Publications

Andersson, E., Grimm, N., Lewis, J., Redman, C., Barthel, S., Colding, J., Elmqvist, T. 2022. Urban climate resilience through hybrid infrastructure. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2022.101158

Urban infrastructure will require transformative changes to adapt to changing disturbance patterns. We ask what new opportunities hybrid infrastructure—built environments coupled with landscape-scale biophysical structures and processes—offer for building different layers of resilience critical for dealing with increased variation in the frequency, magnitude and different phases of climate-related disturbances. With its more ...

Colding, J., Samuelsson, K., Marcus, L., Gren, Å., Legeby, A., Berghauser Pont, M., Barthel, S.. 2022. Frontiers in Social–Ecological Urbanism. Land. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/land11060929

This paper describes a new approach in urban ecological design, referred to as social–ecological urbanism (SEU). It draws from research in resilience thinking and space syntax in the analysis of relationships between urban processes and urban form at the microlevel of cities, where social and ecological services are directly experienced by urban dwellers. The paper elaborates on three types of media for urban designers to int...

Colding, J., Giusti, M., Haga, A., Wallhagen, M. and Barthel, S., 2020. Enabling Relationships with Nature in Cities. Sustainability, 12(11), p.4394.

Limited exposure to direct nature experiences is a worrying sign of urbanization, particularly for children. Experiencing nature during childhood shapes aspects of a personal relationship with nature, crucial for sustainable decision-making processes in adulthood. Scholars often stress the need to ‘reconnect’ urban dwellers with nature; however, few elaborate on how this can be achieved. Here, we argue that nature reconnectio...

Colding, J., Colding, M. and Barthel, S., 2020. The smart city model: A new panacea for urban sustainability or unmanageable complexity?. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 47(1), pp.179-187.

Despite several calls in this journal of debating the rapid growth of the literature on “smart cities”, such a debate has in large been absent. Smart cities are often un-critically launched as a sustainable way of developing cities. When cities become increasingly complex as its features are wired into the Internet, theories for their understanding is lagging behind. As it is prospected that a greater number of people and thin...

Sanecka, J., Barthel, S., Colding, J. 2020. Countryside within the city: a motivating vision behind civic green area stewardship in Warsaw, Poland. Sustainability 2020, 12(6), 2313; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12062313

In the midst of the epoch of the Urban Anthropocene, citizen engagement is an important step on the path of creating local and global sustainability. However, the factors that motivate civic urban dwellers to become voluntary stewards of nature environments inside cities need research. This is an empirical study based on deep interviews and a grounded theory approach focused on the “inner world” of people in Warsaw, Poland, th...

Samuelsson, K., Barthel, S., Colding, J., Macassa, G., Giusti, M. 2020. Urban nature as a source of resilience during social distancing amidst the coronavirus pandemic. Landscape and Urban Planning. Preprint DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/3wx5a

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic caused countries across the world to implement measures of social distancing to curb spreading of COVID-19. The large and sudden disruptions to everyday life that result from this are likely to impact well-being, particularly among urban populations that live in dense settings with limited public space. In this paper, we argue that during these extraordinary circumstances, urban nature offers res...

Colding, J., Barthel, S., Sörqvist, P. 2019. Wicked Problems of Smart Cities. Smart Cities 2019, 2, 512-521.

It is often uncritically assumed that, when digital technologies are integrated into the operation of city functions, they inevitably contribute to sustainable urban development. Such a notion rests largely on the belief that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions pave the way for more democratic forms of planning, and that ‘smart’ technological devices result in a range of environmental benefits, e.g., energ...

Colding, J., and S. Barthel. 2019. Exploring the social-ecological systems discourse 20 years later. Ecology and Society 24(1):2. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10598-240102

This paper explores the 20-year evolution of the social-ecological systems framework (SESs). Although a first definition of SES dates back to 1988, Berkes and Folke more thoroughly used the concept in 1998 to analyze resilience in local resource management systems. Since then studies of interlinked human and natural systems have emerged as a field on its own right, promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration in a wi...

Samuelsson, K., Barthel, S., Colding. J. 2019. Urban resilience at eye level: Spatial analysis of empirically defined experiential landscapes. Landscape and Urban Planning Volume 187, July 2019, Pages 70-80

An unresolved issue in creating resilient cities is how to obtain sustainability benefits from densification while not eroding the capacity of social-ecological systems to generate wellbeing for urban dwellers. To understand how different relationships between urban form and wellbeing together play out, we analysed geocoded experiential data (1460 experiences from 780 respondents) together with variables of the physical enviro...

Gren, Å., Colding, J., Berghauser-Pont, M., Marcus, L. 2018. How smart is smart growth? Examining the environmental validation behind city compaction. Ambio DOI 10.1007/s13280-018-1087-y

Smart growth (SG) is widely adopted by planners and policy makers as an environmentally friendly way of building cities. In this paper, we analyze the environmental validity of the SG-approach based on a review of the scientific literature. We found a lack of proof of environmental gains, in combination with a great inconsistency in the measurements of different SG attributes. We found that a surprisingly limited number of st...