A resilient university campus

One of the ideas of what a sustainable campus could look like. Image: KIT-arkitektur and Hanna Erixon

Sweden might be the first country in the world with a university campus built according to resilience principles. When Stockholm university realised that it will need more space for their activities, they asked researchers from Stockholm Environment Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology to lay their heads together with a group of architects to create a vision of a campus that can serve as a model for sustainable urban development.

In a world where about five billion people are believed to be city dwellers by 2030, city planners face enormous challenges. Somehow they must try to balance the urban development and people’s wellbeing with the stress that a city puts on ecosystem services such as water, storm protection, flood mitigation and biodiversity.
– We need new models and perspectives in order to face these challenges, where the cities interact better with crucial ecosystems, says Stephan Barth, who is researcher at Stockholm Environment Institute.
He also says that this area, which is called Albano, can become an important piece in a social-ecological system, where animals and ecosystems have the space and accessibility equal to that of humans.

I’d be most eager to visit this campus right away. But a quick phone call to one of the architects involved in the work reveals that actual building plans are still about five or ten years away. The visionary images give a nice idea, though, of mixing different activities (I love the idea of community gardens in the middle of everything) and types of nature. More images can be seen at KIT-architecture’s web page.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

August 12, 2010

• architecture
• city planning
• resilience
• Stockholm university
• sustainability
• Sweden