Working Groups

Water and sanitation are becoming ever more essential to stopping the spread of disease and improving sustainability as urban populations rapidly increase around the global. Traditional grid-based water and sanitation systems are failing to meet the challenge in many locations. Worse, traditional systems are significant contributors to climate change. Over consumption of water, lost nutrients, and the failure to expand services to underrepresented and vulnerable populations all indicate the need for a water and sanitation revolution. This working group aims to address how wastewater and sanitation services can evolve to meet the Sustainable Development Goal in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic.

Previously, this working group examined how urban areas could take tangible first steps towards reducing the demand for water resources in urban water and sanitation systems. In 2020, the working group examined how off-grid wastewater and sanitation solutions can be integrated into a city-wide inclusive water and sanitation framework, with a specific focus on rapidly growing informal settlements and resource constrained settings.

* Relevant previous working group (2019) led by Adam DeHeer (Leapfrog Design)

Throughout history, cities have developed mechanisms to grow beyond the limitations of the productive capacity of their immediate hinterlands. The changing nature of the relationship between a city and the landscapes that provision it is of central concern to the SCL hub. This theme looks at how secure are the food systems of cities and their hinterlands, and what are some of the environmental and human health and wellbeing consequences of their current arrangements. These environmental and wellbeing concerns extend to all actors in the food system, from producers, processors, retailers, consumers, and issues in post consumption, wherever they may be located.

The food and nutrition security theme is interested in current and potential alternative food production and distribution systems at a range of scales, from the very local, including urban agriculture, to regional ‘food catchments’ and ‘food miles’, to national and international distributions systems, including ‘telecoupled’ relationships between producers and consumers in distant places. At any scale, food systems can be assessed against their material and energy costs and outputs, including the sustainability of terrestrial and aquatic methods of production, and the transmission of information, including finance, values, and trust relationships between actors. Beyond studying processes that make food physically available, the theme is concerned with issues of equity and justice for all agents in the food system. It is also concerned with the health and wellbeing implications of different food system arrangements for primary producers, process workers, and for consumers accessing foods with differing degrees of processing and differing energy and nutrient densities. Overarching questions asked by the theme concern the exposure food systems have to different levels of risks and vulnerabilities and how they might be reconfigured to reduce those vulnerabilities, while improving measures of health, justice and sustainability.

This working group met for the first time in 2019 and has since been developing two initiatives. One is drafting chapters for the Sustainable Cities and Landscapes handbook, which were reviewed by participants at the 2020 meeting in Auckland. The other activity is road-testing a Global Food System model, which is a relatively simple computer simulation model based on an idealised situation where photosynthesised food production is maximised and is optimal for the people and domesticated animals that consume that food. Although both these initiatives stem from the 2019 workshop, the working group welcomes new members and its activities can be readily expanded to include them.

Mā te whakaatu, ka mōhio By discussion comes understanding
Mā te mohio, ka mārama By understanding comes enlightenment
Mā te marama, ka mātau By enlightenment comes wisdom
Mā te mātau, ka ora. By wisdom comes wellness
– Na Pā Henare Tate

Participants of this group are experienced and interested in addressing sustainability challenges that draw on Indigenous worldviews, knowledge, approaches, experience and practices.

Naku te rourou, nau te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi.
With your basket and my basket, we shall thrive.

This proverb refers to the benefits of co-operation and collaboration which is central to what we seek to achieve in responding to sustainability issues.

Smart Cities is relatively a new concept that embeds in the fourth industrial revolution and the advancement of various technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoTs), Big Data and Digital Twining. Emerging smart technologies generate new capacities to better understanding, management and development of cities. The primary objective of Smart Cities initiative is to create sustainable, resilience, environmentally friendly city that can provide services to its residents more effectively and efficiently. The emerging smart technologies could be deployed to improve on existing services and infrastructures such as transportation, waste and water management, power network, and asset management and building services, to manage natural disasters, and to mitigate pollution via real-time monitoring natural and built environments.

The Smart Cities working group focuses on thematic issues, including water, energy, climate, oceans, urbanization, transport, science and technology.

The Transitions in Urban Waterfronts group focuses on the edge between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems; as a central and essential element in the development of cities, waterfronts have shouldered ongoing, significant impacts of urbanization, while also providing sites of transformative growth, symbolic inspiration, and reinvention/renewal. The working group highlights issues of site performance and access, within wider social-ecological networks of a metropolitan region, as well as patterns of global trade/migration (how does the waterfront work, and for whom/what).

