We are pleased to announce that the RSA Board have agreed funding for the RSA Research Network on Bridging Governance Gaps in City-regions Addressing Land Take and City-Region Building through Comparative Research.
Policy goals of social-ecological transformation and sustainability place a strong focus on cities (like SDG 11). A most representative indicator of these policy goals, land take, highlights a shortfall when not addressing city-regional functional interdependencies: land take is not limited to core cities but results to a much greater extent from social and economic dynamics in the functional urban region, including peripheral areas. The policy and planning ambition of no-net-land take-take will therefore be decided on the city-regional scale. However, many urban actors encounter institutional and imaginative hurdles when perceiving and shaping city-regions as one space for action. Against this background, the proposed network has two objectives: (1) challenges and solutions are developed at the intersection of the research on city-regional governance and land take as well as for the intersection of the research fields of city-regional imagination and city-region building; and (2) methodological innovations for comparative city-region research will be developed.
The RSA is looking forward to working with the network’s community and the organisers, Anna Growe (Kassel University, Germany), Alois Humer (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria), Chen Chen (Tongji University, China), Simin Yan (Kassel University, Germany) and Eva Purkarthofer (Aalto University, Finland).
Click here to join the network on LinkedIn.