Ecological Urban Design theory, research, and praxis (original) (raw)
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2021
A closer partnership between urban design and urban ecology can yield new knowledge with the predictive advancement of both fields. However, achieving such partnership is not always a straight-forward process due to different epistemological departures. This chapter provides a rudimentary background of the fields of urban design and urban ecology and familiarizes readers with some epistemological characteristics that are useful to consider in all forms of partnership activities between designers and ecologists. Social-ecological resilience offers a useful framework for inquiry of particular relevance for urban transition at a time when global societal challenges of massive biodiversity loss and climate change require urgent attention and where wicked environmental problems require creative urban tinkering. Such a framework could open up for more dynamic research approaches with a greater potential to bridge the gap between design and ecology that has tended to be dominated by relati...
Biomimetics
Redesigning and retrofitting cities so they become complex systems that create ecological and cultural–societal health through the provision of ecosystem services is of critical importance. Although a handful of methodologies and frameworks for considering how to design urban environments so that they provide ecosystem services have been proposed, their use is not widespread. A key barrier to their development has been identified as a lack of ecological knowledge about relationships between ecosystem services, which is then translated into the field of spatial design. In response, this paper examines recently published data concerning synergetic and conflicting relationships between ecosystem services from the field of ecology and then synthesises, translates, and illustrates this information for an architectural and urban design context. The intention of the diagrams created in this research is to enable designers and policy makers to make better decisions about how to effectively ...
While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of this book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed as an imaginative and practical method for addressing existing as well as new cities. Ecological Urbanism considers the city with multiple instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary focus. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment. The book brings together practitioners, theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policymakers, scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of providing a multilayered, diverse, and nuanced understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future. The promise is nothing short of a new ethics and aesthetics of the urban. This book is also part of an ongoing series of research projects at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design that explore alternative and radical approaches between ecology and architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urbanism.
Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning
Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning A new compilation of essays and work from a number of leading landscape architects, architects, and planners is slated for publication in June 2016. Nina-Marie Lister contributes a chapter on resilience. Nature and Cities will be published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in association with the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, and George F. Thompson Publishing.
Intersecting disciplinary frameworks: the architecture and ecology of the city
Introduction: While many studies have explored the link between ecology and urban design, this paper examines two major conceptions that can promote deeper connections between architecture and ecological science. Outcomes: Rather than providing a comprehensive review, the paper explores in detail two frameworks that have not yet been exploited as foundations for a bridge between these fields. One is the seminal work of Aldo Rossi on the architecture of the city, as opposed to a more traditional architectural focus on specific buildings, lots, or specific clients. The complementary framework for ecological science is the ecology of the city, developed to support and explain a new era of more integrated social-ecological study of urban systems than had existed previously. Discussion: This paper draws heretofore unexamined parallels between architecture as represented by the work of Rossi and the ecology of the city as represented by the Baltimore School of Urban Ecology. The ecology of the city has become a widely used framing in the science of urban ecology, while the architecture of the city continues to influence a deeper understanding of the built environment as a whole. The parallels provided by the architecture of the city and the ecology of the city help to understand the historical interrelations between nature and culture. Conclusion: Intersecting the two conceptual frameworks of the architecture and ecology of the city can help satisfy the call for an actionable ecology for the city. This call demands both disciplines integrate their conceptual frameworks with communities in the collective enterprise of creating urban ecosystem health, justice, and sustainability.
Ecological Urbanism, revised edition (2016)
2016
While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of this book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed as an imaginative and practical method for addressing existing as well as new cities. Ecological Urbanism, now in an updated second edition, considers the city with multiple instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary focus. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment. The book brings together practitioners, theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policymakers, scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of providing a multilayered, diverse, and nuanced understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future. The promise is nothing short of a new ethics and aesthetics of the urban. This book is also part of an ongoing series of research projects at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design that explore alternative and radical approaches between ecology and architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urbanism.
Publication Reviews: New Urban News; Ecological Design
Reviews of: NEW URBAN NEWS newsletter: Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic for the New York Times and frequent critic of the New Urbanism has written, "The Congress for the New Urbanism is the most important phenomenon to emerge in American architecture in the post-Cold War era." As evidence of the New Urbanism's coming of age, it now has its own newsletter, New Urban News. The newsletter represents an all-purpose information source on the topic, primarily aimed at practitioners: developers, planners, architects, elected officials, and others involved in urban planning and real estate development.; ECOLOGICAL DESIGN: Embracing slime molds as teachers and role models may give humankind a chance, according to Ecological Design. In this work, architect Sim Van der Ryn and complex systems specialist Stuart Cowan look to ecological models for ways our prodigal species can more successfully interact with a planet showing the strains of supporting our current ways of life. ...