Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Approaches in Geography for Sustainability Challenges

Contemporary approaches to insular development unilaterally consider islands as tourism destinations and focus on top-down oriented short-term solutions that often place stress on local water resources and disregard the particularities of insular societies and resources. Such practices raise questions on the long-term sustainability of development trajectories, especially as regards the resilience to drought risk of insular societies and hydrological systems. With respect to drought risk, LRD is understood as development that enhances the resilience of local communities, businesses and infrastructure against drought stress through strategies that promote self-sustenance, adaptability and sustainability. Implementation of such strategies requires shifting from linear approaches aimed at meeting specific objectives to approaches that accommodate uncertainty, acknowledge feedback and embrace re-evaluation of adaptation interventions. Utilizing a SHS approach, the paper attempts to highlight the interplay between local development trajectories and their impact on drought resilience of vulnerable social groups and the hydrological systems on which they depend. Social-Hydrological Systems’ (SHS), a special category of SES, consist of a social and at least one hydrological subsystem that interact, co-evolve and are inter-determined through adaptation and feedback. SHSs are characterized by their resilience and have spatial boundaries that transform in time. Focusing on two Greek island cases, the author uses a fit-for-purpose methodology to (a) spatially identify the SHS(s) and their respective subsystems, (b) identify vulnerable social groups, their resources and adaptation options to drought risk, (c) understand the connections between local development, resource allocation and building drought resilience through feedback relations, (d) highlight the importance of adaptive governance in building LRD and (e) justify the appropriateness of SHS approach as a tool to implement LRD in islands with respect to drought risk management.

This presentation examines the role of culture in urban planning and connects it to geography and sustainability. It raises fundamental questions: Can urban planning be understood as an outstanding cultural practice? How is this relationship made concrete? What challenges lie ahead for Europe, especially under socioeconomic crisis? Urban planning is shown as a field of dilemmas, where resources and constraints coexist. In this context, culture serves both as a means of understanding and as a tool for intervention. A central figure in this analysis is Klaus Kunzmann, who recognised early on the importance of culture in urban planning and emphasised the dual relationship between culture and education. The contribution of culture draws its roots from classical theorists, evolves through postmodernism, and is today dynamically expressed through urban regeneration, the creative city, the slow city, cultural heritage, and place marketing and branding. Emphasis is placed on creativity, which Kunzmann approaches more broadly than dominant theories, characterising it as a “friendly virus,” “postmodern Zeitgeist,” and “vague concept.” Creativity requires strong human resources and is closely linked to the concept of the slow society, where quality of life, tradition, and innovation coexist. Cultural heritage is analysed as a key element of identity, quality of life, and place marketing and branding. It is also seen as a field of tension between the local and the global, particularly under the pressure of globalisation and tourism. Finally, the presentation highlights future challenges in urban planning with a focus on sustainability. It proposes a strategic interconnection of creativity, innovation, heritage, lifestyles, and culture to improve the quality of life and strengthen social cohesion in Europe.

Water security under climate change remains a pressing sustainability challenge, and drinking water supply is particularly demanding, as non-compliance with strict quality and service norms directly affects public health and wellbeing. Desalination has emerged as one of the most prominent technical responses to water scarcity across the MENA region and the Americas. Chile is a pioneer in this regard: desalination is the country's main adaptation strategy, particularly for urban centres along the hyper-arid coast of the Atacama Desert. Drawing on feminist and gendered approaches to domestic water security, the climate change maladaptation literature, and critical social research on desalination, I develop an integrative framework for evaluating water security through a gendered and intersectional lens on maladaptation. I apply this framework to reassess desalination in Chile not as an isolated adaptation intervention with neutral or negative impacts, but as embedded within long-standing neoliberal water policies that privilege market-based solutions and capital-intensive mega-infrastructure, and that produce or sustain water insecurity for women and other vulnerable groups. Empirically, I examine how domestic water insecurity is constituted in the everyday lives of urban Chilean women who drink desalinated water, drawing on household surveys, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and a targeted literature review. The analysis shows that desalination operates as maladaptation in three interrelated ways: (1) it does not guarantee water security at the household level; (2) it displaces conflict geographically, temporally, and socially; and (3) it contributes to the very climate change it is meant to help societies adapt to. The paper contributes to interdisciplinary debates in geography by bridging physical understandings of water with feminist political ecology and critical adaptation studies, surfacing justice concerns often invisible within technocratic sustainability agendas.

