Age-Friendly Cities and Communities

Leads: Shengxiao (Alex) Li, National University of Singapore; Mei Lan Fang, Simon Fraser University

This working group unpacks the urban aging challenges cities and communities face in an aging society and proposes context-based solutions. It also supports the next generation of leaders in advancing inclusive, age-friendly planning through sustainable and educational approaches.

Botanical Urbanism

Leads: Xiaoxuan Lu and Yun Hye Hwang, National University of Singapore

Botanical Urbanism re-centers plants and ecological processes as fundamental urban drivers and advocates a paradigm shift toward a culturally engaged ecological design. Ecological design has long prioritized ecosystem services, treating ecology as a utility and quantifying how nature can serve human needs. This working group instead draws on political ecology, arguing that the ecological cannot be separated from the cultural and political: Whose nature is being designed? Who benefits from urban green space? What cultural meanings are attached to these plants? The group positions Botanical Urbanism as a proposal for action beyond analysis, engaging urban flora as a generative force in design to advocate for urban nature that is equitable in both human and non-human domains.

Civic Resilience and Justice Co-Design

Leads: Chaewon Ahn, National University of Singapore; Chingwen Cheng, Pennsylvania State University; Jeff Hou, National University of Singapore

Building on the previous Civic Engagement and Community Design and Climate Justice and Community Resilience working groups, this group focuses on collaborative approaches to strengthening civic resilience and advancing structural change toward justice in the built environment. Working as a consortium of researchers and practitioners, it investigates how climate change, environmental inequities, and urban vulnerabilities intersect to affect communities disproportionately across diverse geographical and social contexts. Its activities emphasize the co-production of actionable knowledge through collaborative research, field-based investigation, and applied interventions, with the aim of identifying strategies for adaptive planning, inclusive decision-making, and effective ways to measure social impacts and justice outcomes. The group highlights place-based insight, community co-design, Indigenous knowledge, and local knowledge as foundations for both infrastructural and community resilience.

Climate-Responsive Therapeutic Landscapes for Healthy Aging Communities

Lead: Lin Xiao, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

This group works at the intersection of therapeutic landscapes, landscape ecology, planting strategies, microclimate regulation, and age-friendly environmental design. It investigates how vegetation systems, green infrastructure, and landscape planning can enhance thermal comfort, psychological wellbeing, and quality of life for older populations in diverse climatic contexts, and promotes comparative study and knowledge exchange on healthy aging environments across the Asia-Pacific. Particular attention goes to tropical, subtropical, and rapidly urbanizing regions where climate adaptation and healthy living environments are increasingly urgent.

Human Development and Nature Preservation

Lead: John Dunn, Universidad San Francisco de Quito

This working group studies cases where human development, such as urban expansion or resource extraction, intersects with areas where ecosystem preservation is a priority. The goal is to document and analyze how these places experience and manage such conflicts.

Landscape and Human Health

Lead: Tzuhui Angie Tseng, National Tsing Hua University

This group explores the relationships between landscapes, built environments, nature-based settings, and human health and wellbeing. It brings together scholars from landscape architecture, environmental psychology, public health, urban planning, environmental design, recreation, and related fields to examine how environmental characteristics shape physical, psychological, and social health. Areas of interest include restorative environments, therapeutic landscapes, urban green and blue spaces, inclusive and age-friendly environments, nature connectedness, environmental behavior, healthy urban design, environmental justice, and the health benefits of everyday contact with nature. The group also aims to strengthen interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration across the Asia-Pacific and to translate research into practical recommendations for healthier, more inclusive cities and landscapes.

Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure

Lead: Anne Taufen, University of Washington Tacoma

Moral ecologies are context-specific relational systems that shape priorities in how cities and landscapes are built. What do we value, why, and how do we interact to get things done? Around the globe, people bring acculturated expectations to the siting, development, and sustainability of infrastructure. This group focuses on three questions: How do people in different Asia-Pacific cities and landscapes make sense of and construct their environment? How do these moral ecologies relate to specific forms of essential infrastructure, such as transportation, water, or energy (with one type of infrastructure as the focus of each meeting)? And how can interpretive methods strengthen our ability to recognize and engage these moral ecologies, building pragmatic leadership skills for inclusive, equitable, sustainable development?

Pedagogies for Sustainable Cities and Landscapes

Leads: Sara Padgett Kjaersgaard and Catherine Evans, University of New South Wales

The APRU SCL network, with its annual conferences and working groups, offers a unique forum for sharing and collaborating on pedagogical practices that support teaching and learning for societal impact and sustainability across disciplines, universities, geographies, professions, and academic levels. This group invites educators, researchers, practitioners, and recent graduates across the Asia-Pacific to explore the role of cities and their landscapes as site, partner, medium, and catalyst for learning and teaching, and to understand how urban landscape-centered pedagogies in diverse settings foster sustainable, relational, and transformative forms of knowledge production while addressing societal and environmental challenges.

Socio-Ecological Production Landscapes and Seascapes (SEPLS): Research, Practice, and Learning

Leads: Gerard Francisco Sandoval, University of Oregon; Jaime López-Andrade, Universidad San Francisco de Quito; Yizhao Yang, University of Oregon

Socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS) draw on historically rooted wisdom and practices from communities in which biodiversity, human wellbeing, and socio-economic activity are sustained through mutually beneficial relationships between people and nature. This group seeks to adapt and advance the concept in evolving urban, peri-urban, and rural communities through evidence-based, community-engaged approaches, strengthening SEPLS research, developing practical methods, supporting innovative applications, and informing place-based policy recommendations across diverse geographic contexts.

Urban AI: Planning, Governance, and Decision Support

Leads: Elham Bahmanteymouri, Alessandro Premier, and Mohsen Mohammadzadeh, University of Auckland

Formed from the merger of the Urban Innovation and Energy and Urban AI groups, this working group brings together the agendas of urban AI, urban innovation, smart technologies, and sustainable energy. It examines how artificial intelligence, data-driven systems, digital twins, intelligent infrastructure, and emerging energy technologies are reshaping urban management, governance, service delivery, and everyday life across the Asia-Pacific. The group promotes interdisciplinary, cross-city collaboration on both the transformative potential and the economic, social, ethical, environmental, and governance implications of these innovations, with particular attention to smart solutions for existing and future urban problems, inclusive digitalisation, energy transitions, data governance, and socio-spatial justice. Through comparative research, knowledge exchange, policy dialogue, and collaborative publications, it supports cities in developing responsible, context-sensitive, and equitable pathways toward digitally enabled, low-carbon, resilient urban futures.

Urban Climate Adaptation in Practice

Lead: Iresh Jayawardena, University of Auckland

Climate adaptation is entering a new phase. The question is no longer whether cities adapt, but how well, for whom, and toward what future. This group proposes that place-based interventions are where strategic adaptation is made real, tested, and legitimised. Precinct retrofits, blue-green infrastructure, urban living laboratories, managed relocation, informal-settlement upgrading, community- and Indigenous-led placemaking, and regulatory experimentation can each make competing values and distributional claims explicit and, under favourable conditions, catalyze the deeper institutional and systemic change adaptation requires. The framing is deliberately broad, welcoming contributions from urban planning, governance, engineering, landscape architecture, public health, urban economics, geography, Indigenous scholarship, evaluation and data science, and from practitioners and community partners.

Water and Wastewater

Lead: Kory Russel, University of Oregon

The Water and Wastewater working group has engaged with a range of water and sanitation concepts over the years. For 2027 in Singapore, the group will focus on affordable and scalable water reuse technologies and designs, including stormwater and greywater, within the urban landscape.