Resilient Places and Designing with Nature
Today more than 50% of the world’s population live in cities and urban areas, making them one of the four critical global systems that can accelerate climate action. At the same time, the stakes are high for ensuring that our cities can adapt to global warming for the wellbeing of citizens. The C40 group — a network of over 100 city mayors from around the globe who are collaborating to deliver climate action — have estimated that if current carbon emission trends continue, over 1000 cities will face regular extreme heatwaves that endanger lives. With so many of the world’s cities also based in coastal areas, up to 800 million city dwellers could also be at risk of flooding due to rising ocean levels.
The impacts from global warming are already being felt in cities across the world. We have witnessed forest fires encroaching on urban areas on the west coast of the United States, flooding in the UK, and extreme heat in cities from Dhaka to Bangkok. The impacts both present and future of global warming on cities are also far from evenly distributed between the Global North and South, and even across communities that co-habit the same city. For designers today, climate resilience is not only about future-proofing our places but addressing the urgent issues we face in the here and now. It is as much an issue of social justice, as it is a complex technical and environmental challenge.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines climate vulnerability as “the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes.” Climate resilience then, at its simplest, is the ability to which a system (or in this case a city or urban area) is able to adapt and cope with the adverse effects of global warming, and to help reduce further harmful change. It requires fundamental re-designs of the city, from energy and water supplies to surfaces, building materials and community engagement with nature.
Historically the city has been wrongly framed in opposition to nature and the landscapes of the countryside. But urban areas are equally entangled with wider eco-systems, rural areas, non-human life-forms and natural resources that are essential for their functioning. What happens when we design cities with nature, rather than in opposition to it? How might this approach to working with nature help us to create more climate resilient places?
On November 18th, Design Council convened its second community of practice event with the Design Council Expert Network. The purpose of these sessions is to collectively explore current issues in designing for planet, and to develop insight into how design can most effectively work to achieve net-zero by 2050. This summary shares or collective insight into how designing with nature can help to create more resilient cities and places.
Four perspectives on using nature-based solutions to design climate resilient places
Four experts from architecture, urban and landscape design shared their perspectives on how designing with nature can help to create more climate resilient places.
Professor Jenny Roe: Draw on the vast evidence base for the benefits nature has on human resilience
One of the key challenges designers face is creating the right brief or conditions to allow them to develop nature-based solutions. One part of this challenge is building the evidence base to make the argument for a nature-based approach.
For Professor Jenny Roe, there is a large and growing evidence base for the value that nature in urban spaces has, not least on people’s health and well-being. In recent years, there has also been a shift in public health policy towards the pursuit of ‘health resilience’: a person’s ability to be able to adapt and self-manage in the face of difficult social, physical and emotional challenges. For Professor Roe, designing with nature is central to creating cities that foster health resilience amongst its citizens, a capability that will be even more vital in a warmer planet. And having the scientific evidence to hand can help to get buy-in from developers and public and private-sector design commissioners.
By sifting through thousands of articles on the health benefits of engaging with green and blue environments, Professor Roe and her co-researcher Layla McKay developed a new ‘restorative cities framework’ for creating health resilient cities. Designing with nature is a key ingredient to a ‘healthy city’, with nature possessing four psychological attributes that can help provide people with their own health-resilience. As designers, how might we use nature to help create these four conditions within urban areas:
- Fascination: Plants, animals and patterns in nature can inspire wonder and fascination in people.
- Compatibility: Nature can help to create urban environments that meet our needs and goals, enabling us to feel ‘at home’. This can range from the shade and improved air quality provided by street-tree planting, to the benefits being near water can have on mental well-being.
- Extent: Natural landscapes, parks and smaller interventions such as green-walls can transport people and give them a sense of a whole other world beyond the human.
- Being Away: The use of nature pockets in cities can create spaces of calm that give people a sense of distance from everyday stresses.
As Roe notes, many of these qualities will be familiar to urban and landscape designers, but the key point is that these can be implemented at multiple scales within urban spaces. At the micro-scale of a neighbourhood, we can create green-walls, micro-planters, or ponds. Whilst at a city-scale we can create new parks, rain gardens and walkways such as the New York High-Line. Of course, this is not to suggest that there is a simple ‘ingredients list’ of interventions we can use to create health resilient places. People’s responses to particular interventions are significantly shaped by their cultures, norms, identities and experiences. And so for Roe it’s crucial to involve communities in the planning and design of new nature-based interventions.
