Day 2 - Food and Territories | Future Cities Symposium & Exhibition 2025

Hello everybody. Thanks a lot. The goal of the project is quite clear. It's to unlock this.

Resilient pathways. And we will do this by a design science loop. To do this we have a very interdisciplinary team of 15 people. They come from the different disciplines, design science. We had governance people and we had also a big local group. We had seven PhD students and we had seven professors. And the support by the middle range people, postdocs, etc. I won't go into the detail, but you can see here that the group really covers different countries and is especially somewhere not in Singapore, nor in Switzerland, but I'm going to bring you to Madagascar. Antananarivo, it's the capital. It's built on a flood plain, as you can see here, where the city is on little hills. And the floodplain is more than just a production of food. 40% of the people are providing are feeding on this area. But it provides a retention basin for the big dynamics which are going on. And the big dynamics include hurricanes, but also very strong droughts. And you can see here the different colors. Where you see the blue areas is where we have water during certain times, and the brown areas where we have urbanized systems. And if you look well, you will see one of the main challenge is, is these brown areas which become larger and larger. What is really going on? I'll explain it a bit later. But it's very important to see that this flat plain is extremely challenged and cannot really provide the function it should do. This is what you can see here, Hurricane Anna in 2022. And you can see the brown water. That's exactly where it doesn't really work. That's where the floodplain should work in terms of absorbing these different changes. And this is because the dikes and the system itself is not managed well. And that's where we would like to intervene. That's where the idea of this project is to intervene with design. So changing the topology and changing the system itself to be able to produce the services people would like from this area, which is food. But it's also protection against what we have in terms of flood and drought. And that also parallelly support biodiversity and the livelihood of people. So this design science loop is here to unlock a new pathway to go away from what they've done until now, to show that there are other possibilities which provide these services demanded, highly demanded by these people. But we were not sure how to do it. We didn't know exactly. So when do you do a design science loop? When in the process of the planning, do you integrate the design and the information of the design, how it works? So we analyzed first very different nature based solution projects from Singapore to China with a sponge city to something on the road correction in Switzerland and to Jakarta. And we try to understand at which point in time in the process do we need to have governance, the participation of people, the science informing the design and the design intervention. And what you can see here, that all these projects have a very short time frame of intervention with the people. And most of these projects really have been done top down and are not really accepted by the local population. Just as an example here in Singapore, of course it has been a top down process. But at the end there has been some feedback on the use of this Singapore ABC program, but not really the intervention and the participation. At a very early program in Indonesia we had some interaction at the beginning, but we didn't have enough so that the project was not implemented. So we tried to develop here out of that a learning and to design. How should that design science loop really be set up so that we have the people at the beginning which are also involved in the implementation at the end. And you can see here the interweaving of these different participatory approaches and the definition at the very beginning of the context, the problem framing, which might change really your research project.

Followed by an iteration between a design and a science loop where the design is adaptation based on the information provided by the science, which is then an informed design which needs to be shared and carried by the people to go into the implementation phase, which we have not done yet. And I'll come back to that.

So here is, and I'm going to illustrate a little bit our process, how we've done that. We started really with a context analysis and tried to understand what was the challenge. I think we had a wrong idea. We had the impression that through the activities of the people in these floodplains that they would really destroy the services provided by these landscapes, which is not really the case. You will see that the brick production, the way they carve the area is a very good adaptation procedure to the drought which is coming up. And I'll show that a little bit later. So that was very important for us to understand what is really the problem. And it was not the problem we were expecting at the very beginning.

We then investigated based on that, what are the different stages of this transformation of that system. And you can see here at the top, the first thing is you have these rice fields, they provide food. The problem is we have A lot of flood and droughts. And the rice production can only be done once every year, not twice every year. So what are people doing? They're starting to carve and to take out the bricks. And that makes little ponds. And in these ponds they can have fish, they have additional food, and they can sell their bricks for having direct money based on that. Afterwards they see that usually it's not enough money, but they still need to produce some food and they start to create these raised gardens. So these are like the raised gardens you would have in your vicinity, having little areas where they can produce some vegetables. Vegetables have a more. A higher cash crop value than the rice production, but it's still not enough because they have usually less than a hectare of land. And at the end they're selling the land to large companies who are developing and backfilling the land. So this is the development of these ecosystem services over time. And you see that they lose a lot of the water availability.

Including aesthetics and of course, the important services which are food production.

We also looked at the impact or what is available in terms of biodiversity. Just very interesting here. We've done a large collection of data. Interesting here is to see that where is the highest biodiversity? The highest biodiversity is in these sacred sites on the hills. So the importance of history and also the development of the place for supporting biodiversity. Meaning that at many different places we have where we could do the design. It's not necessarily where we will have the highest biodiversity, but they are like seeds areas where these biodiversity can probably be taken up to these other areas. So you see here the sacred and non sacred and the impact of the native population in these sacred sites. Especially you look at the exponential growth of the biodiversity in these sacred sites. So we intervened with these designs in an iterative process with the students. We had a lot of. I mean, the students were from down in Madagascar. And this is the result of these iterations, which you can coming up. I'll show you a little bit later on. But what you can see, maybe you wonder with what kind of techniques we worked. Everything has been done in point clouds. Why point clouds? Because point cloud was the way we could discuss across the disciplines. So the design could be done in the point cloud, in the LiDAR point cloud. This LiDAR point cloud was an input to the ecological models and the hydrological models. And these hydrological models could be designed so that people would understand it. So we had a communication language of this design science loop for the different disciplines involved. And you can see here the hydrological modeling on this design on this transformation of the topology based on this iteration, where we regularly recalculated how well is the design functioning under different climate scenarios, etc.

So here you can see these three case study areas we investigated and you can see how the water would flow in this new topological arrangement provided by the input in this design science.

The problem is always at the end is how are we going to implement these functioning now informed design and we developed a series game to try to understand what are the enablers and hindering factor for this transformation. And we played these games with all the different kampungs. Kampungs are the different neighborhoods. And we also.

Played the game with the decision makers. And the results are quite interesting, is that we have a big gap first in the shared vision. So the vision is very different depending on if you're a decision maker, the decision maker have the impression of this infrastructure which could help you really transform this area in a secure way. And the local people are much more for them. Much more important are the services provided by these areas. So we have really a gap in the shared understanding of the system. And we have a very strong discrepancy between who can take decisions in this system and how this system can be implemented. And these learnings here are now the learnings we are transporting in November to the stakeholders where we would like to go the next step. Because all these people had been in involved from the very beginning. There is a real need.

And we know now big decision makers to make happen. So this would be the idea here now to harness this network, this community, to be able to do the transformation. However, our project is going to be finished. I told Dirk here that this is the next step, which is really difficult is how can we make the next step to implement such an now shared understanding of the future. Just to close here, I think the main learnings in a more abstract way of such a project is that to really change the social ecological system so the interaction between people and nature, we really need to have an explicit consideration of pathways. It's not just resilience at the moment, but we need to understand how we can unlock the current situation where people are in at the moment. This informed design, across scale, using the same grammar, if you want, has been very helpful to do that. And it allowed people to self organize around something they all could understand because it was in the same language. So starting with a shared vision I think is extremely important in this design science loop and allowing to negotiate negotiate over the whole process. I think we were quite successful in Creating a very good link to the administration, to the ministries and to the local people, especially the kampung leaders, which have a huge role in the transformation of these processes. So having the diverse actors and at the end, a community of practice, I think with the six PhD students we have who, who are really also very embedded in a system they understand, I think we could do the next step to implement what has been developed in this project. And maybe you wonder why I put here the Petit prince. And I think it's at the end, it's you become responsible for what you tamed. And he tamed his plant. And I think if we start to have people responsible for what they work on, you can get another added value. Thanks a lot.

Thank you, Professor.

It's in. It's quite interesting how research can actually be taking form in the real world. So this is one of the few researchers which have been evolving from research labs.

