Urban-Rural Systems: Seeding Adaptive Infrastructure
Investigating contemporary patterns, processes, and practices of urban-rural settlement in Monsoon Asia; understanding their dynamics; and proposing knowledge strategies, design scenarios, and action plans for sustainable development pathways.
This research is focused on the hybrid urban-rural regions emerging around many cities and towns in Monsoon Asia. Monsoon Asia supports close to 50 percent of the world’s population, and much of it is accommodated in urban-rural regions. As such they already represent one of the world’s dominant forms of settlement. Scholars have also suggested that they represent a distinctly Asian settlement type that is anomalous compared to cities elsewhere. How such settlements change in the future will have significant impact on the wider patterns of urbanisation at a regional and global scale. Despite this, we have little up-to-date information on the extent or characteristics of such settlements. Furthermore, it is unclear what planning approaches, urban design strategies, and material and technological interventions might effectively ameliorate the most damaging, and enhance the positive characteristics of urban-rural settlement types. Could it be that contemporary urban-rural regions of Asia contain the seeds for a distinctive urban-rural ‘urbanisation’? Could such hybrid regions offer insights into ameliorating the interconnected threats of urban population growth, deteriorating quality of urban environments, and declining productivity of agricultural regions? Furthermore, what might such insights offer to alter- native approaches to urban design and planning elsewhere, and what might they have to offer to the emerging consensus around a global frame- work for sustainable urbanisation?
The research will:
1) Investigate the patterns (morphologies, infrastructures, land-uses), processes (economic, ecological, demographic) and practices (agency, culture, skills) of settlements in urban-rural regions of Monsoon Asia
2) Help understand the varying stable, transitional, vigorous or entropic dynamics that shape contemporary urban-rural settlements
3) Propose a range of knowledge strategies, design scenarios, and action plans for sustainable development pathways in Monsoon Asia.
For further details visit external pageUR Systems
