Pre-Columbian Tropical Urban Life: Placing the past in designs for sustainable urban futures (TruLife)

Facing the challenge of increasing urbanisation, strategies for future city development are not considering the long urban past. Archaeologists of ancient cities recognise that long-term urban processes can teach us about diverse human-environment interactions. Thus, TruLife's core research question is: Can studying the diversity of long-term urban traditions, exemplified by pre-Columbian Maya tropical cities, effectively inform designing for sustainable urban futures?

Research activities
Under the current Cross-Council Enquiry Highlight Notice, TruLife will create a humanities led network of researchers that incorporates the environmental and social sciences. They will convene in three workshops dedicated to pivotal concerns ubiquitous to building sustainable cities:
A) Food Security
B) Decay and Waste Management
C) Spatial Practice
TruLife's workshops establish concrete foundations for comparative frames of reference, associated terms, data, and analysis relevant to pertinent topics, which will be widely disseminated.

Background
The longest time span and most diverse cases of urban developmental pathways are being recorded by archaeologists. This significantly expanded evidence base of urban scenarios is currently not used in designs for sustainable urban life. A lack of comparative frames of reference (including commensurable methods and data presentation) causes the absence of direct, mutually informing dialogues.
With a focus on the well-documented 2,500 year history of the Maya Neotropical urban tradition, workable, high-potential outcomes for wide-ranging research and innovative design applications can be achieved. Maya urbanism offers an elucidating case. It flourished without the 'human-animal grazing complex' Old World urban growth relies on. This contrast asks crucial questions about critical differences in human-environment interactions. Maya everyday urban life and development thrived in different urban ecological relations and metabolic processes to those of globalised temperate-climate models. European colonisation replaced Maya urban configurations with such models, causing the loss of key practices, including its long-term adaptability to change. Dependence on grazing animals results in declining soil fertility, soil erosion, massive deforestation, and misdirected investments (e.g. growing crops to feed cattle), all of which pose a global threat to humanity.
Urban design and environmental engineering aspire to balance ecological relations of cities to attain more sustainable social life. The usability of ideas derived from TruLife's cross-disciplinary encounters follows from both a better appreciation of archaeological contributions outside the discipline and allowing environmental and urban social science to influence archaeological investigation.

Dissemination and Impact
TruLife will examine the relevance of long-term Maya tropical cities to offering critical contexts and alternatives to current discussions on strategies for urban futures, disseminating results in a special issue of an international journal (TruLife has links to Journal of Urbanism and Ecology and Society) and abridged methodological pointers on an existing research website.
Developing a brief for a Design Ideas Competition will test the ability of new insights and frames of reference in areas of shared concern. The competition and resulting exhibition will be organised with non-academic project partners creating a powerful arena of knowledge exchange and impact, both of research and impacting subsequent research scopes.

Reach
The network comprises an international membership with a strategic UK base (12 in 6 countries), expert invitees (6), and non-academic project partners (2). Diverse membership, including links to related NGOs, steering group, and external partners ensure the quality and broad leverage for TruLife's outputs. Impact activities concern urban populations, urban professionals, students, and public.

Urban Design and Environmental Engineering
[1] Network members include urban design and environmental engineering experts working towards research applications. This opens a route to influencing design and engineering implementations commercially or as part of governmental policy. Connecting archaeological evidence to other research practice, which regularly informs consultation and application processes, prepares for innovative use and awareness of alternative developmental paths and social practice in future planning of interventions;

[2] A Design Ideas Competition will influence urban design and environmental engineering practitioners directly. Contestants will work to a brief and submit implementable ideas for urban design, engineering, and practice interventions, which improve sustainable urban life and development. Producing the brief is an intellectual outcome of TruLife's research workshops. Targeted are professionals, students, and knowledgeable members of the public, who think and work creatively on urban challenges. Participation will promote their work and abilities, while salient research insights within the brief will take root in contestants. This means new insights will live on in the sector, benefitting urban development;

[3] Promoting the competition and its exhibited results will reach a wider audience involved in urban design and environmental engineering. The partnership with RIBA Southeast (Royal Institute of British Architects), a key architectural representative, enhances this.

Heritage Museums and Audience
[1] Producing an exhibition of competition winners with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (SCVA) exemplifies how archaeological and heritage knowledge can be active components of ideas for the future. This realises an incremental innovation in how the presentation of heritage can be relevant to the improvement of the world today, and may act as a model for further parallels in which heritage is used;

[2] Museum visitors are made aware of alternative paths towards sustainable urban life as inspired by past solutions in an exhibition combining research insights with design and engineering ideas. A greater appreciation of the importance of archaeological recording and preservation, as well as stimulating support for sustainable innovations in people's own living environments are expected mid-term effects.

Urban Prosperity (esp. the developing world and Neotropical indigenous populations)
Designing sustainable cities determines prosperity for a growing majority of the world's population. Understanding successful and unsuccessful outcomes of urban life and development can help cities become better and more sustainable places to live. This can inform smarter public investments, according to diverse environmental and cultural urban conditions. TruLife learns from scenarios of past human developmental processes for the long-term benefit of human inhabitation.

Understanding the functioning of past urban designs and spatial practice can help mitigate the rural-urban migration crises in the developing world. Utilising rural migrants' own practical expertise, knowledge of past indigenous Neotropical food security and waste management may teach current populations workable models. Network members have worked on cities in the developing world, making it feasible to advance TruLife's outcomes for various place-specific, bio-cultural adaptations.

Impact Timeframe
TruLife's direct impact follows the three research workshops, supported by the publication strategy and social media promotion. The competition brief has its greatest impact at the end of year two. Beyond the network, the exhibition and online resources continue mid- and long-term impact. Third parties (internationally) will be encouraged to put on the exhibition after its initial SCVA run. This would enlarge the audience and create further awareness of the heritage and sustainable urban messages.