Silk Cities is an independent socio-professional and academic initiative for knowledge exchange, international engagement, research and publication. Being inherently interdisciplinary, Silk Cities performs under the overarching and overlapping spheres of resilience and disaster management, urban development, communities’ cultural assets and social wellbeing. With an initial geographic focus on real-life challenges those countries along the Silk Roads in the West-Central Asia face, the geographic coverage of Silk Cities reaches out further to other cities, regions and countries which are prone to similar issues and fosters international exchange. By using the narrative of the urban Silk Roads we tap on the notions of connectivity and exchange, historical presence that is reflected in city characteristics and urban life, and contextual contemporary challenges.
Silk Cities bridges the gap between local and global efforts, academia and practice, local and diaspora experts, and bridges fragmented urban domains. We identify real-world, yet under-explored contextual and global challenges and opportunities, then take the intellectual leadership to initiate frontier collective interdisciplinary projects. Through intellectual capacity building and creating international visibility of those under-presented local researchers and working professionals, Silk Cities strives to inspire, empower and make impact. Silk Cities organises workshops and conferences and undertakes research, while seeking further innovative initiatives. There are many issues and solutions that need to be explored.
Our vision is to be a global leading hub to create equal opportunities for all to inspire and be inspired towards improving the quality of cities and communities’ wellbeing. Some of our focus areas are as follows:
- Creating a built environment that is safer, more resilient, and adaptive to change;
- Better quality of life for people within their built environment;
- Historical continuity in the built environment, connecting past, present and future;
- Recognising and appreciating cultural assets and values.
Why we do what we do
As cities grow and transform, they generate a multiplicity of challenges which require careful and responsive solutions to be explored. In our view, communication and knowledge-sharing provide a means for improving the quality of the built environment – to discuss, challenge and stimulate ideas towards finding shared solutions. A lack of sufficient communication in regard to the quality of the built environment is more evident in developing countries, especially those within the West-Central Asia, which are not usually placed in the limelight of international focus (from a built environment perspective) and are under-explored. Additionally the issue of dispersed knowledge in the region prevails.