Stephan Barthel
Biographic Data
| ID | 1413562 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephan Barthel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephan |
| FAMILY NAME | Barthel |
| SIGNATURE | BARTHEL S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stockholm Resilience Centre |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2637-2024 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 435 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 39 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
It would feel weird to not drive my car! Exploring the role of habits in public policy acceptance of carbon taxations
This study aims to expand the understanding of public acceptance of carbon taxes by exploring the role of habits. Habits play a pivotal role in guiding our behaviors and reasoning and can even influence our self perception and identity but remain an underexplored variable in relation to public policy acceptance. We employed a large scale ( N > 5200) national survey to measure public acceptance of higher carbon taxation in Sweden, also capturing c…
Towards intergenerational neutrality in urban planning and governance
In urban studies, ‘presentism’ – the prioritisation of present-day concerns at the expense of historical and future considerations – has emerged as a critical bias that is rarely challenged, either through governance structures, institutional frameworks and urban planning and design, or as the ethical basis for our communities and social relations. From the vantage of the historical social sciences, we problematise applications of presentism with…
Overcoming the headwinds
This paper explores wind power attitudes in Sweden, considering the proximity of wind power installations, using a large-scale survey (N = 5280). The study examines if attitudes were affected by policies that provide collective financial benefits through municipal tax revenues, personal benefits through direct compensation, or openings for democratic involvement. Only 15 % of the respondents expressed negative attitudes to wind power as a measure…
Navigating complexity with the four pillars of social sustainability
The concept of social sustainability has long been a subject of discussion within academic literature and practitioners. However, there remains a lack of clarity in its definition and scholars argue that this can impacting the legitimacy of addressing social sustainability challenges. Through a systematic literature review and a content analysis, we shed light on the multifaceted discourse surrounding the concept of social sustainability, elucida…
Social Sustainability and Alexander’s Living Structure Through a New Kind of City Science
The disputed endorsement of inherited visceral and universal aesthetic preferences justifies the scientific validity of Alexander’s living structure. Apart from implying a resource-efficient way to promote well-being through urban design, the premise favors a collective approach to human self-perception and social justice. To better understand the contributions of Alexander, this article explores current knowledge about visceral and universal aes…
Contribution of prioritized urban nature-based solutions allocation to carbon neutrality
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are essential for carbon-neutral cities, yet how to effectively allocate them remains a question. Carbon neutrality requires city-led climate action plans that incorporate both indirect and direct contributions of NBS. Here we assessed the carbon emissions mitigation potential of NBS in European cities, focusing particularly on commonly overlooked indirect pathways, for example, human behavioural interventions and res…
Modeling place-based nature-based solutions to promote urban carbon neutrality
Nature-based solutions (NbS) are recognized as widely available and cost-effective mechanisms for sequestering carbon and offsetting carbon emissions. Realistic NbS implementations for carbon neutrality need to be effective at the global level and also appropriate for the socio-economic and physical conditions prevailing at the local level. This paper presents a framework that can help stakeholders identify demands, locations, and types of NbS in…
Urban climate resilience through hybrid infrastructure
Urban infrastructure will require transformative changes to adapt to changing disturbance patterns. We ask what new opportunities hybrid infrastructure—built environments coupled with landscape-scale biophysical structures and processes—offer for building different layers of resilience critical for dealing with increased variation in the frequency, magnitude and different phases of climate-related disturbances. With its more diverse components an…
Pro-environmental habits
Habits are the fundamental basis for many of our daily actions and can be powerful barriers to behavioural change. Still, habits are not included in most narratives, theories, and interventions applied to sustainable behaviour. One reason societies struggle to reach policy goals and people fail to change towards more pro-environmental lifestyles might be that many behaviours are now bound by strong habits that override knowledge and intentions to…
Mapping Flood Risk Uncertainty Zones in Support of Urban Resilience Planning
River flooding and urbanization are processes of different character that take place worldwide. As the latter tends to make the consequences of the former worse, together with the uncertainties related to future climate change and flood-risk modeling, there is a need to both use existing tools and develop new ones that help the management and planning of urban environments. In this article a prototype tool, based on estimated maximum land cover r…
Visiting nearby natural settings supported wellbeing during Sweden’s “soft-touch” pandemic restrictions
The coronavirus pandemic entailed varying restrictions on access, movement and social behavior in populations around the world. Knowledge about how people coped with "soft-touch" restrictions can inform urban spatial planning strategies that enhance resilience against future pandemics. We analyzed data from an online place-based survey on 2845 places across Sweden that respondents abstained from visiting, visited with similar frequency, or visite…
Engaging with the pragmatics of relational thinking, leverage points and transformations – Reply to West et al
