Dr. Adrienne Grêt-Regamey was appointed Associate Professor of the Chair of Landscape Planning and Urban Systems (PLUS), ETH Zurich in July, 2008 and is a full professor since 2014.
PLUS: Planning of Landscape and Urban Systems
The goal of sustainable planning is to balance the use of natural resources against their availablity, in order to insure the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Current spatial planning is, however, primarily concerned with the question of land use and disregards the question of resource availability in space and time. In Switzerland and worldwide, demand for economic and ecosystem services provided by the landscape is increasing as the world‘s population becomes urban, lifestyles change, and industrial agricultural practices intensifies. If one thus considers landscape performance in the context of sustainable development, then land use decisions have to be made after consideration of economic, social and ecological aspects.
The recently founded research unit PLUS focuses on developing and testing decision-support and planning systems for sustainable spatial development to foster understanding of how urban, peri-urban, and rural systems deliver essential services meeting economic, social, political and environmental demands. Research includes fundamental contributions to new integrative methodologies linking GIS and probabilistic approaches, new instruments for integrating the value of ecosystem services into regional economic development, and the investigation of GIS-based 3D landscape visualisations in participative approaches for human-nature interaction modeling.
Professor Grêt-Regamey‘s particular focus lies in integrating environmental considerations in spatial planning processes, risk-based decision-making for landscape and urban development, participatory approaches in landscape and environmental planning, including GIS-based 3D visualisation and modelling tools, and in solving inverse problems for sustainable spatial development.
