Building open societies means reimagining how people, places and ecosystems live and thrive together.
Cities and landscapes around the world are changing as a result of ecological crisis, resource extraction, displacement, inequality and urbanisation. Our community Global and Urban Ecologies (GLUE) aims to explore and reshape the way humans, other forms of life and the built environment can work together to create fair, sustainable and liveable places. In doing so, researchers bring together science, design, art and societal partners.
GLUE analyses how urban and planetary ecologies simultaneously create pressures and possibilities for open societies. GLUE believes that rather than erasing the damage that has been done, we should weave the fractures into new, meaningful connections that make it possible to challenge and transform the history of inequality. We promote openness, justice and sustainability as practical forms of collective reform that actively foster new relationships, institutions and futures.
The community is part of Utrecht University's research theme Institutions for Open Societies.
Three interconnected themes
Open UrbanismsExploring how processes such as (de)industrialisation, gentrification, bureaucratisation, datafication, and social and linguistic inequity reshape public space, governance, and civic life, with particular attention to how resilient public futures can be co-created through engaged and creative forms of urban openness.
Fair FuturingExploring how speculative and experimental methods can open up imaginaries of institutional change grounded in justice, fairness, care, mobility, and non-extractive forms of organisation, especially in contexts shaped by inequality, extraction, and uneven development in the Majority World.
More-Than-Human EcologiesTo place relationships between different species and ecological interconnections at the heart of institutional design and care for the planet, building on posthumanist, feminist and postcolonial perspectives, building on the ongoing work of More-Than-Human Studies Lab.
To find answers, we bring together academic, cultural-institutional and civic networks from the Netherlands, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean to compare, contrast and challenge current engagements shaped by colonial, post-colonial, decolonial and other geopolitical and socio-cultural realities.