We reply to ‘A relational turn for sustainability science?’ by West et al. We commend West et al. for their salient comments about the relational turn. Yet the article leaves us wondering about the methodological challenges and pragmatics of relational thinking. The authors omitted important tensions in relational thinking discussion about how to assess dynamic socio-ecological systems, and how to lever change for sustainability. Whilst relationa…
Urban Commons and Collective Action to Address Climate Change
Climate change and the coupled loss of ecosystem services pose major collective action problems in that all individuals would benefit from better cooperation to address these problems but conflicting interests and/or incomplete knowledge discourage joint action. Adopting an inductive and multi‐layered approach, drawing upon the authors’ previous research on urban commons, we here summarize key insights on environmentally oriented urban commons an…
How ecosystems services drive urban growth
Addressing urban challenges with nature-based approaches can improve and protect ecosystem services. Yet, urban planning has not efficiently integrated such approaches to manage land use. This paper examines interactions between human and natural systems that result in ecosystem services and changes in land use and land cover in urban areas. It develops a social-ecological model for land use and land cover change, and for ecosystems services that…
Urban nature as a source of resilience during social distancing amidst the coronavirus pandemic
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic caused countries across the world to implement measures of social distancing to curb spreading of COVID-19. The large and sudden disruptions to everyday life that result from this are likely to impact well-being, particularly among urban populations that live in dense settings with limited public space. In this paper, we argue that during these extraordinary circumstances, urban nature offers resilience for maintaini…
The smart city model
Despite several calls in this journal of debating the rapid growth of the literature on “smart cities”, such a debate has in large been absent. Smart cities are often un-critically launched as a sustainable way of developing cities. When cities become increasingly complex as its features are wired into the Internet, theories for their understanding is lagging behind. As it is prospected that a greater number of people and things will become conne…
Supporting Bottom-Up Human Agency for Adapting to Climate Change
Residential environments across Denmark have become both denser and greener over 20 years
Despite much attention in the literature, knowledge about the dynamics surrounding urban densification and urban greening is still in dire need for architects, urban planners and scientists that strive to design, develop, and regenerate sustainable and resilient urban environments. Here, we investigate countrywide patterns of changes in residential density and residential nature at high spatial resolution over a time period of >20 years (1995–201…
Applying seven resilience principles on the Vision of the Digital City
We use an ecological lens on physiognomies of the digital city-development. • Using resilience principles can reduce risks in digitalization of city functions. • Strategically design for both buffering instant shocks and slow erosion • Use autonomic self-organizing machine learning for whole digital network resilience • Keep a separated and redundant analogue technology for critical infrastructures
Beyond Rhetoric
Historical ecological approaches to settlement aggregation and complexity reject modernist and post-modernist reliance on linear neo-evolutionary categorization of cities in relation to earlier farming communities. Instead, urban centres and multi-urban systems are viewed as components of complex heterarchically and hierarchically organized landscapes. Resilience theory has been applied in several archaeological efforts to characterize urban deve…
Towards a socio-ecological spatial morphology
The recent shift towards greater emphasis on biodiversity and urban ecosystems has increased the need for greater understanding of the green areas in cities as ecological environments. However, landscape ecology and urban morphology have yet to be integrated into a joint field. In this paper steps are taken towards developing an integrated socio-ecological urban morphology based on developments in each field. Such a morphology can inform professi…
Towards a socio-ecological spatial morphology
Interest in the green infrastructure of cities has rapidly increased in recent years. The reasons are several but generally relate to the great increase of research and policy on sustainable urban development. Of particular importance here is the more recent shift in this field towards greater emphasis on biodiversity and urban ecosystems and not only climate change and environmental engineering. This shift brings new demands for a deeper underst…
Exploring the social-ecological systems discourse 20 years later
This paper explores the 20-year evolution of the social-ecological systems framework (SESs). Although a first definition of SES dates back to 1988, Berkes and Folke more thoroughly used the concept in 1998 to analyze resilience in local resource management systems. Since then studies of interlinked human and natural systems have emerged as a field on its own right, promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration in a wide set of fields and…
Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land
Global urbanization and food production are in direct competition for land. This paper carries out a critical review of how displacing crop production from urban and peri-urban land to other areas - because of issues related to soil quality - will demand a substantially larger proportion of the Earth's terrestrial land surface than the surface area lost to urban encroachment. Such relationships may trigger further distancing effects and unfair so…
Future urban land expansion and implications for global croplands
Significance Urbanization’s contribution to land use change emerges as an important sustainability concern. Here, we demonstrate that projected urban area expansion will take place on some of the world’s most productive croplands, in particular in megaurban regions in Asia and Africa. This dynamic adds pressure to potentially strained future food systems and threatens livelihoods in vulnerable regions.
