IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cog/urbpla/v6y2021i2p139-142.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Rapidly Changing Cities: Working with Socio-Ecological Systems to Facilitate Transformation

Author

Listed:
  • Karina Landman

    (Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Pretoria, South Africa)

Abstract

Cities across the world are changing rapidly. Driven by population growth, migration, economic decline in rural areas, political instabilities, and even more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic, urban systems and spaces are changing to accommodate moving people and new functions. In many cases, these trends contribute to increased levels of inequality, poverty, food insecurity, and unemployment, while the warnings about the impact of climate change continue to raise concerns. Though some have called this a new urban revolution, others have referred to, in a more apocalyptic turn, the end of cities. In response, many writers are encouraging smarter cities, whereas others are promoting a post-urban context and a return to small communities. High levels of uncertainty are characteristic, along with increased intensities of complexity, rapid fluctuation and unbounded experimentation. This raises many questions about the nature and implication of change in different cities situated in vastly contrasting contexts. This thematic issue of Urban Planning focuses on five narratives from cities across the world to illustrate various drivers of change and their implications for urban design and planning. The editorial introduces these narratives, as well as commentaries from leading academics/practitioners and highlights several divergent experiences and common threats. It argues that to deal with the rapid and often large-scale changes, planners need to view human settlements as socio-ecological systems and plan for change and uncertainty to facilitate the co-evolution of humans and nature.

Suggested Citation

  • Karina Landman, 2021. "Rapidly Changing Cities: Working with Socio-Ecological Systems to Facilitate Transformation," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 139-142.
  • Handle: RePEc:cog:urbpla:v6:y:2021:i:2:p:139-142
    DOI: 10.17645/up.v6i2.4472
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/4472
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.17645/up.v6i2.4472?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Han Verschure, 2021. "Lessons Learned from 55 (or More) Years of Professional Experience in Urban Planning and Development," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 218-224.
    2. Schuman Lam & Heng Li & Ann Yu, 2021. "A Demand-Side Approach for Linking the Past to Future Urban–Rural Development," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 162-174.
    3. Han Verschure, 2021. "Lessons Learned from 55 (or More) Years of Professional Experience in Urban Planning and Development," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 218-224.
    4. Schuman Lam & Heng Li & Ann Yu, 2021. "A Demand-Side Approach for Linking the Past to Future Urban–Rural Development," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 162-174.
    5. Rob Roggema & Nico Tillie & Greg Keeffe & Wanglin Yan, 2021. "Nature-Based Deployment Strategies for Multiple Paces of Change: The Case of Oimachi, Japan," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 143-161.
    6. Safa H. Ashoub & Mohamed W. Elkhateeb, 2021. "Enclaving the City; New Models of Containing the Urban Populations: A Case Study of Cairo," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 202-217.
    7. Darren Nel & Chrisna du Plessis & Karina Landman, 2018. "Planning for dynamic cities: introducing a framework to understand urban change from a complex adaptive systems approach," International Planning Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(3), pages 250-263, July.
    8. Safa H. Ashoub & Mohamed W. Elkhateeb, 2021. "Enclaving the City; New Models of Containing the Urban Populations: A Case Study of Cairo," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 202-217.
    9. Rob Roggema & Nico Tillie & Greg Keeffe & Wanglin Yan, 2021. "Nature-Based Deployment Strategies for Multiple Paces of Change: The Case of Oimachi, Japan," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 143-161.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Macarena Gaete, 2023. "Social-Ecological Knowledge Integration in Co-Design Processes: Lessons From Two Resilient Urban Parks in Chile," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 8(2), pages 359-373.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Karina Landman, 2021. "Rapidly Changing Cities: Working with Socio-Ecological Systems to Facilitate Transformation," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 6(2), pages 139-142.
    2. Rob Roggema & Nico Tillie, 2022. "Realizing Emergent Ecologies: Nature-Based Solutions from Design to Implementation," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(11), pages 1-15, November.
    3. Aseela Haque, 2024. "Inhabiting Flyover Geographies: Flows, Interstices, and Walking Bodies in Karachi," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 9.
    4. Rob Roggema, 2023. "The Eco-Cathedric City: Rethinking the Human–Nature Relation in Urbanism," Land, MDPI, vol. 12(8), pages 1-22, July.
    5. Tao Shen & Chan Gao, 2020. "Sustainability in Community Building: Framing Design Thinking Using a Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(16), pages 1-13, August.
    6. Paulo Silva, 2020. "Not So Much about Informality: Emergent Challenges for Urban Planning and Design Education," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(20), pages 1-16, October.
    7. Darren Nel & Araz Taeihagh, 2024. "The soft underbelly of complexity science adoption in policymaking: towards addressing frequently overlooked non-technical challenges," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 57(2), pages 403-436, June.
    8. Austin Dziwornu Ablo & Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, 2022. "A SHADOWY ‘CITY OF LIGHT’: Private Urbanism, Large‐Scale Land Acquisition and Dispossession in Ghana," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 46(3), pages 370-386, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cog:urbpla:v6:y:2021:i:2:p:139-142. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: António Vieira or IT Department (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cogitatiopress.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.