Research

We examine how cities and rural areas need to be developed and managed in sustainable ways. Our point of departure is people, together with the social structures and norms that enable or hinder change. Our research provides knowledge that strengthens society’s capacity to meet challenges and drive transformations – locally, nationally, and globally.

  • Our interdisciplinary research is grounded in the social sciences, humanities, and design sciences
  • The research fields reinforce one another and bring together human perspectives with the living environments of rural and urban areas
  • The results are applied in spatial planning, policy, and sustainability effort

Agrarian History

Agrarian history is a broad discipline examining people in the rural society, their social and economic conditions, and their relationship with nature, the landscape and wider society.

Rural Development

Rural development is an interdisciplinary field of study based in the social sciences, in which we pay special attention to how ideas about development have material consequences in both the Global North and Global South.

Landscape Architecture

Landscape architecture is the art of combining function, aesthetics and sustainability in the planning, design and management of the environment.

Environmental Communication

We consider communication as the joint construction of meaning, and conduct primarily qualitative social science research concerned with themes such as legitimacy, participation, power, resistance, conflict and learning in decision making and transformation processes.

Environmental politics and governance

At the Division of Environmental politics and governance, we study how contemporary environmental and sustainability challenges are imagined, known and governed across multiple sites, empirical domains, and actor constellations.