Future Cities Lab Global • Food & Territories

Research Modules of Food & Territories

Agropolitan Territories of Monsoon Asia

The Agropolitan Territories module addresses the unsustainable relationship between urbanisation and food production in monsoon Asia. Globally, urban land expansion is consuming fertile agricultural land at unprecedented rates. Simultaneously, the industrialised agricultural practices developed to meet the food needs of urbanised populations are placing pressure on a range of ecological systems. The module is developing an 'agropolitan' outlook to this challenge, foregrounding the inter-dependence of future cities and future agriculture. It is doing so by developing transdisciplinary and multi-scaled approaches to data collection and analysis, dynamic planning support tools, and designs and prototypes for sustainable agropolitan territories.

SDG

Potential Agriterritories: Agrarian Questions under Planetary Urbanisation and Agroecological Transitions

Through analysis of several case studies in Europe and Asia, the project aims at a better understanding of processes of extended urbanisation in agricultural territories, exploring their characteristics, outlining potentials for agroecological transitions, and formulating concrete design strategies and governance models. The interdisciplinary module contains work packages covering the sustainable agroecological design and governance arrangements, novel soil ecologies, nature's contributions to people, and the impact of renewable energy extraction in agricultural territories.

SDG

Resilient blue-green infrastructures

The overall goal of the module is to design and plan functioning blue and green infrastructures, which not only improve urban water efficiency and reduce flooding, but also support local food production, mitigate heat island effects, increase water pollution control, recreation, biodiversity, and ultimately provide jobs for and a higher life quality of citizens. By securing and/or introducing these nature-based (green) stormwater managements (blue) in the urban fabric, we expect the hinterlands to become more resilient to climate change and population growth.

SDG

Other Clusters

Cycles & Districts

This cluster focuses on the improvement of material processes (digital fabrication, energy generation, building material reuse) involved in sustainable construction and habitation of high-density settlements at building and city-district scales.

Infrastructure & Ecologies

This cluster focuses on the connective tissue of settlement systems (roads, rail, ports and airports, waterways) and their transformative effects on land use patterns, working at city-district, the sea-city interface, regional and transnational scales.

Integration & Strategies

This cluster focuses on the development of innovative cyber-physical design processes (cognitive, collaborative, participatory, digitally-enhanced) by which the forms, patterns and functions of settlement systems may be arranged in sustainable ways.

Tools & Platforms

This cluster groups various software development efforts at FCL Global to create and maintain a suite of desktop applications, web services, software addons, plugins and processing pipelines. We aim to unify and merge the functionality of new and existing software into a universal frontend and standardized processing middleware to provide a complete, open-source platform.

Future Cities Laboratory Global

Welcome to FCL Global, an interdisciplinary research programme that seeks to address the worldwide circumstances of rapid urbanisation. Our ultimate goal is to promote more equitable and livable urban futures, by bringing together Science, Design, Engineering and Governance.

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