Urban Ecology Labs in Shanghai

Description

John Thackara:

“In the Ecology and Cultures Innovation Lab at Tongji University in Shanghai, researchers promote the ecological literacy of citizens, and community-scale ecological participation, in ways that support the emergence of Ecological Civilisation in Chinese cities The work begins to enable action at a local level that meets national commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Strengthening food webs is not a “one stop” bold breakthrough. Rather, it’s a distributed social process of ‘muddling through’ together in diverse and different ways that are at best agroecological and collective, culturally and ecologically tailored to different geographies.

It means embracing a messy politics of relationship, nuance, context, complexity and co-learning.

The technical innovation in the project involves the design of interactions between scientific knowledge and public participation. Based on a knowledge ecosystem approach, it makes natural science data, concepts, and tools visible, accessible and usable in the public domain.

The Shanghai Urban Ecology Lab is also innovative as an instrument of participatory ecological education – in three ways:

(1) An urban ecology dashboard will be designed as a proof-of-concept service platform;

(2) an Hour Of Ecology module will be designed collaboratively by participating citizens and local government officials;

(3) an Urban Ecology Lab training programme and Toolkit will allow its replication in other cities.”

(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-07-01/agtech-for-agroecology/)