Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation
Overview & Approach
Land use has arguably been the most enduring and tangible expression of human-Earth relationships across space and time. Indeed, global intensification of land use is argued to be a key component of the ‘Great Acceleration’ of human–Earth system interaction and life in the Anthropocene.
Urbanisation is a particularly significant form of land use change given that two-thirds of the human population will live in cities by 2050. Urbanism also impacts the Earth system, and cities make major contributions to climate change, modify biodiversity, and influence land use through construction, administrative policies, and the consumption of food and materials. The coevolution of urbanisation and land use will undoubtedly be critical to our future on this planet, and are therefore placed at the core of the new Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation (DLU).
Cities are not recent phenomena, however. They have a rich, global history extending back ~5,500 years. Yet, the urban past is often neglected in contemporary urban studies and policy as a result of restrictive definitions focused on the ‘urban-ness’ of individual sites, regional isolation, and patchy records. The DLU is based on the idea that cities do not exist in a vacuum. They are connected to other cities, settlements, local, regional, and global histories, and, through land use on different spatial scales, to the Earth system. It looks ‘beyond the city’ to approach two major themes: i) the socioeconomic, cultural, and ecological variability characterising urban forms, trajectories, and networks across space and time, and ii) the co-evolutionary connections between these urban dynamics, their land uses, and different parts of the Earth system.
The department combines archaeology’s unparalleled ability to document long-term material outcomes of urban processes with history, palaeoecology, anthropology, and urban science to build new quantitative and qualitative datasets. This allows the comparison of past urban patterns, land use tendencies, and, critically, their alternatives across a variety of environments, including those traditionally considered marginal or peripheral, such as highland, desert, coastal, and densely forested settings.
Through state-of-the-art fieldwork, archival research, geospatial approaches, and laboratory analyses, as well as data compilation, the department connects observations from the deep past to present planning and future predictions and explores urbanisation as a non-linear, dynamic process, answering questions such as:
- Are there commonalities, differences, or sustainability predictors for urban phenomena and their associated land uses and Earth system interactions across different spatial and temporal scales?
- Have major political, economic and climatic changes resulted in ‘tipping points’ or path dependencies in urban and land use trajectories?
- Given that urbanism is just one possible form of social organisation, what can non-urban pasts teach us about other possible trajectories of land use, settlement, and social organisation in the Anthropocene?
- What is the long-term legacy of different past land use and urban dynamics on modern ecosystems, landscapes and socio-ecological pathways?
- How can we include other forms of knowledge, beyond Western science, in discussions of relationships between land use and urbanisation? What do these terms mean to different people in different cultural, social, and material contexts, and how can community expertise or Indigenous knowledge contribute to long-term interpretations?
- How do different urban forms and land use patterns shape human perception, adaptation, cognition, mobility, and decision-making over time?
- How can insights from long-term urban and land use co-evolution inform contemporary policy, planning, and sustainability transitions?
As a department we have developed together a series of scientific values which see diversity and inclusivity as critical to the above objectives. This includes combining different fields, perspectives, and other forms of knowledge (e.g. art, oral traditions) with common aims in the study of urban and land use co-evolution, as well as recognising the epistemic value of research conducted in different linguistic, cultural, and geographic contexts.
Ultimately, combining diverse methods from the social and natural sciences and the humanities, the department aims to provide novel insights into the roots, path dependencies and emergence of human–Earth system relationships across space and time. The outcomes are new understandings of baselines of anthropogenic change, richer, quantitative understandings of historical legacies for contemporary contexts, and a more diverse library of human-environment-Earth system interactions to provide a wider, more inclusive basis for action.
