The Cities Environment Landscape (CEL) research group performs research and education on a broad spectrum of issues of major global concern regarding urbanization, political ecology and landscape change. The CEL group participates in international collaborative research programs, including the EU, Asia and North America, publishes widely, teaches on related themes in courses at all levels from undergraduate to doctoral courses, and engages in public lectures, debates and political forums.

Urban, environmental and landscape geography traditionally belongs to the core of teaching and research at the Department of Human Geography. Urban geography focuses primarily on basic social problems that unfold in the urban arena: gentrification, polarization, segregation, urban conflict, the use of public space, urban politics, and the role of finance and crisis in shaping urban landscapes. Environmental research at the department comprises critical investigations of (urban) sustainability notions, risk management, and political-ecological analyses of island societies and the leisure industries. Research on the landscape comprises both historical and current processes of change. Landscape is understood not only as the physical environment, or a vision, but rather as a nexus of natural processes, social interaction, power relations, practice and customs.

The CEL research group is affiliated with and collaborates in the “Lund University Centre of Excellence for Integration of Social and Natural Dimensions of Sustainability” (LUCID) and the Nordforsk-funded “Nordic Landscape Research Network” (NLRN).

Research projects of the Cities Environment Landscape research group address questions concerning among other issues:

• accumulation by dispossession
• the Arctic land grab and the oil commodity frontier
• drivers and effects of agricultural land use change
• ecologically unequal exchange and formation of landesque capital
• film and visual methodologies
• financial crisis and urban development
• financialization of the built environment
• gentrification and filtering
• the historical geography of Scania (Skåne)
• ideologies and produced landscapes of cultural heritage
• island development
• the landscape of the great landed estates
• neoliberal urban politics in Asian cities
• neoliberalization of housing and polarization in Swedish cities
• neoliberalizing the countryside
• planning of the peri-urban landscape
• the political economy of space
• the socialist city
• transport mega-projects and tourism development in Mallorca
• uneven development
• urban dystopias

Whom we are

Anders Lund Hansen, Lecturer
Carl-Johan Sanglert, PhD candidate
Diana Gildea, PhD candidate
Eric Clark, Professor
Erik Jönsson, PhD candidate
Guy Baeten, Docent
Kaj Ojanne, PhD candidate
Lise-Lotte Persson, PhD candidate
Lovisa Solbär, PhD candidate
Nicklas Guldåker, Lecturer
Ståle Holgersen, PhD candidate
Tomas Germundsson, Professor