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Projeto de investigação
Novo: An Institutional Analysis of urban Ecologiacal Commons Governance - with Case Studies in Guangzhou, China Antigo: The policy-making and planning of urban greening in China - with case studies of three cities: Guangzhou, ingdao and Liuzhou
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An evolutionary complex systems perspective on urban health
Publication . Liu, Jieling; Gatzweiler, Franz; Kumar, Manasi
Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of urban health and wellbeing sustainably have often been implicitly biased by ideas such as being ‘human-scale’ or ‘people-centered.’ With increasing urban populations and increasing urban system interconnectivity, many cities have transformed into city regions or clusters, and the external effects of urban growth are carried mainly by the marginalized and the environment putting urban health increasingly at risk. Here we address the question of why human societies have not been better at collectively adapting to the challenges of urbanization and global environmental change? We build a theoretical framework of multi-level selection, complex systems evolution, and governance, following which we then present ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-centered’ ideas of urban development as expressions of two types of socio-political organization with different degrees of self-organization. We found several reasons for which the maladies of current urban development emerged and the seeming inability to resolve them. First, urban systems became increasingly interconnected and evolved into ultrasocial superorganisms, displaying preference to sustain themselves as a whole rather than their subordinates. Second, the difference in scaling effects between the biological and the social network contributed to the mismatch between rapid urban growth and slow adaptation. Furthermore, institutions of decreased variety reinforce themselves and become dominant, creating a positive feedback mechanism and promoting invasive and exploitative exponential growth, but they also reduce the creativity and resilience of urban systems. We also found that both the “human-scale” and the “people-centered” approaches acknowledge the exponential growth and decreasing variety in urban systems, and advocate for correcting the mismatches. To incorporate people's needs and values for long-term, truly sustainable urban health governance, we recommend combining the self-organizing, evolutionary feature of “human-scale” and the coordinative, political feature of “people-centeredness.”
The institutional challenge to co-deliver migrant integration and urban greening—evidence from Haizhu Wetland Park Project in Guangzhou, China
Publication . Liu, Jieling; Gatzweiler, Franz
We aim to investigate the governance challenges of many Chinese urban governments to co-deliver migrant integration and urban green space provision. In specific, we examine the existing institutional arrangements applied in the Haizhu Wetland Park Project in Guangzhou and the consequential marginality. Why is it challenging for many urban governments to take social marginality into account in the conservation of urban green spaces? We approach this research question with the concepts of marginality, complex social-ecological systems, and institutional fit. We construct a conceptual framework to identify and explain the types of marginality emerged and to analyze the institutional fit in the case study. Our analysis reveals a segregative effect in the current institutional arrangements. On the one hand, they are cost-efficient in ecological restoration and urban green space conservation; on the other, not effective in addressing migrant integration and wellbeing. Current institutional arrangements segregate these two interconnected issues, leading to the marginalization of urban migrants. The current institutional segregativity reveals the degree of challenge to balance the pursuits between social equity and ecological benefits. For more collaborative and inclusive urban governance, future research is needed to understand whether the lacking integration of urban migrants is an institutional blind spot.
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Entidade financiadora
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
Programa de financiamento
OE
Número da atribuição
PD/BD/128209/2016