The ‘Urbanscapes’ cluster of CSPS aims to engage with staff members of the four chair groups and associated PhD candidates in debates and joint activities related to the evolving urban landscape, its future and related issues. The cluster activities will be open to collaborating with other chair groups beyond the CSPS umbrella groups.

Vision and scope
Globally, urban spaces are unremittingly evolving, and these spaces will continue to agglomerate. With the neo-liberal economy and mobility of rural populations into urban spaces, the urban landscape is changing, leading to power relations and newer constellation of actors, institutions, and discourses, leading to conflicts and possible cooperation. It is noted that new constellation of actors, institutions and technology is redefining the urbanscape, and it is critical to explore how different theoretical frameworks can explain the evolving urbanscape. The cluster will focus on conflicts between the state and the citizens, conflicts between citizens and contestations between urban and rural spaces. Broadly speaking, academics from different social science disciplines (within the four chair groups and beyond) will convene to revisit these contestations from several thematic aspects, including critical infrastructure studies, health in urban environments (especially around pandemics), socio-cultural transformations due to migration, rural-urban interlinkages (urban metabolism and periurban conflicts) and changing nature-society relations. The urbanscape cluster will also connect with other clusters under the CSPS umbrella to foster collaboration. For instance, it can easily collaborate with clusters such as disaster and risk, political ecology and health and environment to dovetail activities such as lectures and seminars, specifically situating issues in an urban and peri-urban context.

Activities
We will organize lectures, seminars or master’s class by participant researchers and inspiring speakers from within Netherlands and across the globe. We also briefly and regularly meet to discuss the contemporary literature and ideas emerging in the urban studies. As a welcoming set-up, we appreciate new ideas and suggestion to engage with urban studies and scholars within CSPS and Wageningen University & Research.

Contact person
Do you have questions about the cluster or are you interested in joining? Feel free to get in touch with Sumit Vij, sumit.vij@wur.nl.