Arterial roads are key urban spaces hosting essential infrastructures and shaping development patterns, yet they are often analysed linearly through a traffic-centric lens. Research typically emphasizes technical cross-sections, neglecting spatial, functional, social, and ecological interconnections with the surrounding urban fabric. Amid mobility transitions, climate adaptation, and calls for equitable spaces, arterial roads require reconceptualization as integrated urban spaces. This study introduces "Territories of Urban Mobility Corridors," reframing arterial roads as dynamic assemblages embedded in the city across morphological, systemic, and relational dimensions and scales. It extends beyond linear streetscapes to highlight spatial relations, ecological systems, and social interdependencies between street segments and adjacent fabric, avoiding traffic-oriented terms like "street" or "road." Thessaloniki exemplifies car dependency with minimal unsealed areas, exacerbating air pollution, urban heat islands, flooding, and inhospitable spaces . Arterial roads connect dense fabric but disrupt pedestrian networks, blue-green links, and neighbourhoods . Focusing on selected arterials, this research identifies attributes to derive Territories of Urban Mobility Corridors, revealing potentials and challenges for both strategic and spatial urban planning. As part of PhD research at TU Wien's Institute of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture , the mixed-methods approach integrates Situational Analysis and critical cartography. Methods include document analysis, urban-design assessments, promenadology, spatial observations, mappings, and expert interviews. Findings synthesize via joint spatial displays for academic, professional, and community dialogue. Expected outcomes delineate territories like ecological networks, heritage-tourism landscapes, residential zones, and productive areas, aiming to uncover thematic-spatial interactions, situational dynamics, and relational ties between streetscapes and fabric. Results inform a typology advancing mobility corridors as relational, multi-scalar urban spaces. By rendering territorial complexity legible, the study fosters regenerative urbanism through context-sensitive knowledge, supporting reimagined corridors in the Symbiocene.

Across Europe, rural regions are undergoing profound socio-ecological transformations, including demographic decline, land abandonment, and increasing environmental pressures linked to climate change. In Greece and the wider Mediterranean, these dynamics are particularly acute in remote rural areas, where depopulation and ageing populations are reshaping land use and agricultural activity. Climate change and water scarcity further exacerbate these trends, raising critical questions about the long-term sustainability of olive cultivation – the region’s most economically and culturally significant permanent crop. This contribution presents findings from an interdisciplinary field-based research experience conducted in Messenia, Greece. Students worked in four semi-mountainous villages in West Mani to examine processes of olive grove abandonment and landscape change, combining GIS-based spatial analysis with farmer survey data. In parallel, they explored transformative adaptation pathways in the olive sector through semi-structured interviews with policymakers, local stakeholders, and cooperative actors, identifying key governance challenges and opportunities. Beyond these findings, the presentation reflects on interdisciplinarity as both a research and pedagogical process. It shows how an interdisciplinary project design, developed at the faculty level, is translated into a field-based learning experience in which students actively engage in data collection, interpretation, and the combination of methods. In this context, student-led fieldwork becomes a key site of knowledge production, where spatial analysis, environmental governance, and rural development perspectives are brought into interaction. Finally, the contribution explores the implications of this experience in the context of sustainability education in Geography. It shows how field-based, experiential and situated learning can support more grounded understandings of rural sustainability transformations, while also making visible the difficulties of combining approaches and perspectives. In this sense, interdisciplinarity emerges not as a given outcome, but as something that is learned, tested, and negotiated in practice.

Over the past fifteen years, the Eastern Aegean archipelago has emerged as one of the most perilous border zones in the Mediterranean and as a site of intensifying socio-ecological change. Across this island complex, EU border sovereignty is materialized through hostility-by-design processes, including Closed Controlled Access Centers (CCACs) and violent pushbacks. These processes not only govern mobility but also reconfigure local ecologies through land dipossession, resource extraction, and militarized infrastructure. While research has largely focused on the socio-political dimensions of forced migration, the environmental effects of border regimes within EU territories remain underexplored. Building on its expanded use in geography, this presentation introduces the ‘archipelago’ as an analytical and methodological framework to capture these entanglements. It proposes archipelagic thinking as a methodology of encounter to examine how ecological and socio-political processes unfold across fragmented yet interconnected island complexes. This approach challenges continental perceptions of seemingly unified or dichotomized worlds while highlighting the relational dynamics of environmental harm and care. In an area such as the Mediterranean basin, where geopolitical conflicts, bordering practices and technological monopolies reinforce violence, segregation and ecological degradation this approach appears particularly urgent. Drawing on a multi-sited research conducted between 2024–2026 across seven islands as part of the ERC funded project ‘The Game: Counter-mapping Informal Refugee Mobilities along the Balkan Route’, the presentation advances two arguments. First, it proposes archipelagic methodologies as a tool for challenging harmful regimes. It repositions the Aegean as a critical site for investigating the intersections of mobility, sovereignty, and ecology. Second, it examines how border regimes intersect with environmental degradation and resource inequalities. To do so it focuses on three cases: the deforestation of Vastria region in Lesvos, water scarcity and land dispossession in Leros, and solidarity practices in Tilos, exploring how bordering regimes but also forms of solidarity reshape our worlds.

