URBEN Group is a multi-disciplinary international collaboration of researchers and practitioners interested in cities and how they will look in the near future.



The mission of URBEN Group


The free market economy has let us believe that natural resources are without limit. As a result, we are over-consuming these beyond sustainable levels, through the exploitation of people and at the expense of the natural environment. With ongoing economic growth, our over-consumption of natural resources such as water, energy and food continues to increase. Especially cities and their urban populations consume far more resources than our planet can provide. Our behaviour has caused climate change, which is now very seriously threatening our life on this planet as we know it. Due to our dependency on high levels of natural resources consumption, we are highly vulnerable to climate change impacts. Whilst most approaches in academia and practice focus on how to supply for the ever increasing demand for natural resources, far fewer approaches look at how to lower this demand. We urgently need to find innovative integrated urban planning solutions enabling cities to cut their high levels of consumption and dependency on natural resources, and become more socially inclusive. To address this challenge, URBEN Group asks the question:



What will the cities of the future look like, and how can we shape them
to consume less natural resources and be more socially inclusive?



Rapidly transforming cities in developing economies are often already facing very serious and pressing social and environmental challenges. With rapidly growing urban populations and pressing day-to-day issues to tackle, cities often cannot address social and environmental issues holistically or effectively due to lack of financial and resource capacity and conflicting stakeholder interests.


URBEN Group has chosen to respond to these issues by developing an approach that enables a wide range of stakeholders constituting a community to attain a better understanding about urban social and environmental issues and their interlinkages, and devise innovative integrated urban planning solutions which aim “not to compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”


To this end, URBEN Group has developed URBEN Training: this is an innovative process and toolkit to support comprehensive assessment of an urban context and facilitate multi-stakeholder processes of urban development to help create innovative urban planning solutions. URBEN Training is being applied in a number of URBEN Projects.




Last updated March 2016

 

Urban Environment URBEN Group