In 2020 the Transitions in Urban Waterfronts group partnered with the Urban-Rural Linkages working group. Cities and their port districts are often at the socio-political and economic center of larger urban-rural regions that influence their organization, trade products and relationships, transportation networks, and governance. They are frequently located at the mouth of major river systems, on former estuaries that drain bioregions stretching well beyond the jurisdictional boundary of the city or port itself. This collaboration is advancing our collective thinking to reach beyond the physical space of the waterfront.

In previous conferences, this formerly named Vulnerable Community Work Group (WG) discussed the root cause of vulnerability in mega cities in the Pacific Rim region and challenges in addressing vulnerability in communities. In 2020, the WG embraced critical topics of resilience and climate justice, and investigated the theory of resilience and vulnerability in community and economic development. These focus areas encompass landscape architecture, urban planning and design, geography, landscape and urban ecology, disaster management, environmental and civil engineering, anthropology, governance and public policy, environmental psychology, and sustainability studies, to understand the root cause of risks to communities and innovative solutions to address equity and sustainability under climate change impacts. This Working Group aims to develop strategies to enhance transdisciplinary research and practice capacity to allow social-ecological-technological systems resilience building in vulnerable communities and their built environment. In addition, we discuss innovations in building transformative capacity to address climate justice and sustainable development goals for SDG 11-Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, SDG 9-Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation, and SDG 13-Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.

This new APRU-SCL working group on children, youth and their environments (CYE) brings together academics from around the Asia Pacific region interested in the role of physical environments in children’s health, wellbeing and development, and the relationships between the social and physical environments of children’s lives. The group’s aim is to enhance research and policy work in this field, lifting its profile to benefit children and youth and, ultimately, creating more sustainable cities and landscapes. The APRU-SCL reach spans nations with diverse cultural challenges and rapidly changing urban environments, all of which affect children’s lives. Cross-cultural collaborations highlight shared experience and expertise. Key environmental issues include: prioritising the needs of children and young people in cities with increased urbanisation; addressing the impact of poverty and poor housing; ensuring the quality of educational environments; increasing opportunities for contact with nature and active play; ensuring safe, walkable neighbourhoods. Social issues with environmental dimensions include: poverty; mental health; obesity and gender equity.

Decarbonization processes will re-shape our cities and landscapes. The Working Group on Energy Futures aims to discuss research pathways towards the achievement of UN SDG No. 7 (affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all) and related SDGs within the Pacific Rim. The work will be articulated in three interconnected streams: climate actions, urban greening, and clean energy. Our goal is to better understand the transformations generated by the uptake of technology and advanced processes on our territory. The WG aims to involve (but not only) researchers in urban design, architecture, environmental engineering, regenerative design, economy, and ecology. Examples of potential topics are urban/building energy, urban heat island, industry 4.0 and clean energy, circularity in the built environment, life-cycle thinking, renewable technologies integration.

* Relevant previous working group (2017-2019) led by Dr. Yekang Ko (University of Oregon) and Dr. Makena Coffman (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa)

People spend lots of time indoors and tend to be and unfamiliar with nature, which reduces causing to contact with green landscapes. From studies in “landscape and health”, researchers asked questions to fill the gap between theories and practical design in landscape and human health. Key questions include action plans to enhance interactions with the landscape, and understanding benefits, by creating greens and vivid environment that reduce stress, increase productivity, and enhances good emotion responses. This can involve intelligent technologies, such as wearable device, biofeedback, brain scans etc., among approaches to be considered by the Work Group.

In the past three years, Professor Chang has been a member of the APRU SCL Steering committee and leading the Working Group on Landscape and Human Health. The Working Group discusses the core concept of landscape and human health under two aspects: ‘Evidence’ and ‘Application’, such as healthy (psychological and physiological) indicators, updating technological device in landscape research, built environment and landscape type analysis, therapeutic landscape planning and design, friendly environment for elders, healthy green infrastructures, healthy evidence-based design process.

The Sustainable Urban Design (SUD) Working Group gathers experts from around the world to research and discuss sustainable urban design issues and approaches. The aim is to share knowledge so that we can better understand the particularities of context as well as help identify more general, universally applicable solutions and ways of thinking about urban sustainability. The working group invites researchers and practitioners from built environment disciplines including urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and engineering, to name a few.

