Biodiversity Coexistence and Integration in Divergent Urban Ecosystem Strategies

BiodiverCities aims to generate practical, usable approaches (‘stewardship’) for urban services to better manage new urban biodiversity, especially unruly species. Our starting point is that coexisting with and managing urban biodiversity requires a new vision and approach to the relationship between humans and nature in cities. We do this with a transdisciplinary and future-oriented vision and through collaborations with national and international partners. Data collection from social and ecological research in the city of Genk will be converted into policy and practical solutions. The project is well positioned to have societal and policy impact from local to global levels: we work in a consortium consisting of academic and government-affiliated research partners from four different urban contexts, namely the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, the Centre for Sustainability Transitions in Stellenbosch (South Africa) and the University of Freiburg in Germany. Each partner works with existing partnerships with local stakeholder networks.