Social–ecological memory in urban gardens—Retaining the capacity for management of ecosystem services
Urban gardens, agriculture, and water management
Bio-cultural refugia—Safeguarding diversity of practices for food security and biodiversity
Reconnecting Cities to the Biosphere
Within-city green infrastructure can offer opportunities and new contexts for people to become stewards of ecosystem services. We analyze cities as social-ecological systems, synthesize the literature, and provide examples from more than 15 years of research in the Stockholm urban region, Sweden. The social-ecological approach spans from investigating ecosystem properties to the social frameworks and personal values that drive and shape human int…
Scale-Crossing Brokers and Network Governance of Urban Ecosystem Services
Ernstson, H., S. Barthel, E. Andersson, and S. T. Borgström. 2010. Scale-crossing brokers and network governance of urban ecosystem services: the case of Stockholm. Ecology and Society 15(4): 28. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-03692-150428
Food and Green Space in Cities
This article examines the role played by urban gardens during historical collapses in urban food supply lines and identifies the social processes required to protect two critical elements of urban food production during times of crisis—open green spaces and the collective memory of how to grow food. Advanced communication and transport technologies allow food sequestration from the farthest reaches of the planet, but have markedly increasing urba…
Urban green commons
Biocultural Refugia
Barthel, S., C. L. Crumley, and U. Svedin. 2013. Biocultural refugia: combating the erosion of diversity in landscapes of food production. Ecology and Society 18(4): 71. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-06207-180471
Exploring the social-ecological systems discourse 20 years later
This paper explores the 20-year evolution of the social-ecological systems framework (SESs). Although a first definition of SES dates back to 1988, Berkes and Folke more thoroughly used the concept in 1998 to analyze resilience in local resource management systems. Since then studies of interlinked human and natural systems have emerged as a field on its own right, promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration in a wide set of fields and…
How ecosystems services drive urban growth
Addressing urban challenges with nature-based approaches can improve and protect ecosystem services. Yet, urban planning has not efficiently integrated such approaches to manage land use. This paper examines interactions between human and natural systems that result in ecosystem services and changes in land use and land cover in urban areas. It develops a social-ecological model for land use and land cover change, and for ecosystems services that…
Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land
Global urbanization and food production are in direct competition for land. This paper carries out a critical review of how displacing crop production from urban and peri-urban land to other areas - because of issues related to soil quality - will demand a substantially larger proportion of the Earth's terrestrial land surface than the surface area lost to urban encroachment. Such relationships may trigger further distancing effects and unfair so…
History and Local Management of a Biodiversity-Rich, Urban Cultural Landscape
Barthel, S., J. Colding, T. Elmqvist, and C. Folke. 2005. History and local management of a biodiversity-rich, urban cultural landscape. Ecology and Society 10(2): 10. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-01568-100210
Pro-environmental habits
Habits are the fundamental basis for many of our daily actions and can be powerful barriers to behavioural change. Still, habits are not included in most narratives, theories, and interventions applied to sustainable behaviour. One reason societies struggle to reach policy goals and people fail to change towards more pro-environmental lifestyles might be that many behaviours are now bound by strong habits that override knowledge and intentions to…
Urban climate resilience through hybrid infrastructure
Urban infrastructure will require transformative changes to adapt to changing disturbance patterns. We ask what new opportunities hybrid infrastructure—built environments coupled with landscape-scale biophysical structures and processes—offer for building different layers of resilience critical for dealing with increased variation in the frequency, magnitude and different phases of climate-related disturbances. With its more diverse components an…
Towards intergenerational neutrality in urban planning and governance
In urban studies, ‘presentism’ – the prioritisation of present-day concerns at the expense of historical and future considerations – has emerged as a critical bias that is rarely challenged, either through governance structures, institutional frameworks and urban planning and design, or as the ethical basis for our communities and social relations. From the vantage of the historical social sciences, we problematise applications of presentism with…
