towards regeneration of agri-food system from local perspectives in post-Corona era, 2021-2026
Food and agriculture in Japan are caught between global issues such as global environmental problems and internal issues such as the consistent regression of domestic agricultural production. The recent coronavirus pandemic has made the future image even more uncertain. This comparative study regards the coronavirus pandemic as a turning point in the revitalization of the food and agriculture systems, and aims at embedding new policy ideas and frameworks in local policies as social institutions, while comprehensively mobilizing local socio-historical, comparative sociocultural, and socio-practical research methods to explore future social forms of linking food production and consumption.
More information
Project information in KAKEN database: https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-21H04745/
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- Combatting biodiversity loss and improving climate change resilience through evidence-based, integrated, and adaptive landscape governance in the Netherlands (COMBINED), 2024-2030
Climate conditions, the state of nature, and human wellbeing are interconnected, and continuously changing. In COMBINED, we will combine climate, nature, and human interactions in landscapes including and combining grasslands, forests and urban nature. Through this approach we aim, for an impact in which Dutch landscapes recover their biodiversity, become climate resilient, and provide a healthy living environment. We focus on these landscape as they cover a large part of the Netherlands and have a large potential to contribute to this impact: multifunctional resilient grasslands can benefit people and nature, forests are a key component of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and our urban environment has the potential to create healthy environments for people and nature. A cross-discipline, cross-scale approach for these ecosystems and their connections enables us to steer and support their management and design, but is still lacking.
In COMBINED we will 1) unravel how changes in biodiversity and climate interact in Dutch landscapes, 2) evaluate the effects of existing measures and strategies on biodiversity recovery, climate mitigation and adaptation, ecosystem services, and 3) identify what social, political and institutional obstacles influence the implementation of such measures and strategies and how they can be removed and by whom. Our consortium is well-positioned to carry out this urgent and innovative project with the following envisioned breakthroughs: 1) harmonized methods to understand climate change and biodiversity recovery, leading to knowledge on the transferability of these approaches and the ability to model the impact of future interventions, 2) critical analysis, studying why, in the face of well-known problems, changes in management have not taken place contributes to the robustness and actionability of our results, and 3) broadly supported visions on future landscape management to break through lock-in in current policies, to make space for successful, adaptive, and integrated management and policy options.
COMBINED is funded via the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA) theme Climate and Nature.
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- Rurban Ateliers: Co-imagining alternative futures, socio-spatial relationships, and policy actions for just sustainability transformations, 2024-2029
As part of the TPS-based Rurban Futures Collective, this project works at the interface (i.e., spatial, social, cultural, political, technological) between the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’, or rurban. Specifically, we propose a rurban lens to explore and re-imagine rural-urban socio-economic interconnections, everyday materiality and practices, and desirable future pathways. By engaging in experiencing alternative futures through transdisciplinary design and creative methods, we aim to explore the prefigurative potential of such methods and their capacity to affect collective imaginaries about inhabiting rurban space, practising rurban lifestyles, and generating new narratives of sustainable futures. We also focus on political and governance questions behind shifts in everyday practices and on possibilities for collective action to shape and achieve desirable sustainable futures.
The project has three objectives:
- Developing a conceptual and methodological ‘rurban’ framework, centred on recontextualising and relocating sustainability debates through civic engagement, and informing an alternative to growth-driven technological innovation based on inclusive processes of knowledge coproduction and conviviality.
- Examining the imaginative process of knowledge coproduction through prototyping spatial and/or technological interventions in the socio-technical contexts in which local sustainability issues unfold.
- Defining and assessing ‘impact’ in relation to the use of creative methodologies and tools to stimulate engagement, imagination, and action (e.g., shifts in everyday practices, policy implementations).
The project partners with Rurban Ateliers (knowledge networks and citizen-centred laboratories focused on experimentation and collaborative learning, urban commoning, and community agriculture projects. A PhD research project works in parallel with the project.
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Selection of past projects
- FEAST - Lifeworlds of Sustainable Food Consumption and Production: Agrifood Systems in Transition (2016-2021)
The FEAST Project takes a transdisciplinary approach to explore the realities and potential for sustainable agrifood transition at sites in Japan, Thailand, Bhutan, and China with significance for the entire region. We analyze patterns of food consumption, food-related social practices and their socio- cultural meanings, and consumer-based agency to change deeply-held cultural dimensions. We map and evaluate food systems specific to national, regional, and local production, distribution, and consumption contexts. Building upon that work, we engage in action research to partner with stakeholders to vision desirable and plausible futures and to initiate food citizenship-oriented experiments and actions. FEAST co-designs and co-produces socially-robust knowledge and mechanisms that challenge mainstream economic thinking on consumption and growth, work to redefine the notion of long- term food security at the regional level, and engage society in a public debate on our relationship with food and nature that questions shared beliefs and values to reacclimatize consumers as citizens and co-producers in the foodscapes around them.
The FEAST Project was developed, funded, and conducted at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto, Japan, one of the National Institutes for Humanities (NIHU). At its conclusion, FEAST was inaugurated as a non-profit organization in 2021 and continues to conduct research to solve environmental and social problems and support transdisciplinary efforts in local sustainable food policy and education.
More information
Project website: www.feastproject.org
Project information via the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature: https://www.chikyu.ac.jp/rihn_e/project/2016-01.html
Video: RIHN 15th International Symposium "Transitioning Cultures of Everyday Food Consumption and Production- Stories from a Post-Growth Future"Key publications
McGreevy, S. R., Rupprecht, C. D. D., Niles, D., Wiek, A., Carolan, M., Kallis, G., Kantamaturapoj, K., Mangnus, A., Jehlička, P., Taherzadeh, O., Sahakian, M., Chabay, I., Colby, A., Vivero-Pol, J-L., Chaudhuri, R., Spiegelberg, M., Kobayashi, M., Balázs, B., Tsuchiya, K., ... Tachikawa, M. (2022). Sustainable agrifood systems for a post-growth world. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00933-5
Kantamaturapoj, K. , McGreevy, S., Thongplew, N., Akitsu, M., Vervoort, J., Mangnus, A., Ota, K., Rupprecht, C., Tamura, N., Spiegelberg, M., Kobayashi, M., Pongkijvorasin, S., & Wibulpolprasert, S. (2022). Constructing practice-oriented futures for sustainable urban food policy in Bangkok. Futures, 139, [102949]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2022.102949
Vervoort, J. M., Milkoreit, M., van Beek, L., Mangnus, A. C., Farrell, D. , McGreevy, S., Ota, K., Rupprecht, C. D. D., Reed, J. B., & Huber, M. (2022). Not just playing: The politics of designing games for impact on anticipatory climate governance. Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.03.009
Calo, A., McKee, A., Perrin, C., Gasselin, P. , McGreevy, S., Sippel, S. R., Desmarais, A. A., Shields, K., Baysse-Laine, A., Magnan, A., Beingessner, N., & Kobayashi, M. (2021). Achieving Food System Resilience Requires Challenging Dominant Land Property Regimes. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 5, [683544]. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2021.683544
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