Comparative Ecology of Cities

The inevitability of increasing urbanization and the attendant problems it creates place an urgent demand on our ability to shape current and future urban development using a science-based approach to urban planning. The project is centred on the proposition that urban pattern-process-function relationships provide valuable knowledge to advance the science of urban planning, but this has thus far remained relatively unexplored and under - utilized in practice. The project builds upon emerging theoretical and empirical evidence that patterns of human settlement systems (urban patterns) shape social and ecological processes (urban processes), and such processes, in turn, dictate the key demands of urban living such as social relations, mobility, economic exchanges, bioenvironment, ecological conditions, etc. (urban functions). The project will investigate pattern-process-function relationships across a large number of cities to address research questions aligned to FCL Global’s (FCLG) aims of developing solutions to guide sustainable urbanization, for humans, the environment and biodiversity.