The climate crisis, reflected in climate vulnerability, impacts, and vulnerable population groups, is fuelling climate litigation in India. With many people relying on climate-sensitive sectors and recent Supreme Court rulings recognizing that Article 21 — the right to life — includes the right "to be free from adverse effects of climate change," climate litigation is likely to grow in India. India's long-standing connection between law and geography frequently centers on land disputes, where determining property ownership depends on accurately measuring land boundaries. Today, geography can play a role in legal processes beyond land conflicts. This study explores the potential and challenges of integrating geographical knowledge with climate litigation via a spatial–legal interface by analyzing 13 climate litigations from India. This perspective article argues that geographic tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, spatial modelling, and vulnerability mapping can greatly improve judicial understanding of risks, location-specific and community-specific vulnerabilities, and the various impacts faced by communities and ecosystems. A spatial approach in the judiciary can be helpful in cases involving extreme weather events, climate disasters, environmental degradation, and displacement, making legal assessments more informed. Besides, Geographic Information Systems can improve compliance monitoring. Additionally, the paper highlights challenges that hinder spatial-legal integration, such as a lack of knowledge about geospatial data, difficulty in managing complex geospatial data, issues with data reliability and standardization, and concerns about whether courts can consider it as evidence. The paper concludes that fostering collaboration among legal scholars/practitioners, geographers, and policymakers can enhance climate governance and climate justice in India. Keywords: GIS; Climate litigations; climate justice; spatial-legal interface; India.

Theories of spatial planning have frequently engaged with the concepts of wickedness and complexity. Although these notions occasionally intersect, they are typically examined in isolation, without a systematic account of their relationship. Each carries distinct implications for planning practice and policy. This paper seeks to establish a theoretical connection between the two by identifying points of convergence in their constituent characteristics. In doing so, it formulates a complex condition that defines particularly challenging planning contexts—most notably the just green transition as a generalized policy exercise, as well as mega and large-scale projects as specific planning cases. By tracing the presence of this condition in planning practice, the paper draws conclusions about the nature of complexity and its implications for the foundations of planning policy, particularly at the social level, re-examining central questions and their socio-political outcomes.

Addressing sustainability challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and socio-environmental inequalities requires forms of knowledge production that move beyond disciplinary boundaries and engage with real-world complexity. This is reflected in sustainability science, a field defined less by disciplines than by the challenges it seeks to address. Geography, positioned at the interface of natural and social sciences and grounded in human–environment interactions, is well suited to contribute to these efforts. This orientation is increasingly institutionalized in European universities through interdisciplinary research centers, laboratories, and specialized degree programs. Yet, translating this integrative potential into coherent research practices and policy-relevant outcomes remains a challenge. This contribution stages a dialogue between two complementary approaches: ecosystem services and social-ecological systems research, which focuses on the attribution of ecosystem functions values for society, and environmental social science, which examines governance processes, social inequalities, and collective action in sustainability transformations. Drawing on selected empirical cases from our research, it explores how these approaches frame key issues and generate different forms of knowledge. It further highlights how methodological choices – from quantitative indicators and spatial modelling to qualitative and participatory approaches – shape not only research outcomes but also their relevance for policy and practice. By placing these perspectives in conversation, the contribution identifies both complementarities, misconceptions and tensions, particularly in integrating data, engaging actors across knowledge systems, ontological framings, and navigating differing epistemologies. The paper argues for the value of working through disciplinary differences as a productive basis for collaboration. Such engagement can support more reflexive methodological choices, strengthen knowledge integration, and enhance the societal relevance of geographical research. As an opening contribution to this session, it aims to stimulate dialogue on how interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches can be advanced in Geography.