Enabling transformation: Linking design and land system science to foster place-making in peri-urban landscapes under increasing globalization

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Unprecedented urbanization is threatening landscape diversity, bringing along new social and environmental problems. Standardized business centers, single family residential areas and shopping malls displace highly productive agricultural land, while the culture and lifestyles of local communities become absorbed into the sphere of globalization. This dramatic uniformisation is nurtured by the ever increasing global human migration. People are losing their sense of place and their motivation to initiate change. Uniformed international landscapes start dominating peri-urban areas. The result is a tremendous increase in fragility of these new landscapes of the twenty-first century, calling for an active and creative landscape shaping process to secure the long-term provision of critical ecosystem services. Up until now, however, models and tools developed in land system science have not caught up with the needs to understand and ultimately foster humans’ capacities to shape their landscapes. This project will contribute to a next generation of tools and methods to foster the development of resilient landscapes. I suggest linking design and probabilistic modeling in a collaborative landscape development tool to enable the transformation of spaces into places. This unconventional approach is necessary to deal with the probabilistic nature of landscapes. Landscapes can only be defined by including the observer – a concept severally neglected in today’s research efforts. Anchored in four peri-urban case studies, the interdisciplinary experimental and modeling work will have impact far beyond predicting transformation pathways of peri-urban landscapes under increased globalization. The resulting methods and tool will redefine the status quo of current geodesign tools, promote novel ways of deliberative decision-making and governance, and ultimately support humans to intentionally transform peri-urban landscapes.