Ekistics and New Urban Agenda for Sustainable Development

This event promotes an initiative on behalf of an important group of members of the World Society for Ekistics (WSE) - the Southern Hemisphere Oceanic group of WSE – hosted by the Centre for Design Innovation Research (CDI), Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. This event launches an on-line Journal Ekistics and the New Urban Agenda for Sustainable Development, supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The journal aims to connect the practice of Ekistics with sustainable development practice for all types of human settlement: urban, rural or remote; traditional or modern; formal or informal; in developed or lesser developed contexts. We also aim to extend the Ekistics framework in terms of how we now understand settlement sustainability, livability and human wellbeing through the complex and adaptive dynamics at play. Through the promotion of a complex systems approach to applying the Ekistics framework we intend to build on Ekistic’s global achievements in influencing urban policy and planning processes over the last 50 years and extend them into the short, medium and long-term futures for human settlements. We therefore hope to lead new thinking in sustainable human settlement development, especially in policy design and implementation, and community participation and cultural development. This event will present links between Ekistics and humanitarian disaster relief, a special area of interest at the Centre for Design Innovation Research (CDI). We also have an interest in the on-going sustainable development problems in remote Indigenous communities in Australia and the Asia-Pacific Region, and the settlement of disadvantaged communities and regions. The launch introduces the journal, its purpose, its people, and its submission processes. The journal will be both research-oriented, double-blind peer-reviewed, and practice-based, connecting deep knowledge in the topic area to the driving need for new patterns of sustainable development practice. We will invite attendees to subscribe to the journal.