International Workshop on Sustainable City Region
23-24 February 2009, Denpasar – Bali, Indonesia
International Workshop on Sustainable City Region
An international workshop was convened by the AGS at The University of Tokyo, by the Integrated Research System for Sustainability Science (IR3S), and Udayana University in Bali, concluded the AGS series of seminars on the Urban Futures initiative. The meeting brought together for the first time researchers in Asia interested in the interaction between urban and rural areas.
A mosaic of urban-rural land uses is a common phenomenon in the fringe areas of Asian large cities. Although current planning systems based on western models attempt to separate urban from rural, increased urban-rural interactions can contribute to establishing sustainable urban communities in Asia. Urban engineers, landscape planners, and agriculture researchers talked together about these issues for the first time, and this was exciting for the participating faculty and students.
Link to seminar videos and presentation (pdf)
Contact person: Dr. Kensuke Fukushi
SHORT REPORT:
AGS Urban Futures seminar series – Report of the First International Workshop on Sustainable City-regions
This international workshop was convened by the AGS at The University of Tokyo, the Integrated Research System for Sustainability Science (IR3S), and Udayana University in Bali. The meeting brought together for the first time researchers in Asia interested in the interaction between urban and rural areas.
A mosaic of urban-rural land uses is a common phenomenon in the fringe areas of Asian large cities. The word desakota (a combination of two Indonesian words: desa for village, kota for town) has been coined to refer to these urban fringe regions. Asian cities have applied planning measures based on the theory of clearly separating the city from surrounding rural areas — so-called modern city planning concepts such as zoning, greenbelt, and compact city – but in most cases failed to successfully control urban developments, resulting in a disordered mix of urban and rural land uses on the urban fringe.
Under the AGS, the University of Tokyo is focusing on the Asian city-region and playing a leading role in developing a new concept for sustainable city regions for Asia, through a new approach to the integration of urban and rural areas, in which increased urban-rural interactions are expected to contribute to establishing sustainable urban communities in Asia. At the workshop, this topic was discussed in four sessions that addressed urban-rural systems, city regional forms, water management, and culture and settlements.
The rural and urban divide can be deconstructed by focusing on the institutions in this zone. The social networks and institutions that control flows of people, capital, energy, food, materials and wastes between urban and rural areas include private companies, NPOs/NGOs, public government departments, and social networks that sustain the informal sector and rural-urban population flows. Often, the formal institutional structures designed to maintain green spaces and ecosystem services in the urban fringe fail to achieve their goal, whereas pockets of informal land uses and unregulated land contribute significantly to local food production and natural resource management.
In rapidly expanding Southeast Asian cities such as Bangkok and Metro Manila, large parcels of farmland on the urban fringe are being divided into exclusive blocks of housing developments, which become gated communities separated by high walls from the outer world. Within these subdivisions, green spaces accessible only to local residents are mandated by law, whilst the agricultural fields outside the walls are ignored by the local residents. Research shows that the official green spaces are poorly used and often abandoned, whereas the numerous vacant open lots are occupied by “caretakers”, unofficially recognized by the absentee landowners and the homeowners association, who produce significant amounts of vegetables that are bought and consumed by local residents.
Discussions addressed how to preserve and revitalize peri-urban agriculture as a key component of sustainable city regions. All over Asia, peri-urban farmlands are vulnerable to urbanization pressure. Farmland in the urban fringe can be protected with new land tax systems and strong local governance to implement farmland preservation policies. Agricultural landscapes can also be sustained and revitalized through the use of new agricultural technologies, for example bio-ethanol production from rice in Japan.
How to distinguish between cultural landscapes that should be preserved and those that have to be transformed? In Indonesia, there is increasing awareness of the importance of cultural landscape preservation; however much effort is still needed from all stakeholders, including citizens, politicians and international agencies. Participants agreed that we need to take bottom-up approaches to preserve cultural landscapes, involving local people who have managed such landscapes as their daily living space.
Participants affirmed the importance of local activity and governance for realizing multi-functional and well ordered city forms for Asian city regions, with new land use control concepts based on the local situation. Panelists and audiences agreed that although there are a lot of difficulties in each Asian city related to the current institutional gaps between the urban and rural systems, we have to develop more concrete visions of urban-rural fusion as well as indicators to measure urban-rural relationships.
For example, current Chinese strategic and regional planning systems try to achieve a holistic planning approach, but the relationships in spatial planning between urban and rural areas are still weak. How can master, regional, and local scale plans be connected smoothly so as to operate an effective land use control? Local governments in China have very diverse attitudes to environmental protection and sustainable development. Multi-scale incentive mechanisms are needed to bridge the gap between national government policies and local government strategies.
One workshop conclusion was that Asian countries, including Japan, should replace the planning doctrine followed so far, which distinguishes sharply between urban and rural areas, and reassess planning systems in an effort to build desirable urban-rural partnerships and uphold diversity in the urban fringes.
