Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanization
Overview & Approach
The Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology was founded to study the past, present, and future of our species’ relationship with the Earth system. Land use is arguably the most tangible expression of this relationship. Indeed, global intensification of land use is argued to be a key component of the ‘Great Acceleration’ of human-Earth system interaction and life in the Anthropocene. Urbanisation is a particularly significant form of land use change given that two-thirds of the human population will live in cities by 2050. Urbanism also impacts the Earth system and cities make major contributions to climate change, modify biodiversity, and influence land use through construction, administrative policies, and the consumption of food and materials. The co-evolution of urbanisation and land use will undoubtedly be critical to our future on this planet and at the core of the new Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation (DLU).
Cities are not recent phenomena, however. They have a rich, global history extending back ~5,500 years. Yet, the urban past is often neglected in contemporary urban studies and policy as a result of restrictive definitions focused on the ‘urban-ness’ of individual sites, regional isolation, and patchy records. The DLU is based on the idea that cities do not exist in a vacuum. They are connected to other cities, settlements, local, regional, and global histories and, through land use on different spatial scales, to the Earth system. It will look ‘beyond the city’ to approach two major themes: i) the socioeconomic, cultural, and ecological variability characterising urban forms, trajectories, and networks across space and time and ii) the co-evolutionary connections between these urban dynamics, their land uses, and different parts of the Earth system.
The department combines archaeology’s unparalleled ability to document long-term material outcomes of urban processes with history, palaeoecology, and urban science to build new quantitative and qualitative datasets and compare past urban patterns, land use tendencies and, critically, their alternatives. Through state-of-the-art fieldwork, archival research, and laboratory analyses, as well as data compilation, it connects observations from the deep past to present planning and future predictions and explore urbanisation as a non-linear, dynamic process, answering questions such as:
- Are there commonalities, differences, or sustainability predictors for urban phenomena and their associated land uses and Earth system interactions across time and space?
- Have major political, economic and climatic changes resulted in ‘tipping points’ or path dependencies in urban and land use trajectories?
- Given that urbanism is just one possible form of social organisation, what can non-urban pasts teach us about other possible trajectories of land use and settlement in the Anthropocene?
