Aun cuando en general siempre estoy atento siguiendo la investigacion que se hace en Latino America, y en idioma castellano en general, este año puse un poco mas de interes en ver que es lo “que hay alli afuera” en materia de servicios ecosistemicos, esta vez poniendo mas atencion a los canales sociales de diseminacion del conocimiento, como blogs y youtube. A decir verdad quede sorprendido por el nivel de desinformacion y confusion conceptual que encontre. Es cierto que el concepto de servicios ecosistemicos despierta incomodidades no solo en nuestra lengua castellana, lo he presenciado muchas veces, tambien es cierto …
Category: News
The Homogenization of cities in the world
Regardless of location, culture and even size, cities in the world depict similar trends in terms of the evolution of their spatial structure in time. As surprising as this statement might sound, we have recently compiled empirical evidence analyzing a sample of 194 cities over 25 years span, from 1990 until 2015. The article was published last week in Landscape and Urban Planning. I would be happy to share a copy with anybody interested to read. That cities are homogenizing is not surprising in urban ecology. Is almost common sense that we can find the same species of birds, small …
Studying Ecosystem Services at the Ruhr University Bochum
Within the Master Program Transformation of Urban Landscapes (M.Sc) I have been teaching Ecosystem Services using a practical approach, learning by doing. The students are free to choose a topic to develop a practical application, a spatially explicit assessment of Ecosystem Services. We have prepared a video interviewing our 2019 master students, asking them to share their experience.
Changing paradigm II
These days I have been thinking about my fundamental question, our relationship to nature. The predominant paradigm understands humans and society as a separated body acting from outside and damaging a hopeless nature. That paradigm has its origins in creationist believes, where humans were created as a distinct and special part of the universe. That vision, inherited from religious approaches, still has a subtle influence in the way science shapes its understanding, even though most of the scientific advancement of the XIX and XX centuries has been systematically demonstrating that humans do not have any special place in reality. We …
Catedra Futuro en Santiago de Chile
Beyond urban-rural dichotomies
In this recently published article we measure urbanisation as a continuous variable in central European landscapes using the technomass indicator. The method is highly promising to understand the high spatial complexity and heterogeneity of urbanisation as spatio temporal process.
Technomass and cooling demand: a super-linear relationship
In this recently published article we explore the impact of the increasing technomass (TM) on cooling demand in buildings in South America, analising the entangled double nature of the building–environment interrelation in an urban context. Using advanced spatially explicit quantitative methods to select representative samples of the urban environment we quantifed the volumes of TM in four South American cities. Principal component analysis was used to extract representative urban tissue categories and the Urban Weather Generator tool was used to produce the urban weather data used in building performance simulations. Our results confirm a superlinear dependence of the total cooling consumption …
Six fundamental aspects of urban form
The first week of October 2016 I was kindly invited to attend an exciting workshop at the Arizona State University. The aim was to discuss land use land cover change, from a spatially explicit point of view, looking towards urban form. There were no presentations, only four intensive working days, excellent food and enlightening discussions. As a result of that meeting, we produce a conceptual paper, to propose a systematisation of six relevant aspects defining urban form. It was a hard one year work until getting the final text ready for submission. The article was recently published in Landscape and Urban …
call for a PhD student in Germany – Food security and urban green
Our research group at the Insitute of Geography, Ruhr-University Bochum is open to receive new PhD applications starting in 2019. The research topics are (1) food security and urban green and (2) urban form and heath. If you are interested in obtaining further information please do not hesitate to contact me any time. There is also the chance to discuss other research topics if they fit within these research lines.
Double Degree Master Programme “Transformation of urban Landscapes (TuL)”
The Institute of Geography at the Ruhr-University Bochum is receiving applications for the Double Degree Master Programme `Transformation of urban Landscapes (TuL)´. TuL focuses on the present and future challenges in developing sustainable metropolitan regions and facilitates the necessary professional competence to cope with those challenges in both growing and shrinking regions. The Master Programme consists of four semesters and will partly be taught in Shanghai at the Tongji University, College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) (semesters three and four). The course language is English. Deadline for applications is 15 July. If you have further queries, please feel free …