‘Resource Urbanisms: Natural resources, urban form and infrastructure in the case of Asia’s diverging city models’ is a two-year LSE Cities research project co-funded by LSE Kuwait Programme/LSE Middle East Centre to examine multiple aspects of how natural resources, urban form and infrastructure affect each other and potentially lead to the establishment of divergent forms of urbanism.

The project’s point of departure is the common assumption that cities and urban development are directly affected by the availability and costs of natural resources, and that in turn, different forms of urban development result in substantial differences in resource use. The project will primarily focus on the specific case of two natural resources, land and energy, and explore their relationships with city form, urban dwelling and mobility. It will analyse these relationships through a comparative case study approach which considers extreme and divergent city models in Asia.

The research will include the multi-scale temporal analysis of different types and changes of urban development in Kuwait and Abu Dhabi (a second Middle East comparator case) and two contrasting city types in East Asia, Hong Kong and Singapore.