Stephan Barthel

Stockholm

Stephan Barthel is at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the University of Gävle, where he researches environmental issues in metropolitan landscapes, with focus on social features that have a bearing on the capacity to manage and design for urban biodiversity and ecosystem services. His publications are on historical land use and contemporary management, design and planning of green infrastructures in Stockholm and Berlin. Comparative studies on common property rights to urban nature are under construction including studies in Cape Town and the Randstand region in the Netherlands. He also works with archeologists and historians where we use a resilience lens on urban environmental histories on Constantinople and Cities of The Maya. Concepts he is part of developing with colleagues are: Social-Ecological Memory, Innovative Memory, Urban Anthropocene, Urban Green Commons, and Pockets of Social-Ecological Memory. He uses research methods from physical sciences as well as social sciences, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, and integrates systems thinking with social theories and the humanities in an attempts to better understand emergent properties of complex social-ecological systems. Of late he is also interested in the relationship between the urban and the rural, focusing on food security and how urbanization interacts with the capacity to grow food. When discovering the importance of food and relations between the urban-rural it seems that the resilience function of interlinked bio-cultural diversity in landscapes of food production must be more fully understood, an issue he will try research with colleagues during 2013. Since 2012 he has coordinated the ’Urban Theme’ at SRC with Dr. Colding and Dr. Gren.