RSA Research Network
RSA Research Network on Bridging Governance Gaps in City-Regions
Anna Growe has been awarded the RSA Research Network Award for co-organising the network “Bridging Governance Gaps in City-Regions: Addressing Land Take and City-Region Building Through Comparative Research.”
The network (2025–2028) explores how social-ecological transformation and sustainability policies—such as those reflected in SDG 11—can be more effectively implemented across city-regions. One key indicator of these goals, land take, reveals the limits of focusing solely on core cities. Urban expansion and land consumption are largely driven by social and economic dynamics that extend across functional urban regions, including their peripheral areas. Achieving the ambition of no net land take will therefore depend on city-regional governance capacities. Yet, many urban actors still face institutional and cognitive barriers when trying to perceive and manage city-regions as coherent spaces for action.
The network pursues two main objectives:
- To address the intersection of city-regional governance and land take research, as well as to connect city-regional imagination and city-region building debates.
- To advance methodological innovations for comparative city-region research, fostering new approaches to studying and governing urban regions in transition.
Organisers of the Research Network:
- Anna Growe, Kassel University, Germany
- Alois Humer, TU Wien, Austria
- Chen Chen, Tongji University, China
- Simin Yan, Kassel University, Germany & Chongqing University, China
- Eva Purkarthofer, Aalto University, Finland