Speakers: Darko Radović, Ulysses Sengupta, Christopher Doll, Alexandros Gasparatos, Raquel Moreno-Penaranda

Attendance is free, but advance registration is required: eventregistration[at]ias.unu.edu

13 April 2010, 2.00 – 5.30

UNU-IAS
6F International Organizations Center, Pacifico-Yokohama
1-1-1 Minato Mirai, Nishi-ku
Yokohama 220-8502
Japan

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2.00 – 2.05 Welcoming Remarks / Jose Puppim de Oliveira, Assistant Director, UNU-IAS

2.05 – 2.35 On Urbanity, or: What Makes Cities – Cities? / Darko Radović, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Keio University

L'urbanite savoir faire la ville, savoir vivre la ville. - This presentation will give a brief broad overview of the concept of urbanity, starting from its Western roots in the idea of Greek polis and the Urbs itself, and presenting its various de- and re-contextualisations in culturally diverse contexts and periods. The presentation will open discussion about inevitable redefinitions of the urban in the times of global crisis, and introduce the concept of eco-urbanity, which aims to reconcile the aims of, and the expectations from environmental and cultural sustainability. A strong emphasis will be on dialectics between measurable and, (too) often neglected, non-measurable qualities of the urban.

2.35 – 2.40 Q&A

2.40 – 3.10 Urban Patterns and Spatial Memory: Digital Methods for the Unplannable City / Ulysses Sengupta, Director (Softgrid Ltd), Lecturer (University of East London), Design Unit Leader (University of Nottingham)

The rapid rate of urbanization today has resulted in extreme changes to the physical fabric of many cities. In developing parts of the world, urban territories undergoing constant, sudden, and drastic changes in topology due to planning and gentrification compete with the speed of rapidly growing informal urban settlements. The failure of most current urban planning practice is primarily the inability to address change and variation. How does one plan the unplanned, and attempt to influence constant change? Developed with dynamic digital tools, abstract models of urban territories in constant flux can be influenced by shifting forces and strategic rules (emulating a variety of influences from topography to policy). The presentation will demonstrate how time based complex urban growth models can be used to study various resultant scenarios.

3.10 – 3.15 Q&A

3.15 – 3.30 Coffee Break

3.30 – 3.45 Continuous Urban: Perspectives and Tools for an Urban Planet / Christopher Doll, JSPS-UNU Postdoctoral Fellow, UNU-IAS/University of Tokyo

Urban agglomerations and their functional linkages is the widest possible definition of a urbanisation. Geospatial tools and analysis in the form of remote sensing and GIS allow us perspectives vital to urban research over all scales. At the global systems level, such techniques help us to understand what are the emerging characteristics of our urban planet and how does this help us consider issues of sustainable development such as resource use and urban carbon emission accounting.

3.45 – 4.00 Urban Metabolism and the Environmental Impact of Cities / Alexandros Gasparatos, JSPS-UNU Postdoctoral Fellow, UNU-IAS/University of Tokyo

This presentation will employ the concept of urban metabolism in order to explain how cities interact with their hinterlands. Cities will be conceptualized as organisms that consume materials/energy and it will be shown how this consumption can affect the environment near and far. Examples from a number of studies will be used to elucidate these processes.

4.00 – 4.15 Cultivating the City: Rethinking the Urban Ecosystem from an Agroecological Perspective / Raquel Moreno-Penaranda, JSPS-UNU Postdoctoral Fellow, UNU-IAS/Tokyo Institute of Technology

In a growing and rapidly urbanizing world, conceptualizing cities as urban ecosystems offers powerful insights for the international development agenda to address global environmental loss and social inequality issues at different scales (from reduction of urban footprint s to improving environmental justice). On the other hand, urban farming is most often interpreted as a local development and social change tool, and not necessarily within its broader ecological implications within the city and beyond (for instance, in biodiversity conservation or ecological restoration). In this talk I use agroecology (namely the science to design and manage agricultural systems which are ecologically sound and socially equitable), in order to explore the challenges and opportunities of understanding the city both as an agriculturally productive and an ecologically sound space for development purposes.

