Shaping the Future: Urban Resilience and Socio-Ecological Systems Through Time

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Background

For over 12,000 years, societies transformed biologically diverse landscapes to support increasingly larger human settlements, with a mixed record of successes and failures. As cities today face the challenges of climate change, a diversity of approaches is necessary to adapt to a new reality. Placing cities on the timeline of human history and drawing connections between the past, present, and future can provide insight into how we plan for urban resilience. How does past experience and knowledge beyond the Western hegemony help re-envision our current understanding of resilient cities? Are there historical examples of “nature-based” approaches to urban planning that simultaneously provide for human wellbeing and biodiversity benefits, and what contributed to their success? Seeking a wider comparison on the role nature-based systems played in supporting early urban settlements, and ancient cities that exist today, can inspire creative solutions that support both wellbeing and biodiversity in today's changing world.

Understanding how natural systems were managed and played a role in society can inform how modern cities can adapt to change. While extensive cross-disciplinary research exists on the historical legacies of land use in cities, and how the natural environment can be leveraged to increase urban resilience to climate change, this work has focused largely on Western human settlements in the 21st century. The archeological record and traditional local knowledge provide examples of urban settings that have integrated environmental landscapes to create resilient places capable of adapting to environmental and social change. By looking at cities and their stewards over a long timeline, we can gain a more comprehensive understanding of what resilient urban planning looks like. This project brings together social and ecological perspectives, especially non-western, to enable a critical look at how urban natural resources were utilized by people across time and from different regions and cultures around the world. This integrated approach will provide a useful comparison for gaining a deeper understanding of the relationships that exist between urban form, ecological systems and the resilience of ancient cities, and the impact on the future of human wellbeing and biodiversity.

This Research Topic integrates social and ecological perspectives to explore the relationship between people and natural resources in and around urban settings– such as developable land, wildlife, and water resources– across time and space. We focus on interactions that occur between urban form, ecological systems and the resilience of ancient cities, and their connections to maintaining biodiversity and human wellbeing. This body of work explores how patterns of early urban settlements, broadly defined as places with a focal sociopolitical role for their wider region where people lived in large and diverse populations, can inform current best practices to support sustainable urban planning and land use management. This topic has important real world applications, helping to understand connections between the past and present in order to build resilient contemporary urban spaces where people and biodiversity can thrive together in the future. Manuscripts can include original research, synthesis and/or perspectives.

Keywords: Urban Ecology, Urban Planning, Urban Archaeology, Resilience, Nature-Based Approaches

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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