Modeling place-based nature-based solutions to promote urban carbon neutrality
Nature-based solutions (NbS) are recognized as widely available and cost-effective mechanisms for sequestering carbon and offsetting carbon emissions. Realistic NbS implementations for carbon neutrality need to be effective at the global level and also appropriate for the socio-economic and physical conditions prevailing at the local level. This paper presents a framework that can help stakeholders identify demands, locations, and types of NbS in…
Navigating complexity with the four pillars of social sustainability
The concept of social sustainability has long been a subject of discussion within academic literature and practitioners. However, there remains a lack of clarity in its definition and scholars argue that this can impacting the legitimacy of addressing social sustainability challenges. Through a systematic literature review and a content analysis, we shed light on the multifaceted discourse surrounding the concept of social sustainability, elucida…
Towards a socio-ecological spatial morphology
The recent shift towards greater emphasis on biodiversity and urban ecosystems has increased the need for greater understanding of the green areas in cities as ecological environments. However, landscape ecology and urban morphology have yet to be integrated into a joint field. In this paper steps are taken towards developing an integrated socio-ecological urban morphology based on developments in each field. Such a morphology can inform professi…
History and Local Management of a Biodiversity-Rich, Urban Cultural Landscape
Barthel, S., J. Colding, T. Elmqvist, and C. Folke. 2005. History and local management of a biodiversity-rich, urban cultural landscape. Ecology and Society 10(2): 10. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-01568-100210
Measuring Social–ecological Dynamics Behind the Generation of Ecosystem Services
The generation of ecosystem services depends on both social and ecological features. Here we focus on management, its ecological consequences, and social drivers. Our approach combined (1) quantitative surveys of local species diversity and abundance of three functional groups of ecosystem service providers (pollinators, seed dispersers, and insectivores) with (2) qualitative studies of local management practices connected to these services and t…
Social–ecological memory in urban gardens—Retaining the capacity for management of ecosystem services
Scale-Crossing Brokers and Network Governance of Urban Ecosystem Services
Ernstson, H., S. Barthel, E. Andersson, and S. T. Borgström. 2010. Scale-crossing brokers and network governance of urban ecosystem services: the case of Stockholm. Ecology and Society 15(4): 28. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-03692-150428
Urban gardens, agriculture, and water management
Civic greening and environmental learning in public-access community gardens in Berlin
The potential of ‘Urban Green Commons’ in the resilience building of cities
Urban green commons
Bio-cultural refugia—Safeguarding diversity of practices for food security and biodiversity
Biocultural Refugia
Barthel, S., C. L. Crumley, and U. Svedin. 2013. Biocultural refugia: combating the erosion of diversity in landscapes of food production. Ecology and Society 18(4): 71. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-06207-180471
Reconnecting Cities to the Biosphere
Within-city green infrastructure can offer opportunities and new contexts for people to become stewards of ecosystem services. We analyze cities as social-ecological systems, synthesize the literature, and provide examples from more than 15 years of research in the Stockholm urban region, Sweden. The social-ecological approach spans from investigating ecosystem properties to the social frameworks and personal values that drive and shape human int…
Food and Green Space in Cities
This article examines the role played by urban gardens during historical collapses in urban food supply lines and identifies the social processes required to protect two critical elements of urban food production during times of crisis—open green spaces and the collective memory of how to grow food. Advanced communication and transport technologies allow food sequestration from the farthest reaches of the planet, but have markedly increasing urba…
Future urban land expansion and implications for global croplands
Significance Urbanization’s contribution to land use change emerges as an important sustainability concern. Here, we demonstrate that projected urban area expansion will take place on some of the world’s most productive croplands, in particular in megaurban regions in Asia and Africa. This dynamic adds pressure to potentially strained future food systems and threatens livelihoods in vulnerable regions.