Into actual stakeholder engagements and implementation at the real world scenarios. So we now move from Madagascar towards monsoon Asia. Our next presentation is titled Agropolitan Territories of Monsoon Asia. This research looks at the perspective of accessing an agropolitan future. And what does that entail? The research investigates agropolitan territories territories as a pioneering alternative models of urbanization, bridging agro ecology, urban planning, landscape architecture and environmental science. So we do have a team of researchers joining here to present this and they are doing it in a panel format, I understand, with Professor Stephen Keynes leading the panel. So I now hand it over or Evie is leading the panel. Okay, so I will hand it over to Evie now.

Hi everybody, I'm Effy.

Okay, I get to control this.

Hi everybody, I'm Effy, the module coordinator. I'll give you a broad overview of our research before I invite my colleagues to chime in on their specific contributions along this trajectory. Our inquiry starts with a long standing fascination for Agropolitan or the Sakura regions, as theorized by renowned theorist and geographer John Friedman and Terry McGee. These are agrarian settlements models that have both urban and rural livelihoods, ecologies and economies intertwined. So they're neither rural nor urban.

And what was missing at the onset is a systematic data driven global map of what we call agoras or agrarian urban areas. This is foundation for future longitudinal comparative studies that researchers could build upon our research. So we went ahead and started work on it. A parallel modus operandi is a Kickstarter package of case studies and reports across monsoon Asia. Jakarta, Balembang, Chengdu, Kolkata, Jaipur. They each offer distinct insights on governance scale, stakeholder complexity as well as technological interventions.

These findings are verified against the Agora map in Earthscape, our open source data visualization platform, which is currently being translated into a web version. Once that is complete, we will host a Gora map live, inviting a global discussion across diverse stakeholders, meaning farmers, hydrologists, conservationists, indigenous leaders who will be able to access it online.

The hope really is to catalyze.

A broader, multi level discussion about collectively and intentionally shaping these landscapes towards a closer, tighter food circularity.

We are also putting together a book, so the atlas that you're showing will go into it.

On top of the Kickstarter package. We will be inviting contributors to add to it and you know, we'll take indicators that we have siphoned out of all our research into agropolitan principles.

So without further ado, I will start by asking Augustine to share about his work in developing Agustin. Tell us, how many people roughly do we estimate to be in agoras and how much land area are we talking about? Do they only exist in monsoon Asia?

Yeah, sure. I.

Would like to share a little bit. Yeah. Well, this is the Agoura map. We built this map by combining three different data sets. We combine population in red, net primary productivity in green and nighttime light in blue. What we did was normalize, combine and then select with specific trees hole the areas that overlap. This is the result that we have here. We can find something very interesting. For example, the pink areas highlight very urbanized areas.

Some blue areas are for high technological intensive production systems and green for.

Landscape where traditional agriculture is still dominant.

What we found here is that agoras are worldwide, but they are shown with specific local conditions. We can see agoras in monsoon Asia, but we also can see in mountain system like Colombian Andes, dry land, river system like in Egypt, or in Peri urban areas like around cities in Europe. In total we are talking about 1.1 million square kilometers, which is a small footprint. But there they live 785 million people and 5% of the cropland of the world is in this area. So that's a very interesting data.

If we go back to monsoon Asia, we can see here is the biggest concentration of agura areas. We can see in India, in the southern India and in the Indo Gangetic plains. A lot of red and pink colors which mean that they're very dense. Urban areas. We see in central China, a lot of blues and purple, which indicates.

High productivity systems. And for example in Jakarta, in the area of Java, we can see orange and yellow which are indicated of traditional farming. Both in high populated areas. So the idea with this map is to have a better understanding of land use and urban growth using the local and global context.

Thank you, Augustine. So that's and now we zoom in on one of the grower areas. Helen, who is our PhD researcher, unfortunately can't be with us today. She is attending the Sichuan Agricultural Expo as we speak, but I've asked her to prepare a video on what she calls is an emerging agropolitan variant.

At a metropolitan scale. So let's roll the video.

Maybe that's the next yeah Chengdu is a pioneer Insight Implementing China's planning paradigm shift in prioritizing agriculture, land protection and through big data system to optimize the locations and resource management of agrarian spaces in the metropolitan scale.

The digital data platform enables specific georeference the management and monitoring of individual agriculture plots, protecting the spatial usage for cultivation of only approved grain crops.

These demarcations aim to re agrarianize the original vernacular settlement.

However, with increasingly diverse stakeholders getting involved, the spatial programming and methodologies are drastically changing. Villagers have their strategies navigating the evolving land policies for optimum local autonomous in space and resource usage. Concurrently, new stakeholders are coming in with their investments in agriculture technologies and innovative agribusiness mod.

Vernacular agrarian housing are de agrarianized under the thriving cultural economics romantizing agrarian spaces for the lifestyle needs of urban customers.

What's fundamentally consistent in all these changes is a historical legacy of water institution facilitating cross cutting sources of authority among governmental officials, social organizations and individual farmers.

These non established social collaboration systems and local resource management mechanisms are shaping increasingly diverse on site conditions of agrarian spatial usage under China's data driven rural reform and food security mandate.

I'm going to ask Nirali and Joshua to speak about their experience in developing Earthscape, which is a platform I talked about earlier.

Thanks Evi. So, as you saw, our team addresses or looks into complex urbanization challenges using both geospatial data tools and as well as grounded fieldwork research. For our side, we draw on both sets of these two things to do transformation research in collaboration with Asian Development bank, local governments and institutions and as well as local practitioners. We collaborate very closely with the stakeholders to explore how cities can use data and design to address these challenges and promote more sustainable futures. And to do so we employ our geospatial tool called Yourscape which is designed or co designed with the stakeholders and to do so we collect iterative feedback loops gathering needs and aspirations from different stakeholders coming from various backgrounds and expertise and familiarity with gis tools and we incorporated directly into the design of the tool that allows the stakeholders to participate more fully into the evidence based planning.

Thanks Nirali. So to share more about what exactly Earthcape is Earthcape is our open source planning support tool designed for cities and regions with variable data quality and sources. We considered the design of planning software holistically so not just data analysis methods and techniques but also data management systems as well as interaction design. We designed Earthscape user interface to be intuitive, accessible and easy to use so that cross sectoral teams, no matter their diverse backgrounds or skill sets, can harness data and link issues across scales. This enables them to plan and have conversations within the context of larger urban, environmental and food systems.

Yes, our engagements with cities and regions across the world help us refine data driven planning workflows. This improves our team's research on design strategies for rapidly urbanizing regions. We welcome everyone to download Earthscape on our website where you can also find our online learning platform and we hope it makes it easy for more citymakers to use and adapt Earthscape for their own context. And we also have a demo version with Singapore data so you can also use the tool with the places that you know.

Thank you Niraleh and Joshua Denise. How does that compare with your experience with participatory planning in Singapore as well as using it with our local partners in Palembang, Indonesia? Thank you Evie. So.

Sorry. Yeah, so PP in SG or participatory planning in Singapore differs from the Rajasthan project as it aims to surface aspects for planning to adoption. We use Singapore as a case to understand how nationwide digitization pushes for nationwide digitization initiatives can also impact citizen participation and to development. So this is what we have done so far. So through interviews with local policymakers, academics and architects, our findings seek to inform the development of tools like Earthscape.

And this was informed by our feedback from our Earthscape workshop at Singapore Design Week 2024. We taught participants data driven participatory planning and you can learn more on the Earthscape website.

And in Palembang, we worked with the Resilience Development Initiative, or RDI to conduct ethnographic research with oil palm smallholders to uncover their alternative streams of income. So while our investigation began geospatially on Earthscape, our understanding of the ground was limited. But through working with RDI they brought rich knowledge to insights on the ground on situated livelihood practices and this allows us to bridge our findings from remote sensing with very ground truths and also so this collaboration with IDI really underscores the foundation of our modules research of building upon diverse research methodologies to uncover these emergent forms of urbanization unique to such landscapes. So what our work hopes to show is that agropolitan regions are not anomalies at the margin. They are truly living laboratories where ecologies, landscape livelihoods and are intertwined, urban and rural, once they're intertwined, and that this is where the future of sustainable urban developments are being negotiated. As a team, we are truly thankful for being able to contribute in this manner.

So.

We know from the overall program, we know from many other ongoing researchers that urban research as it stands has very much focused on the city as a primary unit of analysis, with the exception of my colleague Sian presenting just now.

