Q-book Albano 4 : Sustainability

This report is the result of a collaboration between The Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, The School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the Architectural firm KIT also based in Stockholm. It explores and discusses strategies for integrating novel social-ecological research within the planning and urban design practices aiming to delineate principles for an integrated and comprehensive social-ecological urban design practice. As focal case and example works the Albano campus area in Stockholm, with a strategic location at the crossroads between the three major universities in Stockholm as well as its inner city and the National City Park, the latter adressing the contested issue of expanding the university and city inside a large urban park of national interest. Taken together this critical location in a most informative way highlights several of the potentials and challenges that the contemporary planning and urban design fields are facing today. Q-book Albano 4 originated from the work by a inter- and transdisciplinary research team, in their effort to challenge existing development plans for the expansion of the Stockholm University campus over an area inside the National Urban Park. While the existing plans lacked a clear engagement with novel findings from research and design theory, and while the campus expansion was to be placed within a park with important biodiversity and cultural heritage, the team took upon them to articulate an alternative vision based on contemporary international and local research. Consequently, the team offered an alternative vision for the area, in contrast to the plans that the City had been offered by other architects and planners. Furthermore, through presenting this vision at an international academic conference open to the public, the real-estate developer Akademiska hus, a body within the Swedish state that manages university campuses across the country, making them one of the largest developers of their kind in the world, showed an interest and urged the team to develop their suggestion further. Through this support, time was given to deepen the principles of social-ecological urban design and to further develop the alternative vision for how the Albano area could be developed according to these principles. This included workshops with experts, and stakeholder meetings with civil society organizations. The alternative vision, in this process developed into this illustrated report that effectively joins theories of resilience, social-ecological systems and ecosystem services with theories of spatial analysis, urban morphology and design methodology, translating this new body of knowledge into principles and elements of social-ecological urban design, using the Albano site as case study.