Human–nature connection
Rewiring food systems to enhance human health and biosphere stewardship
Food lies at the heart of both health and sustainability challenges. We use a social-ecological framework to illustrate how major changes to the volume, nutrition and safety of food systems between 1961 and today impact health and sustainability. These changes have almost halved undernutrition while doubling the proportion who are overweight. They have also resulted in reduced resilience of the biosphere, pushing four out of six analysed planetar…
Beyond Rhetoric
Historical ecological approaches to settlement aggregation and complexity reject modernist and post-modernist reliance on linear neo-evolutionary categorization of cities in relation to earlier farming communities. Instead, urban centres and multi-urban systems are viewed as components of complex heterarchically and hierarchically organized landscapes. Resilience theory has been applied in several archaeological efforts to characterize urban deve…
Towards a socio-ecological spatial morphology
The recent shift towards greater emphasis on biodiversity and urban ecosystems has increased the need for greater understanding of the green areas in cities as ecological environments. However, landscape ecology and urban morphology have yet to be integrated into a joint field. In this paper steps are taken towards developing an integrated socio-ecological urban morphology based on developments in each field. Such a morphology can inform professi…
Towards a socio-ecological spatial morphology
Interest in the green infrastructure of cities has rapidly increased in recent years. The reasons are several but generally relate to the great increase of research and policy on sustainable urban development. Of particular importance here is the more recent shift in this field towards greater emphasis on biodiversity and urban ecosystems and not only climate change and environmental engineering. This shift brings new demands for a deeper underst…
Exploring the social-ecological systems discourse 20 years later
This paper explores the 20-year evolution of the social-ecological systems framework (SESs). Although a first definition of SES dates back to 1988, Berkes and Folke more thoroughly used the concept in 1998 to analyze resilience in local resource management systems. Since then studies of interlinked human and natural systems have emerged as a field on its own right, promoting interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration in a wide set of fields and…
Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land
Global urbanization and food production are in direct competition for land. This paper carries out a critical review of how displacing crop production from urban and peri-urban land to other areas - because of issues related to soil quality - will demand a substantially larger proportion of the Earth's terrestrial land surface than the surface area lost to urban encroachment. Such relationships may trigger further distancing effects and unfair so…
Urban nature as a source of resilience during social distancing amidst the coronavirus pandemic
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic caused countries across the world to implement measures of social distancing to curb spreading of COVID-19. The large and sudden disruptions to everyday life that result from this are likely to impact well-being, particularly among urban populations that live in dense settings with limited public space. In this paper, we argue that during these extraordinary circumstances, urban nature offers resilience for maintaini…
The smart city model
Despite several calls in this journal of debating the rapid growth of the literature on “smart cities”, such a debate has in large been absent. Smart cities are often un-critically launched as a sustainable way of developing cities. When cities become increasingly complex as its features are wired into the Internet, theories for their understanding is lagging behind. As it is prospected that a greater number of people and things will become conne…
Supporting Bottom-Up Human Agency for Adapting to Climate Change
Residential environments across Denmark have become both denser and greener over 20 years
Despite much attention in the literature, knowledge about the dynamics surrounding urban densification and urban greening is still in dire need for architects, urban planners and scientists that strive to design, develop, and regenerate sustainable and resilient urban environments. Here, we investigate countrywide patterns of changes in residential density and residential nature at high spatial resolution over a time period of >20 years (1995–201…
Applying seven resilience principles on the Vision of the Digital City
We use an ecological lens on physiognomies of the digital city-development. • Using resilience principles can reduce risks in digitalization of city functions. • Strategically design for both buffering instant shocks and slow erosion • Use autonomic self-organizing machine learning for whole digital network resilience • Keep a separated and redundant analogue technology for critical infrastructures
Geography (26 works) · Ecology (25 works) · Environmental resource management (24 works) · Land Use and Ecosystem Services (23 works) · Political science (20 works) · Environmental planning (19 works) · Business (17 works) · Economics (16 works) · Environmental Science (16 works) · Urban Green Space and Health (15 works)