But we also know that urbanization has long exceeded the boundaries of the city.

Proper.

Whether that is through energy infrastructure, through the infrastructure of food, that we also just heard about, logistics, migration, of course that is all tied to that. And so in order to better understand the dynamics of climate, of climate change, of resource use, we looked at a particular instance of agricultural territories of sites for food production to better understand what are the challenges, but what are also the potentials of these very territories to mitigate and to adapt in this ongoing transformation process. And we focused on a set of particular processes, specifically peripheralization, operationalization and enclosure that is happening around through these territories of food production in Asia and Europe.

Sorry, this is.

Yeah.

Here.

To understand these processes in Asia and Europe in particular. And we've then looked at the larger metropolitan region of Zurich to test some of these insights through scenarios that we've planned, executed with master students at ETH Zurich, in order to also better understand what is the possible role that we as architects and planners can execute in supporting these territories towards more agro ecologically sustainable future ready sites.

And the way we structured our module for that purpose is in two larger clusters.

Cluster 1, here in yellow, looked at different case studies of such agricultural territories and practices sites in Asia and Europe. So we did a lot of fieldwork, everything was basically empirically grounded to then inform theoretical insights.

Around this agrarian question, as it's also referred to. And then in the second here outlined in blue second kind of cluster, we then looked at the strategies and the possibilities and potential of these sites to become agro ecologically sustainable and future ready.

This is the team and of course.

It'S or with this kind of ambition we had quite a large team. I'm here only in presenting on behalf of my colleagues here, Mili Czatopalovic and Christian Schmidt, who Unfortunately couldn't make it to Singapore. And we've had collaborators from other disciplines, Adrienne for example, with a PhD student and christophen Johan, on supporting this investigation.

So I'm just going to show you some snapshots of these case studies in the first half and then some of these attempts to think through applied design practice about ways, potential ways forward. So one of these case studies and instances of agricultural landscape transformation was the production of sugarcane that we looked at.

Specifically in the case of Thailand and northeastern Thailand. Sugarcane production is very lucrative agricultural business here in the region, not just for the production of sugar, but and this is becoming an increasingly important driver for the production of electricity. So it's electricity demand nowadays that is primarily shaping the expansion of sugarcane production, not the demand of sugar.

And we've been trying to understand the logic that not just the demand, but these other logic, such as where sugar cane residues, which is bagasse, can be converted into electricity, how these different components drive the particular territorial expansion of sugarcane production in this region. Then we looked at the conversion of agricultural territories for solar farming, particularly in Indonesia. And again, what are the different incentives, drivers and mechanisms through which this transformation is happening and land use is being replaced? New stakeholders are being introduced into these landscapes.

We looked at the large scale.

Oil palm plantations that we find here in the immediate vicinity of Singapore.

In particular in Johor. We had one PhD studying the operationalization of these large landscapes for the production of oil.

We looked at the population depletion in some of these landscapes, in this case in Arcadia and Greece, and the transformation of agricultural practices into, for example, tourism sites, sites for so called ecological tourism.

And we looked at the transformation of these agricultural landscapes through large scale infrastructural interventions, in this case in the periphery of Delhi.

We then brought all these different insights and strategies that we've identified leading to these conversions and transformations of agricultural landscapes to the metropolitan region of Zurich. And there complemented these investigations through, for example, a study that was looking at the.

Kinds of ecosystem service transformations that are happening in this region.

We've been looking at the multi criteria framework to assess and compare the socioeconomic, cultural and ecological qualities that are provided by these regions. In order to understand when we come in with design scenarios, what are the key qualities and assets that need to be maintained and fostered.

And then bringing this together, we did a kind of collective mapping exercise throughout the metropolitan region.

Generating, allowing us to generate a new set of typologies of agricultural landscape typologies for the metropolitan region of Zurich and these categories. These Kind of new typologies of agricultural landscapes that you see here, then served as a basis for design studios and planning propositions for a future development within that area. That was done by my colleague Milica Topolovic, in a rather large sequence of design studios iterations of these questions in practice. And they were extremely fortunate being able to work directly with the city of Zurich, getting the support of the city of Zurich and getting access to data.

And being able to enter the direct dialogue with people responsible in the decision making and planning of these territories.

Parts of the outcome of these design scenarios have then been turned into several series of exhibitions. Here, the one at the Museum of Architecture in Zurich.

We'Ve been able to organize a series of international conferences, bringing in external experts to the agrarian question and the question of how to translate that into specific design scenarios that then have also been exhibited in two iterations of the Venice Biennale.

And since this was also building up on previous work that we've been doing in the second iteration of the Future Cities Lab have been.

Instrumental in producing these two publications that we did as a module, Vocabularies for an Urbanizing Planet. Again focusing on exactly this question that we need to identify new kinds of vocabularies and typologies based on these new potentials that we discover in these diverse territories around the world. And the second book here, Extended Urbanization, Tracing planetary struggles around exactly these extended urban territories.

And the challenges and potentials very much that these offer and that cities are very much relying on leveraging moving forward. We've organized this here and we've brought this here in Singapore into a symposium around the energy transition because. Because energy production, renewable energy production specifically, is a key driver in the transformation of these territories. And same also here in Zurich, only a couple of weeks ago, at the Collegium Helveticum, where we also organized an international panel discussion.

This is still very much in process. Of course. We also all need to aim for putting this into a format that is accessible to the scientific community. Saw a series of publication here, the ones tied in, submitted or accepted already, and a few more in the making and coming.

We've also gathered all this information in a publicly accessible website format, because we believe it's key to make this information, these insights and tests, scenarios and propositions, accessible to the key stakeholders, whether this in Zurich or here in the region. And with that I hand it over to you. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Professor Naomi. We will now. That kind of concludes the main presentations and then we will now commence our Q and A Session, I would like to call it more as a discussion than a question answer session. So may I please invite the representatives or presenters to please come up and join me so that we can.

Again, as I reminded in our first session, we do want to keep this more interactive and it's not going to be like a one sided question answer session. So I hope people can freely ask questions, can share feedback, can also share reflections, because at the end of the day, this is a journey and we don't see this to be the end of it. Yeah. So just to start, I asked a question in my first panel as well to our panel members and speakers that, you know, we all have gone through this as a journey over four years. So can I also get your inputs and insights on what would you like to share as some reflections on this journey? The challenges that you identified which pushed you for some innovative approaches which you then pursued and the impacts that they generated? It's just to kind of go through that process. Yeah, any. And there's no specific order, please. Anyone who wants to start first could start.

Naomi, you want to give up first? Have the MIC first.

Sure. Thanks. I think in our group, and I'm just assuming I share that, we were extremely excited by the interdisciplinary challenge in the beginning and bringing really the mandate to bring extremely different perspectives together.

I think in the first stage that was very inspiring, of course, firstly very challenging, but also very inspiring in having the opportunity of listening and thinking about common narratives and questions and of course, vocabulary. Common vocabulary. To begin with. It was very challenging to carry out this dialogue through. To carry this dialogue through to the very end. I think also just very much challenged by the structure of how such a project together with, you know, the curriculum of a PhD student works. There is, there are just very different moments within which such conversations can happen.

I think as much it was as it hopefully also was inspiring to PhD students, it was probably even more challenging for them. As a PhD student, you know, you're kind of in the position of you have to define what your expertise actually what, what is your discipline, what is your expertise, what is your realm of questioning.

Right.

And then when you're part of an interdisciplinary project, you're simultaneously pushed to tear down all these boundaries, disciplinary boundaries that help you to somehow get grounded and that in a way increases with the maturity of a PhD and somehow is maybe to some extent.

Going in the opposite direction of what the module and the question and the progress of pursuing these interdisciplinary inquiries kind of aims to do. That's just one sharing point.

Thank you.

Naomi. Steve.

As Naomi was talking, I had a better idea of how to respond to the question.

One thing for me is when we see each other's work now, that changes things quite remarkably, I think. So when I look at Adrian's work.

That goes so deep and has such high resolution, so we probably have done about six or seven of those, but none of them to the same level of engagement and technical data kind of resolution. So for me, that's very, very insightful. So for me, I'm very excited about what we did. But when you then see comparative, different kind of methodologies, roughly working on the same kinds of phenomena.

Like the sculpting and the scraping away of topsoil to make bricks, that's all through Jakarta, it's all through Bangladesh, it's all through Bengal. It's quite striking, but in a way you get right down because you have also this very beautiful point, cloud technology, which always lights up the room. So there's some wonderful technical complementarities.

But to be a little bit more from my point of view, and I think we probably all feel this, it's remarkable how what we did all came together, but it's all happening because it's so much flatter and we can't get so deep. It means that you're always. You never can see the project because some of it is progressed very fast and some of it hasn't happened yet. And so it's all happening at different rates. And sometimes the technology then catches up. Technology is transforming very fast as well, its capabilities. So that also transforms what you can do in the field. Some field work is extremely bureaucratically tangled. So probably one of the biggest achievements that you saw here is Helen. Helen's been working so hard in doing the Sichuan deep dive in the context of China, which is one of the most sensitive debates in China right now, is what to do with sprawl, so called sprawl, and the countryside, as opposed to Jakarta, where I've got networks, I can just go and say, can we come to the field next week? And they said, yeah, come on, let's have a party. And it's very relaxed. So that out of sync ness is something I fully credit the team, and Evie in particular, for pulling it all together and to present it in this way. I've never seen it quite so coherent. And it gives you a feeling of. Of how.

Many different fronts we're working on simultaneously. And I think the work that Naomi, of course, that Naomi's representing and doing intellectually is very significant for us. So this Vocabulary book. We're not exclusively using that vocabulary, but we fully acknowledge concepts of extended urbanization are really relevant to all of us. The agri, agro, that's certainly present in what we're doing and you have to look closely. But all our names. Names are probably represented in everybody else's posters and events, I would say. Yeah. But overall it's extremely exciting, I think. But this adds another layer of complexity because this is the first time we've really done it with this level of resolution in our work. Yeah.

Thank you, Stephen. Sure.

I would like to highlight two points. One is we started in Covid.

And it has been a huge chance because we empowered people down there. There was no other way. We were not allowed to go into the site. And I think it was a huge chance for that project because very quickly people have taken over the project for us. It was hard and especially for data collection. I mean Michel and Duc, they had to wait. On the other hand.

We were able to bring afterwards the knowledge back to Switzerland.

We got additional grants and got the people back here to help us understand the site. So I think that. I think it was. It happened first, we were scared, but I think at the end of the day it was a big chance. So I think this collaboration has been what we were thinking it would be and trust.

To teach certain new methods, let it also evolve. And I think that was very productive. And the second thing is I would like to turn a little bit this side around what you said, Stephen. I think we have been very much. You say on the solution part.

But.

As you've seen, our vocabulary is still a very much land system science vocabulary, we use land use, etc. And Europe trying to scale up certain things we're not able to. And I think that's where the interdisciplinary work could really advance us. We were talking about some publication you would do in science, etc. We got one out in Nature on the importance of design in water management. And I think this interaction has to really. We have to make that case that it's different than this classic. I mean, I'm still talking about floodplains. You're not talking about floodplains because they're not floodplains. They are in between. And I think to upscale the solutions we are discussing about. I think it would have been very good at the very beginning and we heard sue talking about knowledge analysis and operationalization to have the knowledge creation at the beginning across us.

We would have.

Gained to identify the locations. Also we transformed by having something which is cross scale with A new definition of space somehow together. And we didn't do that. So for us, we can communicate to our water scientists and to our ecologists and say, hey, we're working in floodplains in urbanized areas. But I think you have a very different terminology which.

Could help us upscale certain solutions in another way. So I think having something which is more integrative, I imagine like different layers, we could lay over and really play the game of knowledge analysis across layers and then operationalization. I think that could have been very useful for working on synthesis. But we were, I think still, we're still stuck in our silos.

If I may add. For us, we discovered that, that integrating food systems into urbanization is a five headed dragon. That we only saw the tail of that dragon when we came into the research. I think it's just that internationally it goes into health, into health issues, it goes into food issues. And we could really only scrub the surface. But I'm glad we started with just looking at monsoon Asia, because that was the other thing. Even traveling to these parts of monsoon Asia has been difficult. And when we finally get around to. To realizing or their counterparts in the other parts of the world, in South America, the agroecological movement has been ongoing for a long while. Thankfully we have Agustin, who is somewhat from that region. And so he could have these networks. And then in Africa, they're also really moving forward because a big part of it is Johan, thankfully, is over there. So we try to work through our networks and be innovative on that front.

Nice.

Some specific questions as well. I think maybe I can start with that. Vyan, you know, how might resilient blue green infrastructures in peri urban regions reshape food systems, water cycles and ecological resilience in these fast urbanizing contexts? You know, based on your experience on the ground, how do you see that really pushing the new frontiers? And how do you see that changing the narratives there?

I mean, what I showed, I think it's an extremely.

Successful strategy of adaptation which should support. So first is changing from extensive agriculture to a cash crop, local vegetable based cash crop, which includes also adaptation to these big change. So imagine if you have these.

These raised gardens, you can have flooding, it doesn't destroy your vegetables. And in the dried season you can really have certain areas because you have some lakes, you can have certain areas to water the things. But it's very clear that the money which is produced by these local products is not enough to support livelihood. And that's where we need to have some kind of.

Support financially. Where the money would go into gray infrastructure to rehabilitate the blue green infrastructure and pay these additional services they provide. They provide a huge amount of services which otherwise would have to be supported by grey infrastructure. And that's where I think there is not necessarily missing knowledge, but there is really work to be done to increase the acceptance of, of these type of solutions, because they're not in this postculanalyzation idea of we fix the problem.

And so I think that's where the work needs to be done. And we saw it also with the decision maker themselves. They see the solution as something effective, efficient, and at the end it's not resilient because it's one solution. And if the solution is not managed, which we've seen, the dikes are not managed, if they're not managed, it fails. We need something redundant. And that's where it's not in the brain of the decision maker, which have been educated in our system, in our northern system. And I think that's where it's much more important to understand. People have adapted, they have solutions, they have local solutions which really work. And we need to scale them up somehow.

Sometimes. It's not always about innovating new things, but it's about discovering what's already there and supporting that, supporting that. Yeah, true, true, that's true, that's true. Maybe I can also ask Stephen about the whole approach of agropolitan models. Right. So what future opportunities do you see in agropolitan models for rebalancing this urban rural relations, you know, especially in regions which are vulnerable to climate and food insecurity. So what kind of potential do you see in these new models?

Yeah, if you just allow me a little backtrack. So some of the terminology that we present. So the title of our module is basically our Hypothesis. So Agropolitan Territories in Monsoon Asia. So we proved, we think we proved the hypothesis there are Agropolitan territories in monsoon Asia. We've tested it, but we've also gone far beyond that. And the first step that we do to go beyond it is to produce a statistical, a statistical demonstration of that. And that's what we call, we measure it effectively and we call that agrarian urban area agura. And we do that because it's very sophisticated and Augustine led that work. But it's very simple, remarkably simple from the people who are interested in actual futures, as your question asks. So AGORA is a global mass map that tells us where these regions are. And of course, the thresholds are debatable, but Augustine has demonstrated that 10% of the world's population live in an area in which food production remains part of the urban fabric. So this is urban and rural conditions coexisting, relatively wealthy and relatively productive in terms of land and maintaining an urban, urban economy alongside that. Most of that is in rice. So the matter of water becomes very, very significant in that area. So that's the first thing we did. Agura becomes a statistical measured unit, and we can do that globally.

Agropolitan then becomes a very helpful conceptual development aspiration. So that's a normative condition that we would like to see. So that's a sustainable idea about how cities might develop in these kinds of regions. So wherever you see the statistical kind of dots, be they yellow, red or green, you could develop agropolitan modes of development in those regions. And we do that because that's different to normal urban modes of development. So we're calling for a different form of future making, and we call that agropolitan. And we have a pretty good idea of where you should do that and where you shouldn't do it. So I wouldn't do it in Singapore.

Although many of the techniques, as Denise showed, have been developed and refined in Singapore.

This won't be a lecture, I promise. I'm just going to a couple of other steps. The second one is the agropolitan regions are not in monsoon Asia. So our hypothesis is wrong. It is all over the world. We find agropolitan territories all over the world, mostly in monsoon Asia. That's true. But if you go to the Po Valley, if you go to the Randstad, if you go to Sheffield, if you go to Florida, you will find agropolitan or agura areas in which there are agropolitan policies being developed. So that's the second key thing. The third is that very large numbers of people live in these regions. We very conservatively think 10% of the world's population is living not in cities, not in the countryside, but in Agora settings. Most of those people are not benefiting from planning, thinking and design and proper development strategies. So that's a really important component. The other things that you saw were to do with future thinking, to do with new technologies. So using the Earthscape platform, earthscape.com and we are especially grateful to Joshua to set up that website and to coming back to the role of Singapore. So Singapore is very important in the development of that technology, which is very, very easy to use, very, very deployable. But it also helps guide the ethnography so the satellite and the ethnography are in dialogue. And then finally, our hypothesis claims that there is a new kind of urban practice that is needed, quite frankly, and that practice is represented by the work that you see here.

We've been very conservative. If I think Agustin's a very serious scientist, but I'm a little bit more. I would be more relaxed. I think those numbers are much higher than that. So I think a lot more people are living in these kind of zones. Our final point is that this is not a flash in the pan. It's not a momentary condition in rapid urbanization. This has been around since the 1950s and 60s in different parts of the world. So it's a permanent feature of urbanization from now on. And I would then completely defer to the work that Adrian and Naomi and colleagues are doing, because they give us quite direct ways of thinking about the future. We do, too, but we do it in a much more studio. Environment. Environment. Our main argument here would be that diversity, of course, is super crucial. But if you can think about diversity in the context of what the global data sets are telling us, we're not robots to the data, but we're interacting with the available data would be the argument. Excuse the long.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Stephen. Evi, would you want to add anything to it based on your. Your experience as well?

Okay.

Okay. No, I mean, it was really about what future opportunities do agropolitan models present, you know, for rebalancing urban rural relations, especially in regions which are vulnerable to climate and food insecurity.

So I.

Always joke with.

I always joke that Stephen got me on board because I grew up in an agropolitan region, an Agura region. I'm from Indonesia in the mountainous areas. And so I grew up seeing these conditions. I grew up seeing people who suffer. I mean, I have friends who are in the situations. And to me, it's like, this is exciting work. You know, this is real work that will change the people on the ground.

Yeah.

Pardon me.

Yeah.

Understand.

I mean, sometimes I think that's also the trigger. Right. When you actually feel it and when you have been part of it, the research makes a lot more sense because it's not just an academic exercise. It's actually an effort to make a difference in the best possible way. Yeah. Thank you, Evie. I mean, just to touch back to Naomi's presentation, I know, like, your research has. Has such complexities, right. When you look at all the different scales which you are working on. But how do you. How do you see this Whole concept of agri urbanism contributing to actually rethinking this whole global urban agendas, especially under the conditions of planetary urbanization. How do you really see this particular concept kind of pushing new frontiers, this agri urbanisms?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a tough one. And there's obviously not just one answer, but there are different angles to this. I mean, first one being the fact that we need to think from and through these varied territories about classic or conventional urban questions, right? So.

If we're developing new strategies on how to redevelop, how to transition cities such as Singapore, these highly concentrated urban regions, we cannot just do that by thinking from and through Singapore in this particular case. But we need to do that in the knowledge of the challenges and the opportunities that lie within these very territories that are not just spatially close to us, but that places like Singapore are heavily dependent on. We cannot develop any kind of sustainable.

Future.

If we're just concerned with Singapore. So that's kind of the first.

The first, I would say imperative, right, about the relevance, the significance of these kinds of territories that they need to be part of any kind of consideration that we undertake. And then secondly, because places such as Singapore just as a proxy for any kind of big consumer.

Essentially.

And the very diverse sustainable agendas that are formulated that are articulated from places like Singapore that need to prioritize these kind of territories, these kind of agricultural landscapes in order to claim any kind of valid sustainability for a place like Singapore, being so dependent on these places spaces, right? To put them to increase the weight that is given in agendas and strategizing around sustainability.

Because they ultimate as the key resource territories, as the key resource frontiers for urban living today, they bear the key of having a sustainable urban life or not.

Yeah. So just now that I've regained composure. So if you take for example in Indonesia, right, You could. There are a lot of these like red small mini marts going into the rural areas and they're fighting with, they're actually dying out all this. In Indonesia you have this small local markets called warungs and they are the lively source of that community and they have caused them to develop over time. But then when these mini marts do come in, it becomes an issue. So when the whole food system is turned upside down, when you no longer have a localized economy that's circular, because you're buying in from outside and because it's based on it being cheaper, because it being based on how easily it's being transported and being packaged, that becomes an issue. You're messing with even that localized system. And. And essentially that will backfire on us in the urban context, because we are depending on them.

Thank you so much. So let me now open it up to the floor. Are there questions from our audience?

Thank you. While I've got the mic, can I be greedy and have two questions?

They're not the same.

Feel free.

Feel free.

Is that okay? Sorry.

Thanks. It was nice to see the work coming together and being presented alongside of each other, because I think it is one of the examples where the sum of the parts.

Is really helpful.

So on that.

Just a query and.

None of you managed to find the state in the work that you were doing, or at least not to articulate it. In other words, one of the things which is the leitmotif of the other FCL global projects is this idea of stakeholders. And you find communities, you find residents and you find communities. But it's not clear to me who the policymakers are and how easy or difficult it is to find them. Partly because of the scale, I think, that you're working at and perhaps because the conventional urban stakeholders that don't present in the ways in your conceptualization. So could you kind of comment on it? So that was my first question. And then the second one is very different. But.

In thinking about phase four and where there's talk of looking at city systems, your general argument that the problem with looking at the future of cities is that we tend to look at cities is bounded and that what you do is that you offer this idea of displaced urbanization and planetary urbanization and messy urbanization that is scaled completely by. It's fine. But I wonder how easy it is to put your work alongside another enduring urban reality, which is that there are systems of cities and even Singapore is not an isolated urban entity. And I wondered if you could think about whether you, of all of the cohorts in this wider community that has emerged, are you the people that we should be entrusting with this work, or should we be going back to other kinds of people to think about city systems?

I can't resist it. I have to just quickly.

The last question is quite provocative because the system of cities is jurisdictionally based and it's not typically reflecting the functional realities of cities. So Jakarta is a 10 million mega city, but the urban region is 30 million something. So I really would push back on the idea that it's a kind of, of course, the famous book about mayors being the, you know, ruling the world. I mean, I think it just doesn't work because cities don't really represent. I can't think of many. I can't think of many situations in which the city's jurisdictional boundaries aligns with the demographic boundary. So they always overspill, mostly in Asian conditions. Shrinking city conditions. In Europe, I understand there was a phase where there's a lot of discussion about cities under bounding, where populations would shrink within the kind of boundaries. But generally speaking, in Asia, cities do not capture the full functional urban functioning population. So they always overreach. And then just to respond to the second question a little bit, it's true, it's true. The only background framework for us was to say that we looked for, we did have a kind of a state overlay, which was to say we had had cases in India, China and Indonesia where fundamentally different modes of organizing the state, but also making decisions about city planning. So the fact that we had Helen here was very important because she's standing for the Chinese case study.

We have other colleagues, Victoria Marshall and others working in India and Indonesia is very well represented. With Evie and I.

I would add another layer of what you said. I think when you look at the actors which are active in certain areas, in our area, there's a lot of international actors, mostly international actors, and they drive the changes, they drive the urbanization. All the backfilling is done by big European companies, French companies, and the entire change of the services provided by these areas is driven by the international market. That's what you said also before. So in that sense, understanding, and that's what we did is understanding the network of factors which are active on a certain plot. They are coming from very different cities. And depending on the market of rice which you have in Indonesia, depending if they have a drought period, your market price, the local market price becomes suddenly more interesting for the city. So in that sense, they are totally teleconnected or whatever you want to call them, through the actors and their interaction on very small scale plot and on the farmers decisions at the end. And I think that in our case is extremely. I mean, it's a very strongly driven system by NGOs in Madagascar. And that's, that's where things happen. I mean, that's where the money comes from and that's how it drives this whole system.

Yeah, well, you mean because of the U.S. yeah, it has decreased, you're right.

So on stakeholders, it really varies. I mean, you think that it's the same or it varies from site to site. So in Indonesia, for example, we were dealing with land bankers, basically people who buy land and Then they would rent it out to farmers. And the farmers think that they're doing them a favor, but actually they're not. They're just waiting for the land price to increase with urbanization widening. So that's a situation in China. What is interesting in the Linpan situation is that it's a historical agricultural area, so there is this heritage aspect to it. But at the same time the government is running, they realize there's a global shift. And so they want to have security, food security. They're taking back some of this land and they're mechanizing it. You saw in the video with the drones, there are 12 drones, 12 satellites up that belongs to China that's actually looking at this land area and they're mechanizing it. So the farmers are not actually farming anymore and they're going to create this little heritage, villages going into ecotourism. So very, very dynamic.

Maybe to add to that and to inquire about the role of the. The state or the key actor in this case also of the transformation of these agrarian landscapes.

Looking at the specific instance of renewable energy production. It is also by no means just a local issue, even though the implications happen within very specific sites. But it's international energy companies, international developers, international manufacturers that bring in the infrastructure and so forth, forth. So we very quickly have reached in our case studies, the limits of just inquiring about the national state. So to put it differently.

Just looking.

At national state actors doesn't get you very far. It becomes a planetary inquiry. Also on that scale. Right here. I personally found the work, I don't know if you know of the work by Niels Gilman and Blake.

They introduced that concept of the planetary subsidiarity as a proposition of how we can tackle these.

Global or planetary struggles, challenges, whether this is the energy transition or the pandemic or climate change. In a way that we give, we. We address that.

Through responsibility on the smallest possible scale. But it has the opportunity to escalate to agencies, actors that are above the national state. While that brings its own sets of problems, obviously.

Right.

I think it's extremely important that in dealing with these planetary challenges, to also think of possible ways of governance that currently are not possible within the nation state framework.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentations. Really nice to see all three of them.

I was. The question I wanted to ask is half answered, but I want to remind everybody about the strange happening in the Guggenheim Museum four years ago, where M. Kohlhaas made this exhibition about the countryside. And.

Typically REM Kohlhaas he did as if he was the first white man ever to go into the countryside and discover all strange things, etc. Etc. And that is typically a sort of architectural hubris to to do that. And we had to remind him. But rim, there are universities, agricultural universities, even in your own country. Wageningen is founded in 19001012 and it's the biggest knowledge hub for this. But in a way we must be aware that of course we are architects too and we are discovering, let's say, the cosmos and are well thrilled by our new discoveries and typologies we make, etc. Etc. But we don't see that. Well, 2/3 of this new universe is filled with dark matter. And we don't know as architects what this dark matter is. And I think the dark matter in this case, it's a bit strange.

Metaphor, but the dark matter is that the agronomic.

Let'S say, angle to this problem. We are now, let's say.

Having an angle on from the urban side has been studied and has also have actors and industries and that's why it's a planetary problem and we have land grabbing and we etc. Etc. And I wonder how you feel that we are getting these two worlds together to really make an impact.

I would just add one point here. I think it's very interesting to reflect the difference between the rule, decision making, what's happening and the one in your I have to get rid.

And I think one of the the main issue is that the supply and the demand.

There'S very different actors now involved in the supply and the demand in urban areas compared to the rural areas. What they want in cities is very different. What you want in an urban area, in a rural area and how you can supply is very different. And I think this is. So the story becomes extremely different and there is much more requirement in terms of multifunctionality. If you are in a city, you.

Discovered that this boundary between the countryside and the city is. Well, it's not there anymore.

Well, but it's very important, yeah.

I mean, to add an institutional layer to that question. Of course, famously, Rem Koolhaas not only discovered countryside, he'd also discovered Lagos and I should say discovered there. So all of us in the post colonial world have already been like, you know, pretty upset about this and it's like, what the hell. So all the agrarian people, of course, are already inside that same discussion, same structure. However, from practical experience.

It'S been very difficult actually to talk across those lines. So one of our partners is the.

The.

Is the Rice Research Institute, which is based in Manila. And that's where the Green Revolution began. So it's a very, very famous, very significant, very, very scholarly group of people. But it's incredibly. We don't speak the same language. So they're interested in the countryside, endlessly interested in the countryside. The idea that they would think about urbanization is really just not on the radar. And they don't have an institutional remit, they don't have KPIs, they don't have funding, funding. It's so locked in to an agrarian outlook. We tried very, very hard and it's hard enough for us to communicate across disciplinary boundaries, let alone those kind of institutional ones. So we literally have International Rice Research Institute as one of our partners. We've also interacted a little bit with wagening, but haven't found a similar kind of vocabulary, lack of vocabulary.

It's a contested area we're entering and we have to realize that in a.

Way, the first thing is it's not very contested because we haven't had those contests. But I do think that's where we should go for sure. And one of the arguments that we make with Earthscape is that we're bringing together data that doesn't usually belong together. So we have to go to the FAO to extract agricultural census data in order to get to the UN and extract track demographic data. And I'm sure you all had the same. So by bringing together those differently siloed data sets is reflected in quite rigid institutional frameworks and funding and publishing and so on. I completely agree with your question. I think that's a really significant next step.

There is this extremely interesting research by Pablo Titonel, I don't know if you know him.

Of ajo ecology and the history of humankind. He is studying all a ecological systems in history and the ones that are still there and has this fantastic story that these are the systems that are really sustainable and we have to learn from them. And I think think they coincide.

For a part with the agricultural urban systems. And it is interesting to look how well from both sides you can make the typology even richer, but also broaden the field of the instrumental side of the study.

Maybe just to echo this, but also make sure that the kind of the question that you just threw up like the architect now discovering the countryside, I think it could also be viewed the other way around. I mean, of course from a theoretical, conceptual angle, there is a whole domain, not just of agricultural science, but of Peasant studies of political ecology that has been in a way similarly limited to a large extent to territorial limited. Right. And I don't see for example, the work that we've been doing in the context of planetary urbanization as a way of co opting any of these existing studies or domains, but as an opportunity to not see it in this silo, a territorial subdivided kind of way, but to bring these conversations together because they're so fundamentally entangled that we cannot progress until we include this in a mutual.

In the middle between the two worlds.

I don't think it's intruding or co opting one way or the other, but it's establishing a dialogue beyond these, these disciplinary, territorial, kind of fantastic lines.

I think you said it's a tricky question because you ask of an architect. I don't think any of us would align ourselves with that form of architectural practice. Even though I'm very proud of my discipline, but I'm also a bit embarrassed by it for the reasons you said. So I operate in a far more design science loop kind of mode.

I think it's also a matter of scale because like right now you see a lot of urban agricultural enthusiasts and the biggest scale within that realm will be Willem and Bowen, who's looking at green networks along urban areas. But what we need to look at is really at a planning scale and even not just city planning, it's regional planning. And while you have all this enthusiastic, it's a zooming in and out. You have to understand agriculture and then zoom out and understand this and then go back and look at hydrology and then zoom back out. And it's a constant back and forth, zooming in and out of scales.

Yeah.

And of course you have the gravitation field of the urban that also land prices are sort of pivotal in this whole discussion. Everything in the gravitation field of the urban, the land prices are going up. So that makes it a very dynamic kind of land use. But on the same time.

On the same time scale you see that the ajo ecological.

Ways of farming in the vicinity of the city sometimes are hundred years old or even older than that. So that's also interesting how, how to escape the land price paradox in these landscapes.

On the cultural front, sometimes when you go into this research, you might think all these people trying to do agriculture in the city, it's a little bit, what's the word? Embellishment. But actually it's really important because what we realize also is that when the children don't understand agriculture anymore, that becomes an issue that no matter what, you still have to have that train of generational passing down of agricultural thinking, even in the urban areas.

Brian.

Thank you.

I'll start with the idea that there are different perspectives.

And then I'll date myself to say.

More from the engineering perspective. And I do see problems and look for solutions that are effective and efficient. And when we look at resilient infrastructure, we worry a lot about how we're going to prove that if disastrous events, or potentially disastrous events like floods.

Are.

We going to lose service and if we do, how fast can we restore it? And so I was wondering to Adrian, if you zoom in a bit on resilient blue green infrastructures and the river, you looked at like the solutions that were being developed, how were you testing them to the 1 in 100, 1 in 200, 300 floods? And how did you define success?

So what we did is what we did. We stress tested these designs according to an evolution of different scenarios which build on each other. So they're pathway dependent. So depending on what you do, you have the same design which is carried over and destroyed and producing. And at each time step you have a set of ecosystem services that you measure and these are demanded by a certain amount of people. So at each step over time until 2080, you have a set of ecosystem services which are produced and you are on a certain pathway and that's where your interventions depending when you have them over time, you can see if you are in a resilient or if you switch to another pathway. So in that sense it's a stress test over time based on an indicator which is ecosystem services under socioeconomic and climate scenarios. That's a bit what we do.

Very good.

Is that a good answer? Thank you.

If you talk across cross disciplines. Because that's engineer to engineer, right?

Exactly.

Sorry, I was going to say I have nothing else to disagree with.

You took it all away.

Our approach would be to say, well, flooding isn't actually a destruction of wealth and resource in many of these landscapes. And coming to Dirk's point.

They'Ve adapted to this environment. So they're actually, they're water watery environments in which they expect flood to come and go. Of course that's being interfered with massively around the urbanization environments. But so people know how to kind of manage wealth and resource and infrastructure with the ebb and flow, seasonal ebb and flow, predictable seasonal ebb and flow of flooding. So it's not called flooding so much as simply part of the irrigation system of the landscape. And that's attached to. That's also attached to demographics. There's a certain amount of labor that goes with that.

Another disciplinary perspective would be to redefine the question. Right, I'm just going to leave it there.

No, I don't totally agree because I think you're misinterpreting what are these flood and droughts at the moment and what they are going to be in the future at the moment. It really has been so disruptive that they cannot do so the infrastructure is not working anymore for what is coming. And that makes them very clearly change the land use practices. They have to change. They cannot produce what they've produced before. The infrastructure is not resilient for these things. So this doesn't work anymore. I agree with the past that you could have defined it as a multifunctional space with food infrastructure, et cetera. But at the moment that's not the case. So we have to restore that. I agree. That's the point. That's the point. So you have to understand what were these services but make it resilient over time to these changes which are going to happen which requires a. A.

Massive in that sense space for these changes which are happening.

We have another question from dav.

Hi everyone, I'm David from eth. This was a wonderful session.

I think it came very well together.

So we had a number of different case studies and some more in depth in Madagascar.

Some project go a bit further.

All have some mapping exercises but case study based. And I think it's really easy to talk about. And although even though I'm studying more the concentrated urbanism or the centers or the urban situation and there was a.

Question about where is the state. And obviously in a lot of issues.

Also in urban areas there is no state or other actors are taking up state functions.

You stressed a lot the notion of community.

And I wonder a bit if there are kind of governance model that you.

Suggest or saw that that are around.

Kind of communities and for example more.

In the urban session.

In the urban areas we have this community wealth building, this kind of models. The models that are kind of that.

Are more cooperative based model that try.

To actually anchor either the land as.

Well as the surplus money that you have around land and production in the communities.

And yeah I wonder is this naive?

Do you see potential in that in this community organized governance models?

Maybe I can start from the case study. I think we have a very typical common pool resource situation in our case. So a rehabilitation of the water infrastructure which requires a community based effort. It's the Way to go in that sense to produce a functioning system that everybody can gain. And the problem is absolutely that there is more and more. I mean they are not functioning anymore. What happens if it doesn't function anymore? You're going to very quickly look for yourself and for very short term output. And it's not supported by a government which is extremely corrupt. So we don't have a support for these communities to try to restore and have a common situation. The state, the ministry is corrupt. And through that you have very quickly these large parcels which are being sold. So I think there.

Would be improvement in terms of linking this state agencies with the local decision making process, which at the moment is dysfunctional.

Yeah, I fully agree. I think we experienced that kind of fragmentation. State powers are usually quite weak apart from China, where that's a whole other discussion. But the environment, where.

Most of the stuff environment in this area, because it's not very urban, it's a bit rural, it also kind of goes off the kind of radar a little bit. But from the community point of view, there's two classic examples. You probably know, everybody in the room, I would assume knows about the Subak land management system in Bali. It's a kind of sad case because it's breaking down. But it's a famous example of an archaeological system of managing landscape. Very large population density, cities, very large areas, but not urban. And also directly related to management of irrigation and rice. So this is a very famous example. It also happens to be breaking down. So there's a great sadness about that. But there's a lot of this a UNESCO heritage site. And there's a lot of work being done on that to study that, how it can be improved and also adapted elsewhere. The other one that might be less known, but it's a very interesting case is in. I was talking to Dirk about it in Bangladesh, where the land tenure is basically rice growing landscape. The rice is privately owned, it's owned by a limited number of landowners, a kind of short term tenure. It now inevitably floods. And in the six months when it does flood, the land flips from rice to fish. So it becomes a fish pond, but the fish is a commons. So the shift in crop also involves a shift in land tenure which is managed locally. And we've seen direct evidence of that. And again, that's a great model that people are now studying in great detail. I'm proud to say that we contributed to that. And it's also being adopted as a kind of example of a watery collective, agrarian and yet high density kind of environment.

A final point is there's so much work done by the civil, by civil society. I think that we already touched on that question. So documenting those examples I think is super supremely important because again, it's the downside of not being urban. City centricity really does drop off the concern and interest in areas, people outside the urban core. So that's another dimension. I think that's part of the work that we would probably share.

Two points about that. One is similar. We ended up looking at a lot of heritage Agricultural FAO actually has a whole website on it. And in Heritage, once you see that it is community driven. In fact, the other wonderful thing is that it aligns to watershed very often. So if you look at the SUBAC system, that's how the province is drawn based on. So that's something to say about, about cartographic development, right. When we start to draw lines, because it's based on what's easy drawing it. That's one. The other one is there are actually regions where the state don't actually want to look at or pretend that it's not there. So the Kolkata Wetlands is another one. Kolkata Wetlands is this place in Kolkata that is essentially it cleans up the sewage of the entire city and it's at the same time a fishery. So in that area there are people living there, which is not in the census. You know, they're just living there and they're producing their own vegetables, they're producing their own fishes and they're surviving pretty well, but the state is not involved.

Just to add to this, I think it could be worth thinking about the temporal dimension and the significance and the capacities of these communities that are exposed to transitions. So for example, in the case of Thailand, where we were looking at the sugarcane expansion and the challenges, the new kinds of challenges that these farming communities were exposed to, the community cohesion itself was also very much challenged through these processes because some farmers were aware of the additional income that has been generated through the residues of the sugarcane production for electricity. Most of the farmers had no idea.

Right.

So the question of.

Distributing knowledge about these new systems, about these processes of transition is I think, extremely important in these four empowering communities in this process.

And knowledge distribution that we cannot just rely on the electricity producer taken care of. Same for the introduction of renewable energy infrastructure in Indonesia. We talked to farmers that have been selling their land for photovoltaic infrastructures that had no idea what this strange thing is actually doing. Right. Some of them saw it as a threat, potentially attracting more rain or thunder to their petty fields. Again, it was a lack of understanding these transitions that brought some community members in a clear benefit, in a position with clear benefit, and others being left behind. So that might change of course, over time. So this is why I think the notion of time and temporal cohesion or temporal challenges to community cohesion and empowerment is extremely important to consider.

Okay, I think that we have one more. Yeah.

I have two questions, if that's okay with you.

First of all, thank you for the presentations.

It's a wonderful session and it feels personal to me as well. Growing up and living in this sort of agropolitan territory. My first question will be specifically about Earth space, but feel free to jump in if it resonates with the others as well. It's about how sort of do you imagine operationalizing the platform in the future? As in who are you passing the baton to? Or like, who are you thinking of sort of collaborating with in the future? This question comes from also Indonesia, where.

There'S a growing distrust towards the government.