At previous conferences we have focused discussion around case studies of sustainable urban design for people and places around the Pacific Rim. This has been presented and discussed, and aspects of this work now being published in the proposed APRU Handbook. Among the issues that remain relevant is better understanding the drivers-of-change across the Pacific, impacted by disruptive technologies, while enhancing well-being, living at higher densities, responding to climate change and being environmentally responsible.

We are now moving the discussion towards what actions need to be taken in cities around the Pacific to give effect to sustainable urban design policies and practices. We also aim to align the discussions to the relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and better understand the challenges involved. Of special interest is identifying what actions and consequences may be universal across the Pacific, and what may be shaped by the particular contexts of peoples and places. 

Urban-Rural linkages are defined by the United Nations as “nonlinear, diverse urban-rural interactions and linkages across space within an urban-rural continuum, including flows of people, goods, capital and information but also between sectors and activities such as agriculture, services and manufacturing.” We will work with the Transitions in Urban Waterfronts group in 2020, to explore the intersections of regional political, biological, economic, and planning boundaries, with the production of port city sites and spaces. This workgroup sets its scope of work to include several important research areas identified by the UN-Habitat’s potential entry points for strengthening urban-rural linkages (UN-Habitat 2019). These areas include:

1. Regional and territorial planning for an integrated urban and rural development, with a particular focus on spatial planning that uses an ecological and landscape approach to shape urban-rural continuum while reducing the environmental impact on rural-urban convergences.
2. Enhancing legislation, governance and capacity via partnerships between urban and rural Areas, including government collaboration and public-private partnership in regional planning to support flows of people, goods, and resources among big central cities, towns, and rural settlements for rural-urban co-benefits.
3. Inclusive investment and finance in both urban and rural Areas, especially equity-driven policies and investment strategies in areas such as housing and infrastructure aimed at reducing urban-rural disparities and supporting urban-rural co-development in economic, social, and cultural spheres.

This working group aligns with several of the SDG’s including 2 (Zero Hunger), 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing), 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), 13 (Climate Action) and 15 (Life on Land). Equally, the United Nations 2017 report “Implementing the New Urban Agenda by Strengthening Urban-Rural Linkages – Leave No One And No Space Behind” identifies urban-rural linkages as a key component of the New Urban Agenda (2016). It is from this position that the research group situates itself in working towards a better urban future.

Since the establishment of the Biodiversity Convention in 1992, many countries have developed strategies and action plans to protect the biodiversity of the plant. Urban areas, which have a large population than the countryside, have lost many habitats in the process of urban development. Landscape studies have played a crucial role in protecting urban biodiversity, as they directly worked on greenspace planning and design. How to enhance biodiversity net gain while improving people’s relationship with nature has become a key challenge to urban landscape development. It is significant to balance environmental protection while providing the society with more opportunities for public recreation, environmental education and green economy development.

The topics are identified based on current scholarship and frontier practices:

1. Environmental strategies to improve biodiversity net gain in the cities
2. Site-based habitat conservation through landscape planning and design
3. Green capital calculation and visualization in biodiversity conservation
4. Recovery of historical habitats of the cities through integrated historical and ecological approaches
5. Soft strategies to enroll public engagement in urban biodiversity conservation to enhance public recreation and environment education
6. Green transportation strategies to facilitate biodiversity conservation
7. Housing development to link home ecology and biodiversity protection at a micro scale.
8. Biodiversity index assessment in different cities and countries

Throughout the Pacific Rim, the rise of civic engagement and citizen actions is transforming the governance of cities and landscapes. Even in countries with limited democracy, citizens and communities have played an important role in mutual aid and self-help, particularly in times of crisis and emergency. However, despite the growing practices of civic engagement, there are continued challenges in forms of tokenism, conflicts, and resistance from society and state institutions. How can citizens and communities participate effectively and meaningfully in matters concerning sustainable landscapes and cities in the Pacific Rim? What are the lessons and insights from current experiments and practice?

This working group is formed through the Pacific Rim Community Design Network, established originally at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998. Through conferences and joint projects, the network has provided a vehicle for collaboration and mutual support, as well as a forum for a comparative understanding of community design in the fast-changing political and social context of the Pacific Rim. As a working group, its goal is to engage in the advancement and critical assessment of civic engagement and community design practices across the Pacific Rim. Recent activities included a webinar series on bottom-up resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic and a virtual gathering to share lessons and insights on civic engagement practices during the Pandemic.