4.15 – 4.30 Q&A
4.30 – 5.30 Open Floor/Summary

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Darko Radović is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Keio University and a Visiting Professor at the UNU-IAS. His research focuses at the nexus between environmental and cultural sustainability. He argues that neither the path of ecological nor that of cultural sustainability can be undertaken separately, and that there is no viable future without their harmonious synthesis. His books include Green City (2005, Routledge/UNSW Press; with Low, Gleeson, Green); Urbophilia (2007 the University of Belgrade, PAPS Publishers), Cross-Cultural Urban Design (2007, Routledge, with Bull, Boontharm, Parin, Tapie), Another Tokyo (2008, University of Tokyo and ichii Shobou) and eco-urbanity (2009, Routledge).

Ulysses Sengupta is Director of Softgrid Ltd., a London based architecture, urbanism and design practice with a sister company in Amsterdam. As a fully qualified architect in the UK and member of ARB and RIBA, Ulysses holds a B.Arch Hons, Dip.Arch, and RIBA Part 3 from the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow. He has been a visiting lecturer and critic at various universities (Architectural Association (London), Hannover, Dundee), and has worked on some of the largest regeneration and master planning schemes in the UK over the last 5 years, with clients from both the private and public sectors. While practicing architecture and urban design, he is currently the head of under- and postgraduate architecture & urbanism design studios at the University of Nottingham and at the University of East London. He is involved in developing investigative urban techniques in rapidly changing urban contexts (recently Istanbul, Izmir, and Jingdezhen) and digital/parametric methods of design at various urban scales.

Christopher Doll joined the United Nations University as a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow with joint affiliation to the University of Tokyo. His primary research interest focuses on the socio-economic and environmental characterisation of global urbanization to assist the design of sustainable development policies. Doll’s research training dealt with understanding the contribution of remote sensing to providing socio-economic information in a globally consistent manner. This was primarily done through the use of night-time light satellite imagery and resulted in the publication of first ever map of GDP derived from satellite data. Further pursuing this theme, he then broadened his research by applying the use of night-time lights and other spatially explicit datasets to the fields of development and environmental analysis. His recent work has explored the geographical dimensions of access to electricity in the developing world using night-time lights and a spatial analysis of the World Bank's database on PM10 concentrations for 3,200 urban locations. Doll was born and raised in the United Kingdom and holds a bachelors degree in geography and mathematics from Royal Holloway, University of London. He was then awarded M.Sc. and Ph.D degrees in remote sensing from University College London. Prior to joining the United Nations University, Doll was an Earth Institute Fellow at Columbia University in New York, where he worked at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). This was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria.

Alexandros Gasparatos holds a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Patra (Greece), an MSc in Environmental Science from Imperial College London and a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Dundee. Alex was employed as a researcher by the University of Dundee for the EPSRC funded SUE-MOT programme exploring the theory and challenges of sustainability assessment. Alex joined UNU-IAS in March 2008 initially as a Visiting Research Fellow (Canon Foundation Fellow) and then as a JSPS-UNU Postdoctoral Fellow. His is currently conducting research on biofuels, ecosystem services, food production systems, social metabolism, sustainability assessment, participatory processes and energy policy.

Raquel Moreno-Penaranda received a BSc in Biology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Moreno-Penaranda then joined its newly created Environmental Studies graduate program which focused on an interdisciplinary understanding of society and the environment. For her Masters’ degree she worked with restoration ecology in Mediterranean ecosystems, while actively engaging in international development cooperation projects in Africa and Latin America. With the aim of deepening her understanding of the complex interactions between social and ecological systems, Raquel joined the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. During her PhD studies Moreno-Penaranda conducted extensive research on Sustainable Agro-ecological Management in Rural Brazil, collaborating with various governmental institutions and civil society organizations. While at Berkeley, Moreno-Penaranda held several teaching appointments, and also worked with the Global Environmental Facility in Washington D.C. After obtaining her Ph.D. and before joining UNU-IAS as a UNU-JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow, she worked as international research coordinator on forests and agriculture for Greenpeace in Amsterdam. At UNU-IAS, Moreno-Penaranda is affiliated with the Science and Technology for Sustainable Development program where will conduct research on the Challenges and Opportunities for International Development Cooperation in Sustainable Eco-food Systems in Urban Areas.