Including governmental statistics and data in which spatial data might or might not matter at all in urban governance. The second one is about ideal city form. Of course, it's a long standing sort of discourse, but in monsoon Asia.

Cities like Singapore often comes up as aspirational.

But I'm wondering what do you think this ideal form looks like in these territories? Or in other words, how, how to reassemble imaginaries of like a more just futures in. In these territories.

Thank you. You.

So Earthscape, it's really interesting. We have a team here who is very passionate about it and we have a dream. We, we constantly want to keep it open source. And part of the reason why we're translating it from currently a desktop version to a web platform is because it's no longer, you know, we, we base it off of a technology that's no longer open source. So we're going in that direction. But the idea of Earthscape also is that we ran a Earthscape workshop once and somebody who's very thoughtful came up to me and said what she thinks is really interesting about this workshop and the use of Earthscape is that it's not just making data open source, it's putting the analysis of data in the hands of everyday people, which is very different from just making it open source because it means that your person on the street, in the Singapore context, your grandma selling vegetables, if she so wants, she can go onto Earthscape and actually see is the neighbor the hood that I'm living in demographically, is it predominantly aging? Is there enough greeneries in it? She can make all these decisions on her own because the data is available and that platform is also available. So that's our vision for Earthcape. It's really to empower and it was first developed actually for development in countries like Indonesia where yes, the government is trying their very best to go smart city and everything. But then there are regional governments, there are local governments who don't yet have the capacity and don't yet have that money to do it. So that would empower project development at that level. While the government, the, you know, the federal government is trying to move things forward. I don't want to.

Add I share Joshua's enthusiasm for Earthscape. I find it incredibly useful as a non technical person. It helps you think in quite a different way. Just to make an addition to what Evie said, Earthscape.

It also open sources the authority and the credibility of the data. We do not claim.

That the data itself is especially credible. We describe Earthscape as a kind of mirror. It's quite a smart mirror, but it's still a mirror. So one of the main exercises we do when we go into particular municipalities.

Would be to project back the data that has been contributed by the people in the room. And there's always two or three people who are embarrassed because there's a big hole where their data is supposed to be. And we say, well, don't worry, just give us the data and we'll upload it. So it is a kind of a. It is a slightly public shaming exercise that we use. But the bottom line is that we do not guarantee the credibility. There is a kind of metadata button, so you can see who made the data, where it came from, how old it is and so on, which is another public shaming technique because if somebody else has better data in the room, they say, hey, I have better data. And I gave it to you last week and they said, well, I didn't get the email. And so, you know, you can imagine. So it's a very messy kind of environment. But as Evie said, it takes the wake the conversation from us and actually puts it out there in the middle. We can be contributing, but it's a much more noisy, messy environment, which I personally enjoy very much. The second. Oh, and what's going to happen next? You've heard some very discreet things about the next phase of fcl, but if we're certainly involved, then escape will be in there for sure. We would like to develop a user Community because we don't want to be a technical back end office. Although we have expertise in FCL that can handle that. But we're really interested people using it. So that's why we keep saying earthscape.com it's our advertising and please use it, please download it and please contribute to the development. The codes online, the data is there for anybody to upload. There's public data that we have there, but you can add your own data.

The ideal city. I think we should talk over coffee. That's a huge, big topic, but I'm totally happy to discuss. I don't know if colleagues just.

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, sure.

I mean, be okay with maybe.

I wanted to come back to my provocation, Stephen, and just try and ask the question in a different way in the light of the way the conversation has gone and in the light of the overarching kind of idea of the program of FCL Global, which is about in place. And I want to sort of restate my point that there's a tension which I think could be a productive tension. I'm hoping it might be a productive tension between the agropolitan focus of spill and messiness and reach beyond the city and the city system logic, which is what a lot of government agencies are often interested in, which is about connecting nodes which often bypass the very places that we've just talked about. Okay. And they're very different agencies, so they're very different datas and they controlled perhaps by very different actors. And if they are, as you indicated, the global actors, which I think they quite often are, they don't actually even touch the hinterland at all or only in an extractive way, which is the kind of post colonial kind of condition.

But if you look at the African.

Context, for example, there's an obsession with the system and trying to get the system work.

If you look at the European Union.

There'S an obsession with the system of cities, how places its transport nodes basically. Whereas if you look at the kinds of actors that you're talking about, it's the Department of Land affairs, it's agricultural production. And I can't help wondering whether there isn't quite an interesting provocation to look at the different imperatives depending on the policy priorities that you put forward of whether your concern is around the Agropolitan or the system of cities. Because I think you would land up with very different outcomes and recommendations because you would work with different actors and you would would have different data. And I just wanted to kind of push you again. To as you begin to think about the future, to engage in both games because I think you might find that there's a really provocative intersection.

You probably heard Sasha talk yesterday about settlement systems, right? Which is a kind of euphemism for exactly the thing that you're talking about. So it's a cake and eat it too.

Yeah, I fully take your point.

I know this is very late, so I'm going to just. We've been thinking very much about that question.

So Forrester and the history of systems thinking of course is very powerful and very significant in Singapore. And it's almost the epicenter of city center theorization. As soon as you step out from Singapore, there's much less system talk. In fact, people are talking because systems over the border in almost any direction are always truncated. They're partial, they're fragmentary. So there are others. And then the other thing, as you've already indicated, what comes into view in fact is the territory across which systems traverse. So it's the famous kind of network diagram. You look at the node and the links between the nodes, but what do they call go through, what's the medium? And that medium is usually water and land and agriculture and nature and so on. So that's the famous kind of hinterland that the nodes consume and interact with and usually export the waste to in a non circular kind of system. So to be really precise about. We have thought very carefully about this and we have started to use the term mosaic which we borrowed from environmental scientists and ecosystem service people. So if you cut, if you cross Forrester, who's the famous godfather of systems and what's his name, Richard Foreman, who's the great, the godfather of mosaics and patches. I think that's where you get a very beautiful system like but non system partial system condition. And I think you see that in almost all the cases that we, that we showed. But also I think it's very hard to think that from. In Singapore and it comes to your core question. Whether that's FCL or not.

Is another issue. We're not pitching to bring this as a core question for fcl. I think it's a Zurich, Swiss Singapore DNA is deep inside the institution and that's the way it should be. But nonetheless it encouraged this work. So I think that's kind of promising in another way.

Maybe also just attempt of a very quick response. And firstly appreciate that you bring this question up again since we failed to answer it the first time around.

And in a way the question I would also claim is very Much at the center of what our module is doing or the iteration of what our module has been doing. By talking about the urban as a condition that appears in different kinds of configurations, patterns with different kind of pathways and trajectories.

And in that sense I would say yes, we, I very much hope that we can contribute to this question of urban systems. So not so much maybe about city systems, right, we would move away from whatever that claimed closed entity is, but to consider what appears, what generates concentrated urban regions taking form of cities, et cetera, as well as the other front that we've been now talking about as one system, the urban system that I believe we can very. I very much hope that we can contribute to.

I might be a little bit more engineering or scientific here, but I have the impression that what you're tackling at is extremely important from the governance part of view. And it's a nested governance because as soon as you will have the territory be in the urban areas, other rules will play. You suddenly have your green areas which become part of the whatever ecological corridor of your city. And the management is very different than if it's outside the city. So the boundaries. And I think that's where the institutional nestedness needs to probably really have a look at it. And I think it's super interesting what you're saying is it's probably worse to think in terms of if you link both what is a new institutional setting you can put on the boundary of these systems, which needs to be cross scale.

Because the functionality you are looking at in the city is usually very restrained to a system which can be in the urban areas, but the functionality you're looking in the central land has a very different dimension. And that's where I think to have something which is nested in terms of ostrum, but in terms of space, I think that there's not that much on that. They will be very interested to invest.

And to add to that, actually we tried looking at the food as a system. It morphs. The problem is it's really hard to systematize food systems because at one point you might be thinking about production of food and then consumption of food. And that's not just the end of it, because there is also commodification of food. So it jumps between layers and then in the distribution it jumps to the transportation layer. So it's constantly morphing itself. And in order to follow it along, you never know when it's jumping between the financial layer, between the economic layer, back down to the production layer and when it's jumping to the irrigation and hydrological layer.

It'S really hard to do.