Ecologically informed urban and regional planning
Everything that is white in the winter should be green in the summer. Everything that gets rained on, everything under the sun, belongs to the vegetable kingdom. Forests will grow in the valleys and on the roofs. In the city we should be able to breathe the pure air of the countryside.
Friedrich Hundertwasser (in Senosiain, 2003: 157)
The global design, architecture and engineering firm HOK partnered with Biomimicry 3.8 to create a new process for innovation called ‘Fully Integrated Thinking’ which is now used in their projects around the world. The FIT framework enables design teams to tap into the wisdom behind the natural, social and ecological systems of a place to inform design and decision-making. It offers answers to today’s design challenges by emulating nature’s genius (HOK, 2015a).
Every FIT project aims to integrate multiple lenses (water, atmosphere, materials, energy, food, community, culture, health, education, governance, transport, shelter, commerce, ecostructure and value) to create a whole-systems design that works with and as the ecology of a given place. All FIT projects are rooted in place through an in-depth understanding of local ecologies. They are informed by ‘Life’s Principles’ and the kind of questions we reviewed earlier. The framework helps to set goals, benchmarks and performance indicators that ensure all FIT projects are fully accountable with regard to their ecological, social and economic impacts (HOK, 2015a).
The collaboration between Biomimicry 3.8 and HOK also led to an exploration of what we might learn from nature’s genius as expressed within the temperate broadleaf forest biome. This biome stretches around the planet and is home to the vast majority of the human population.
Dayna Baumeister, Taryn Mead and the team from Biomimicry 3.8 helped HOK to ask the important question: How can we create cities that function like ecosystems? The project explored how to design cities based on ‘ecological performance standards’ by benchmarking the urban design project against the original ecosystem of the given locale and establishing the metrics of how the natural environment should perform: “How many millimetres of soil, how many tons of carbon, how much water stored, how much air purified?” Janine Benyus argues: “It is not enough to have green roofs and walls, we will need to ask how a building will store carbon. We need cities to perform like ecosystems, not just look like them” (Oppenheimer, 2010).
The two pilot sites the project focused on were a new residential district around Meixi Lake in the city of Lang Fang in China, and a greenfield city development in Lavasa, a new hill town spread across 12,500 acres southeast of Mumbai (HOK, 2015c). These projects are still in development. †
Apart from these biomimicry inspired approaches, there are many other ecological design-based approaches to sustainable communities and urban planning. The global ‘Eco-City Movement’ and the work of eco-city pioneer Richard Register, who founded ‘Ecocity Builders’ in 1992, have helped to develop the ‘International Ecocity Framework and Standards (IEFS)’. Ecocity Builders are now collaborating with UNISDR (The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’) to support the ‘Making Cities Resilient’ campaign which has already 1840 cities signed up (UNISDR, 2015.). Ecocity Builders supported UN- Habitat’s ‘City Resilience Profiling Programme’ and also created the ‘Ecocitizen World Map Project’ which crowdsources and communicates tools, data and replicable methodologies from around the world to support urban sustainability.
These visions and tools for urban planning, many of them biologically or ecologically inspired, are supporting the growing networks of cities worldwide, like the ‘World Urban Campaign’ and the ‘C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group’, in the important task of redesigning our urban environment in ways that support the shift towards regenerative cultures.
The best human innovations mimic and learn from natural systems. Cities need to reflect this approach to innovation in their planning, design, production, consumption, and governance.
Peter Newman and Isabella Jennings (2008: 238)
Town planning pioneer, Sir Patrick Geddes, stressed in Cities in Evolution (1915) that effective urban planning must be based on a detailed survey of, and integration with, the surrounding region. He also demonstrated with his work on slum redevelopment that participatory processes and an educated and active citizenry were needed.
Almost 100 years later, Herbert Girardet wrote in Regenerative Cities: “Planners seeking to design resilient urban systems should start by studying the ecology of natural systems. On a predominantly urban planet, cities will need to adopt circular metabolic systems to assure their own long-term viability as well as that of the rural environments on which they depend.” He suggests: “Policy makers, the commercial sector and the general public need to jointly develop a much clearer understanding of how cities can develop a restorative relationship to the natural environment on which they ultimately depend” (Girardet, 2010). Figure 21 shows how we can create regenerative cities by reducing their ecological footprint and redesigning the material and energy flows they depend upon primarily at the scale of their region.
His recent book Creating Regenerative Cities describes the evolution of cities from ‘agropolis’ to today’s ‘petropolis’. To create ‘ecopolis, the regenerative city’ we need to learn from ecosystems to help us reduce the ecological footprint of cities by optimizing the urban metabolism by designing for circular resource and energy flows and reliance on renewable energy and resources (Girardet, 2015).
The Smart City approach of optimizing the use of resources and the functioning of cities through widespread use of sensors and networks that give real-time (big-data) feedback on how the city is performing will certainly be part of the transition towards more sustainable cities, but we should be careful not to design in dependence on these high-tech systems. We need to design for resilience through including analogue alternatives and redundancy should these intelligent digital systems fail or be corrupted. A recent study by ARUP for the UK government estimated that the global market for smart city technologies will reach $408 billion by 2020 (ARUP, 2013).
Urban agriculture (Phillips, 2013) and vertical farming (Marks, 2014) will be equally important elements in tomorrow’s regenerative cities as effective transport systems, urban industrial ecologies, ecological water treatment systems, building integrated renewable energy systems, and combined heat, power and cooling systems that are connected at the scale of city blocks or urban districts. Systems integration, win-win-win solutions and decentralized systems that meet local demand through local supplies, are all aspects of such urban and regional biomimicry at the ecosystems level. The movement of ‘bioregionalism’ (Brunckhorst, 2002) which started in the 1970s is worth revisiting in this context. The founders of the Bioregional Development Group suggest:
[…] the prices of many of the products and services we buy do not take into account the damage they cause to the environment, to people and communities. If we were to take these external costs into account, we would see the balance shifting towards smaller scale, more diverse local and regional development, or bioregional development. We can then reap the benefits of bioregional advantage. It will not take much to tip the balance and make bioregional development a much bigger part of the mainstream economy.
Pooran Desai and Sue Riddlestone (2002: 82)
[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from my book Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]
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Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.
Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures
