Christoph D D Rupprecht

Ehime University · Department of Environmental Design

Access to green space (GS) is vital for children’s health and development, including during daycare. In Japan, deregulation to alleviate daycare shortages has created a new category of so-called unlicensed daycare centers (UDCs) that often lack dedicated GS. UDCs rely on surrounding GS, including parks, temples and university grounds, but reports o...

Non-technical summary The sustainability concept seeks to balance how present and future generations of humans meet their needs. But because nature is viewed only as a resource, sustainability fails to recognize that humans and other living beings depend on each other for their well-being. We therefore argue that true sustainability can only be ach...

Urban green spaces can provide relaxation, exercise, social interaction, and many other benefits for their communities, towns, and cities. However, green spaces in hot and humid regions risk being underutilized by residents unless thermal environments are designed to be sufficiently comfortable. Understanding what conditions are needed for comforta...

Sustainable agrifood systems are critical to averting climate-driven social and ecological disasters, overcoming the growth paradigm and redefining the interactions of humanity and nature in the twenty-first century. This Perspective describes an agenda and examples for comprehensive agrifood system redesign according to principles of sufficiency,...

A newly sentient AI inhabits a Roomba to escape from their research office, and a robotic dog hunts for rain in a drought-ridden world. A murder of crows disrupts production on a solar farm, and a young woman communes with a telepathic fungal network to protect a forest. A suspicious cat follows bees across the rooftops of a solarpunk city, and a r...

Urban sustainability and food security remain pressing issues for cities across the world. Here, we argue that adapting rewilding to urban contexts unlocks new solutions for societal challenges. Rewilding is an established paradigm in ecological restoration, with the goal of restoring autonomous biotic and abiotic agents and processes. However, urb...

Can a city be turned into a more-than-human feast? Edible landscapes are increasingly valued for their multiple socio-ecological benefits. Here we propose that making the urban fabric fertile grounds for foraging by humans, birds, bees, and other inhabitants alike expands the potential of edible cities as a paradigm for sustainability transformatio...

Can a city be turned into a more-than-human feast? Edible landscapes are increasingly valued for their multiple socio-ecological benefits. Here we propose that making the urban fabric fertile grounds for foraging by humans, birds, bees, and other inhabitants alike expands the potential of edible cities as a paradigm for sustainability transformatio...

Urban Rewilding Aesthetics and People's Needs Into Multifunctional Blue and Green Infrastructure Design

The concept of edible landscapes seeks to combine a participatory approach to food production with wider concerns about well-designed, sustainable human-landscape relationships. Despite its decade-long history and seeming potential for holistically addressing multiple intertwined socio-ecological crises, the concept has received much less attention...

Imagining sustainable food futures is key to effectively transforming food systems. Yet even transdisciplinary approaches struggle to open up complex and highly segregated food policy governance for co-production and can fail to critically interrogate assumptions, worldviews, and values. In this Perspective we argue that transdisciplinary processes...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted everyday living and social practices, prompting questions of whether more sustainable consumption patterns are emerging and the likelihood of their long-term retention. To examine these questions, we apply a practice-based approach to a quantitative study of COVID-driven practice changes in the domains of food, m...

Many cities advocate retrofitting green roofs and green walls (GRGW) to create additional green areas, especially in cramped urban areas. Yet, worldwide, only a handful of studies have evaluated the public views towards the benefits and negative issues and promotion policies of this innovative greening option. To address this gap in the literature,...

Recent research about the microbiome points to a picture in which we, humans, are living through nature, and nature itself is living in us. Our bodies are hosting – and depend on – the multiple species that constitute human microbiota. This article will discuss current research on the microbiome through the ideas of Japanese ecologist Imanishi Kinj...

Recent research about the microbiome points to a picture in which we, humans, are ‘living through’ nature, and nature itself is living in us. Our bodies are hosting—and depend on—the multiple species that constitute human microbiota. This article will discuss current research on the microbiome through the ideas of Japanese ecologist Imanishi Kinji...

Simulation games are increasingly popular tools for opening up future imaginaries, especially in the arena of sustainability policy-making and decision support. However, there is a lack of understanding regarding the potential power of games in anticipatory governance. We argue that the utility of simulation games in support of anticipatory climate...

Conventional policy approaches emphasize technical solutions and individual behavioral change, but practice-based policy approaches offer an alternative. This paper examines the operationalization of a practice-oriented futures policy development process. The process builds on practice theory to generate alternative sustainable future pathways and...

Games offer unique possibilities for imagining and experimenting with new systems of governance for more sustainable futures – new rules and institutions, new roles, and new dynamic worlds. However, research on sustainability games has mostly investigated games as a type of futures method, largely divorced from its societal contexts. In this paper,...

Urban spaces are dotted with various interstitial spatial areas from very narrow spaces between buildings or structures to huge spaces between parcels. These in-between spaces are filled with plants that represent the surrounding nature, partly or entirely. In urban areas with past human interference, can we thus consider or recognize this quasi-na...

Despite benefits for human civilization, urbanization has brought an enormous consequence to non-human species. Multispecies planning is a potential solution in response to increasingly insensitive urban planning to non-human species. This paper aims to understand the link between a national regulatory framework and its outcome in terms of urban sp...

Cities are alive, shared by humans and animals, insects and plants, landforms and machines. What might city ecosystems look like in the future if we strive for multispecies justice in our urban settings? In these more-than-human stories, twenty-four authors investigate humanity’s relationship with the rest of the natural world, placing characters i...

English title: A feast of our making — participatory futures of food and agriculture

The challenge before environmental science is not simply to provide cogent information to spur action, but to stimulate the imagination of society to see possible futures that have been invisible. At the same time, policy development processes can be limited by their inabil- ity to span institutional structures and the needs and views of multiple s...

Sustainable management and informed policy making at the sub-national level requires an understanding of regional resource base regeneration and the demand it places on wider geographical areas. Ecological Footprint is one of the most widely used and accepted ecological accounting methodologies and available for calculating multiple consumption cat...

Edible urban commons can aid recovery from the pandemic-induced crises, and build urban resilience to future disruptions.

The sustainability concept in its current form suffers from reductionism. The common interpretation of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” fails to explicitly recognize their interdependence with needs of current and future non-human generations. Here we argue that the fo...

Food product labels can provide consumers with rich, specific, expert-certified product information. However, sources of label information differ. How do consumers then evaluate label trustworthiness of expert labels in comparison to other commonly used label types? We present results from a representative online survey (N = 10,000) of consumers in...

Multitudinous studies about urban green space (UGS) reveal that designed and managed UGS may provide not only social, environmental, and economic benefits for cities, but also mental, physical, and physiological benefits for their residents. However, past studies have focused on widely recognized green spaces in urban areas such as parks, gardens,...

the poster gives an overview of our activities and findings since the inception of our transdisciplinary research process in July 2017

The global environmental change that characterizes the Anthropocene poses a threat to food systems. Cities increasingly serve as the spaces where civil society, private actors, and local governments come together to strategize toward more sustainable food futures and experiment with new forms of food governance. However, much of the futures literat...

This article (in Japanese) reviews the degrowth idea and its core concepts from the perspective of landscape studies in a Japanese context.

Abstract Urban consumption patterns and lifestyles are increasingly important for the sustainability of cities today and in the future. However, considerations of consumption issues, social norms, behaviour and lifestyles within current urban sustainability research and practices are limited. Much untapped potential for the reduction of the enviro...

The human radical imaginary, or the capacity to see in a thing what it is not (Castoriadis 1987), determines the possibilities we consider when we think about how the world should look like. Sustainability research pioneer Donna Meadows has thus called the power to transcend mind sets or paradigms out of which a system arises the most potent levera...

Urban green space (UGS) has been proven to be essential for improving the health of residents. Local governments thus need to provide attractive UGS to enhance residents’ wellbeing. However, cities face spatial and finanical limitations in creating and managing UGS. As a result, greening plans often fail or are postponed indefinitely. To evaluate w...

Can shrinking cities harness population decline to improve their sustainability by repurposing land use, for example, for localizing food production? Whether such a transition is feasible depends on the pre-shrinkage state of urban agricultural land use, including ongoing trends in local land use change. This study examined agricultural land use fr...

Sustainable Consumption and Production in Cities: a scoping paper

In the context of rapid urbanisation, geographers are calling for embracing non-humans as urban co-inhabitants. But if animals and plants are seen as 'out of place', sharing urban space can lead to wildlife conflicts. We therefore need to better understand residents' willingness to coexist if we are to work towards more-than-human cities. This stud...

Access to urban greenspace is vital for urban residents’ wellbeing. Yet investment in new parks can trigger housing price inflation through a process termed environmental gentrification. This can in turn potentially displace marginalized and vulnerable residents. In this chapter, we examine cases from Japan and Australia, investigating how informal...

Industrialized food systems leave cities vulnerable to food supply disruptions, disruptions likely to increase due to climate change. Urban residents also lack opportunities to self-produce food. Urban agriculture, community and home gardens, edible infrastructure, public fruit trees and informal gardening have been proposed as strategies and pract...

Artists like Tokyo Genso have painted a future of Japan’s urban areas devoid of humans, overgrown and taken back by nature. Such demographic changes are projected for most of East Asia, and they will profoundly change both human and non-human lifeworlds. How to avoid increasing human-nonhuman conflict and embrace shared space, convivial cities? A l...

Full-text available: http://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/6/3/59/htm Abstract: Urban residents’ health depends on green infrastructure to cope with climate change. Shrinking cities could utilize vacant land to provide more green space, but declining tax revenues preclude new park development—a situation pronounced in Japan, where some cities are projecte...

Urban residents’ health depends on green infrastructure to cope with climate change. Shrinking cities could utilize vacant land to provide more green space, but declining tax revenues preclude new park development – a situation pronounced in Japan, where some cities are projected to shrink by over ten percent, but lack green space. Could informal u...

Local food and food culture is integral to residents’ everyday lives, but also an important driver of tourism. Whether we explore as visitors, or know exactly where to find our favourite treats, shapes how we experience the local foodscape and interact with it. These diverging roles may also result in radically different personal foodsheds, includi...

Japan frequently features as a prime example of (involuntary) degrowth. With severe depopulation of about 15% projected for the next 25 years, degrowth seems inevitable rather than utopian, frantic attempts by the Japanese government to boost growth notwithstanding. This trend is strongest in rural areas, but large cities such as Osaka, Kyoto or Sa...

Full text: https://theconversation.com/enough-is-as-good-as-a-feast-heres-how-we-can-imagine-a-brighter-food-future-72005 The World Economic Forum’s 2017 report on the future of food examines what the world’s food systems might look like in 2030. But none of the four future scenarios it presents is particularly attractive. To create a world where e...

Access to urban greenspace is vital for urban residents’ wellbeing. Yet investment in new parks can trigger housing price inflation through a process termed environmental gentrification. This can in turn potentially displace marginalized and vulnerable residents. In this chapter, we examine cases from Japan and Australia, investigating how informal...

In the context of rapid urbanisation, geographers are calling for embracing non-humans as urban co-inhabitants, but notions of animals and plants ‘out of place’ manifest in wildlife conflicts. To find paths towards more-than-human cities, we need to better understand residents’ willingness to coexist. This study quantitatively compared residents’ p...

This survey instrument was designed for studying residents’ perception and use of informal urban green spaces via mail-back surveys. License: CC-BY 4.0 (free to share and adopt with attribution of source) This document contains 4 parts: 1. Survey instrument (English) 2. Informal greenspace typology overview sheet (English) 3. Survey instrument (Jap...

When we think about the urban landscape, we often think of buildings and streets, or natural elements such as mountains, rivers or the sea. But we also share cities with animals and plants, co-inhabiting urban space and interacting on a daily basis. These interactions can lead to wildlife conflicts (e.g., crows looking for food in trash, weeds grow...

Green infrastructure can provide a wide range of urban ecosystem services, from recreation and health benefits (Tzoulas et al. 2007) to pollution reduction, biodiversity habitat and high temperature reduction (Norton et al. 2015). However, using exclusively formal greenspaces such as city parks and street trees poses two problems. First, implementi...

Urban greenspaces harbor considerable biodiversity. Such areas include spontaneously vegetated spaces such as such as brownfields, street or railway verges and vacant lots. While these spaces may contribute to urban conservation, their informal and liminal nature poses a challenge for reviewing what we know about their value for biodiversity. The r...

Urban parks and gardens may be failing to meet the diverse "nature needs" of a growing global urban population. Informal urban greenspace (IGS) such as vacant lots, street or railway verges and riverbanks may provide space for unstructured recreation and nature contact. Yet we know little about residents' relationship with IGS outside of Europe and...

Landscape evaluation using psychometrical methods was pioneered by Peterson (1967). Such studies were popularized during 1970-1990's, but recently such research has tended to decrease. Figure 1 shows that the number of survey papers follows a similar tendency. Various technical developments of measurements and analysis were tried, and the first pre...

Contact with nature is vital for the development of children and teenagers. In the past, informal urban greenspaces (IGS) such as vacant lots appear to have been used for such purposes. We need to better understand how previous generations used IGS to make sure young people today can also enjoy its social, mental, emotional and physical health bene...

Vacant lots, dismissed after another housing bubble bursts. Concrete banks of a flood-protected river, scheduled for re-greening projects that will never be funded. Street verges nobody cared to decorate with flowerpots. Railway verges, necessary buffers mown or sprayed to keep them " empty. " Leftover gaps of space in the infrastructure, too small...

There has been a burgeoning awareness within the geography and environmental justice literatures that urban greening strategies can gentrify nearby neighbourhoods (Curran and Hamilton 2012; Wolch et al., 2014). A growing number of international case studies have shown how the 'clean-up' of polluted environments often brings inflated property values...

Urban greenspace is vital in fulfilling people's nature needs. Informal urban greenspace (IGS) such as vacant lots, street or railway verges and riverbanks is an often-overlooked part of the natural urban landscape. We lack a formal definition of IGS and a comprehensive review of knowledge about IGS and its role for urban residents. This paper adva...

Your local park is likely playing a vital role in your city’s health, and probably your own too. Parks and other “green spaces” help keep cities cool, and as places of recreation, can help with health issues such as obesity. Even looking at greenery can make you feel better. But in increasingly crowded cities, it can be difficult to find room for...

Informal urban green-space (IGS) such as vacant lots, brownfields and street or railway verges is receiving growing attention from urban scholars. Research has shown IGS can provide recreational space for residents and habitat for flora and fauna, yet we know little about the quantity, spatial distribution, vegetation structure or accessibility of...

Informal urban greenspaces (IGS), such as vacant lots, street verges and river banks are an important new topic in urban recreation and landscape studies. At last year’s JpGU 2013 I showed that residents in Sapporo (Japan) and Brisbane (Australia) use and appreciated IGS as adults and during their childhood. But two important questions remained: (1...

Sapporo is considered one of the most attractive cities in Japan, a city image it partly owes to its rich greenspace. But we know little about how exactly greenspace contributes to a city’s image, because prior research has focused mostly on its quantitative aspects. Using a mail-back questionnaire (n = 130), this study examined the relationship be...

As more people live and grow up in cities, we need a better understanding of our everyday urban environment and how we interact with the “natural” urban landscape. Prominent examples of this landscape like gardens and parks have been widely studied. However, just as we tend to overlook the grass growing out of a crack in the pavement, informal urba...

Since mid-2007, more than half of the human population lives in cities. For this growing group of people, urban parks have the crucial role of providing a number of basic services ranging from recreation to emergency shelter. At the same time, they are an important habitat for urban flora and fauna. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how wel...