Tag Archives: Henrik Ernstson

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Resilience Science in 2010: looking back

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How was 2010 for this blog?

Google Analytics can be used to find out what happens on a website, and according to Google Analytics, in 2010 Resilience Science had about 240,000 page views, 190,000 unique visitors, and over 500 feed subscribers (according to Google Reader).

The most common search term for Resilience Science was “resilience science”, but less expected frequent searches included “haiti earthquake sociology“, “adaptive architecture“, “biological art“, “Hunza landslide“, and “financial instability hypothesis“.

Visitors came from all over the world.  Our visitors are frequently from the USA (39%).  The ten countries with the most visitors, after the US, were the UK (9%), Canada (9%), Australia (5%), Sweden (4%), India (3%), Germany (3%), Netherlands (2%), France (1%), and Spain (1%).   Below is a map showing the top locations of visitors by city.  London, Stockholm, New York, Sydney, and Melbourne sent the most visitors.

Most visitors went to the home page.  Some posts are popular because they link to an interesting talk or graphic.  These posts are frequently accessed but only glanced at.  For example, the most popular post overall is a 2006 post on economy distorted cartograms.  Other longer posts are read for a while and provide something more analytical.  The five most popular longer posts from 2010 were:

  1. Haiti, disaster sociology, elite panic and looting
  2. A history of Stommel diagrams
  3. The growth of the ecosystem service concept
  4. Resilience meets architecture and urban planning by Matteo Giusti
  5. Undermine Nature/Culture dichotomy – Bruno Latour visits Stockholm by Henrik Ernstson.

About 45% of visitors came from search engines (>95% google), 40% from referring sites – The Resilience Alliance (35%), Facebook (6%), Twitter (4%), development economist’s Chris Blatman’s blog (4%), and Greenpeace (3%) were the top five referring sites.  Direct visitors made up 15% of the traffic.

Hopefully Resilience Science will continue to be interesting in 2011, and that 2011 will be a good year for our readers and writers.

Cities, Ecological Management, Scenarios

Weaving ‘Protective stories’ to secure urban green areas

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Henrik Ernstson and Sverker Sörlin‘s article Weaving protective stories: connective practices to articulate holistic values in the Stockholm National Urban Park, (2009 Environment and Planning A).  Is described in a Stockholm Resilience Centre press release ‘Protective stories´ help secure urban green areas:

Despite strong exploitation pressure, a diverse urban movement of civil society organizations in Stockholm has managed to provide narratives able to explain and legitimize the need to protect urban green areas. Through ‘protective stories´ that interlaces cultural history and conservation biology, activists have managed to link areas previously considered disconnected and justifying the need for a better, overall protection of the areas.
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Crucial for generating and keeping alive such narratives have been artists, authors and scientists and their artefacts like paintings, maps, buildings and scientific reports. While some artists are from the historical past, others have worked alongside the movement in producing artefacts towards articulating certain values. When re-printed in media, displayed at an exhibition, or published in a book, these artefacts — old or newly produced — also become agents in “telling the story” so as to put pressure on authorities and to change public opinon.

Such networks of activists, artefacts and social arenas do not possess any formal power, but they can nonetheless achieve a lot, both as a community of practice wielding power and knowledge but also through mobilizing yet more actors and artefacts to make the network grow. The protective story is kept alive at many places continously and simultaneously, says Ernstson.