Sustainable Places Research Institute

Cardiff International Conference on Sustainable Place-Making

Date: 29th/30th October 2012
Venue: Sustainable Places Research Institute, Cardiff University
Fee: £95

 

 

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Alison Blay-Palmer, Assistant Professor, Wilfred-Laurier University
Arthur Mol, Professor in Environmental Policy, Wageningen University
James Meadowcroft, Professor in Public Policy, Carleton University
Tony Capon, Head of Public Health, University of Canberra
Hilkka Vihenen, Professor of Rural Policy, MTT Agrifood Research Finland

Coping with the adaptive changes necessary as a result of climate change and resource depletion becomes one of the main challenges facing the world in the second decade of the 21st century. Sustainability science has grown rapidly as an engaging interdisciplinary field in which to scientifically address these issues. This conference wishes to focus on the problem of sustainable place-making; that is how integrated thinking can be developed and applied in different places and spaces so as to adapt systems of production and consumption and bring about transformative change.

Current structural processes of globalisation, financialisation, economic competitiveness and technological development are creating constraints and major challenges for sustainability and social cohesion. Many of these processes have tended to reduce the significance and diversity of place. Also, in many scientific disciplines place-based thinking and applications have given way to more generic models of understanding and application. Society faces emerging and interconnected sustainability challenges linked to financial instability, ’peak oil’, food security, climate change, drought, loss of biodiversity and other eco-system services, and demographic changes including migration.  At the same time we are witnessing the growth of potentially transformatory ‘place-based’ initiatives associated within, for example, the key resources sectors of energy, food, mobilities, health and household goods and services. Territorial and place-based approaches are also becoming more important in policy debates and innovation strategies concerning regions such as Europe and at the city-region levels.  The importance of redefining and recognising diversified territorial assets and new types of social and regional cooperation and collaboration has been recognised by such bodies as the EU and the OECD in considering economic and innovation strategies. These concerns now need to embrace questions about the spatial economy and how this re-links with ecological and socio-cultural and community processes of evolution and development.

The conference wishes to bring together leading scholars and active researchers around the theme of sustainable place making, providing a platform for critical debate and progress about the theoretical/ conceptual and practice and policy implications of adopting place-making approaches.

Conference Organising Committee
Terry Marsden
Leanne Cullen-Unsworth
Isabelle Durance
Alex Franklin
Yi Gong
Brian MacGillivray
Abid Mehmood

 

Themes:                 

                                        

• Sustainable and Connected Communities
  
  A sustainable community needs to support the quality of life of its existing and future members. The recent literatures on ‘sustainable place-making’, ‘sustainable communities’ and community-led sustainability initiatives, have put a renewed emphasis upon problematising space and place as part of progressing real adaptations towards the integration of ecological, economic and social forms of sustainability. Such works, in turn raise new sets of questions about the degree and strength of the sustainability dynamic itself in and through places. For example, how can new forms of connectivity within and between communities and their broader environments (both physical and social environment) help sustain the health of the local population? How does the physical environment complement the distinct social character of a community in creating a sense of a place? How do we foster ‘real’ or ‘strong’ forms of sustainability practice? Why do so many community-led sustainability initiatives remain fragmented, marginal and disconnected; how can they become more joined and scaled up such that they add significantly to a denser matrix and cluster of sustainable place-making? What are the rights, roles and responsibilities of each set of stakeholders involved
  (individually and collectively)? Given the increasingly recognised peculiar nature of real sustainability practice - in that it is highly embedded in places and community on the one hand and therefore highly resistant to generic and aggregated progression, either at the empirical or conceptual levels on the other - these questions challenge theory-building as well as our empirical analyses. Nevertheless, exploring such questions and issues remains central to progressing and mainstreaming sustainability practice at the local level, and for delivering the wider goals of sustainable adaptation.

• Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services
  
  Ensuring sustainable environments, in a world where the climate and other conditions are changing, requires a new understanding of how physical, ecological and social processes are inter-related.
  
  Services delivered by our ecosystems have globally been undervalued largely through lack of understanding of the interactions between these processes across different scales. Understanding their coupled relationship is vital for adaptive systems of management and governance that can ensure sustainability despite increased pressure on natural resources stemming from climate change, food security, water scarcity…
  
  This theme is aimed at ecologists, earth scientists, economists and social scientists, and we aim to explore questions related to
  
  - What combinations of ecosystems and social systems are sustainable? How can these relationships be strengthened to foster higher resilience
  
  - What ecosystem services are most under threat, and what are the trade-offs we will need to address?
  
  - What scales are relevant to the sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystem functions, and how can findings be translated from one scale to another?
  
  - What tools and measures best assess current interactions between societies and their natural environments, and can also be used for predictive purposes?
  
  

• Implications of mobilities, flows and migrations for the creation of sustainable places
  
  Implications of mobilities, flows and migrations for the creation of sustainable places
  Sustainability impacts related to ‘place’ are to a large extent determined by the flows that occur within and between places including flows of people, money, energy, water, soil, species, natural resources, produce, manufactured goods, waste and vehicles. There is therefore a need to understand the dynamics of sustainable places, by considering the relationships within and between places in terms of these flows of resources, human mobilities and natural migrations. This theme will focus on how mobilities, flows and migrations impact the sustainability of particular places in terms of: protection of environmental quality; promotion of social justice and; provision of sustainable livelihoods and wellbeing. Key streams include: Natural Flows within (and between) ecosystems (e.g. species migrations, ecosystem services, water, air flows); People Flows (e.g. migrations at different scales, commuting, tourism); Resource Flows (e.g. international resource transfer, energy, food and mineral flows); Economic Flows (e.g. international trade deficits, investment flows, regional economic flows, rural-urban economic flows). We also encourage submissions related to other areas such as information or knowledge flows, ideas and policy flows. This theme aims to include different aspects of sustainability science to inform a future dynamic interdisciplinary flow-based research agenda.
  
  

• Re-placing risk governance: alternative ways of governing places
  
  Risk remains the dominant logic for governing environmental threats, yet its emphasis on universality, prediction and control seems to make it ill-suited to deal with the often unruly features of particular places. Is the logic of risk incompatible with place-based governance, or can it be tinkered with to better accommodate local knowledge, spatial variation, and meaningful public participation? Or do we need to look elsewhere for alternative logics of governing places – e.g. precautionary, or adaptive management – and what sort of ontologies and institutional designs might they entail?