Dr L Carton (Linda)

Carton's research is focused on collaborative planning and mapping for sustainable cities. She is committed to following the science on climate change and ‘bottom-up’ citizen initiatives. She looks at government’s best practices (and mistakes) in dealing with the related sustainability challenges of climate adaption and mitigation in cities and regions. An ongoing fascination is the emergence of conflicts between local scale and city-level or state-level decision-makers on governing collective natural resources or “commons,” and dealing with "externalities". The core application domain is the field of -smart, sustainable, healthy- cities and regions. Previous master thesis projects include the spatial dimension of energy infrastructures, water problems, and citizens and governments co-developing green-blue regional infrastructures. In Master thesis research projects, her students often study phenomena at the science-policy nexus while working together with parties in practice (municipalities, provinces, water boards, ministries, citizen initiatives).
Research themes:
1. Sustainable planning and citizen participation
- Sustainable Cities, climate change and spatial planning
- ‘bottom-up planning’ / sustainable governance models
- Citizen participation in land-related natural resource management
- Regional planning
2. Renewing and rethinking mapping and planning methods in today's network society
- Framing in multi-actor decision-making (networked society)
- Internet enabled Mapping practices (open data geo-info, sensor networks)
- Environmental monitoring networks by self-empowered communities
3. Governance of land-related resources: dealing with commons and externalities
- Multi-scale governance of land use and land-related resource flows
- Rethinking the role of land tenure and land rights systems
- Designing alternatives for representing land-related flows

• New Participatory Planning Methods for Governance of/in the Sustainability Transition

• Geography, Planning and Environment