Even though many will have an intuitive grasp of the value nature has to our health, wellbeing and resilience, having the evidence to hand is important to making the case to clients, public-sector bodies and developers. Keeping on top of recent reports such Public Health England’s Improving Access to Greenspace review is one way designers can be prepared to advocate for better green and blue infrastructure in urban areas.
Sheena Raeburn: Find the right partners to bring in ecological expertise within a project
Using nature to design climate resilient places requires multiple forms of knowledge and expertise: an understanding of local ecologies, plants and animals that will be resilient to changing climates; understanding of local histories and communities; engineering and understanding of materials; and much more. Forth Valley Hospital and Larbert Woods in Scotland is an award-winning project developed by landscape architect Sheena Raeburn and her colleagues at Raeburn Farquhar Bowen and an example of how building new cross-disciplinary collaborations can help empower designers to work with nature, and create places that will be resilient in the long-term. Commissioned by the NHS, the project sought to restore and foster a resilient natural landscape on a 70-hectare site surrounding a new hospital, including a loch and native woodland.
The hospital and its grounds were developed on the historic landscape of Larbert House which in the 1990s had fallen into neglect due to lack of maintenance and vandalism. As a result, the landscape surrounding the new building wasn’t seen as an asset but as an inaccessible liability that had no value for the local community. In response, Raeburn’s team sought to re-frame the green landscape as an integral part of the new hospital. Centring nature as a key beneficiary, they removed invasive species; re-planted native woodlands, introduced sustainable urban drainage features, and created green courtyards within the hospital grounds.
For Raeburn, the design and development of Forth Valley Hospital relied on strong leadership from the local council to embrace a long-term mindset. In a crucial move for setting-up the legacy of the project, Falkirk Council also required that the developers included a mechanism for long-term maintenance of the estate to be awarded planning permission. This not only led to the production of new design guidelines for the site, but a novel partnership between the NHS and Forest and Land Scotland, who partnered to act as conversation partners to the grounds. The result has been a more resilient landscape which has had multiple benefits for the community: it is now used by hospital patients for cardiac rehabilitation activities, and by the wider community for outdoor learning and exercise. It’s an example of how strong client leadership can create the conditions for climate resilient places.
Designing climate resilient places will not only require us to design for, and on behalf of, nature and local eco-systems. It will also require us to change the deep code of planning, partnerships, regulation and policy. The Forth Valley Hospital project demonstrates the opportunities to create new public-sector partnerships across health and environment, in addition to embedding long-term thinking into our planning regulation and approvals processes.
Kevin Barton: Advocate for nature-based solutions with commissioners and developers
As in the Forth Valley Hospital project, nature-based solutions are becoming better embraced in urban planning and policymaking. But what are ‘nature-based solutions’? The European Commission defines nature-based solutions as: “Solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, which are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits and help build resilience. Such solutions bring more, and more diverse, nature and natural features and processes into cities, landscapes and seascapes, through locally adapted, resource-efficient and systemic interventions.”
Kevin Barton of Robert Bray Associates is an expert of one kind of nature-based solution: SuDS, or sustainable drainage systems. For Barton, these offer a crucial strategy for creating climate resilient urban areas. At their most basic, SuDS systems use plants and soil to capture and retain water as a way of reducing flooding in urban areas, although they are about far more than water management. Many cities today are at risk not only of flooding and drought, but of water insecurity, extreme heat, poor air quality and lack of biodiversity. Using SuDS can help us to address these multiple challenges whilst offering a cost-effective solution to water-management.
The Bridget Joyce Square Community Rainpark is an award-winning SuDS project based in White City in London. Sitting between a school and two playgrounds, the park captures rainwater within the soil, simultaneously providing hydration to the plants and cooling the surrounding area. Hard surfaces have also been designed to be permeable, allowing accessibility around the schools and pathways. It is one of many SuDS examples of how we can bring nature into our cities for the benefit of people and planet.
SuDS also have a key role to play in tackling pollution and supporting transport infrastructure. Much of Barton’s work involves creating SuDS barriers between roads and pavements. These micro-gardens not only use plants to deal with polluted surface run-off from roads (which can then get into waterways and kill fish and amphibians), but re-introduce biodiversity. The key challenge however is choosing a diversity of resilient vegetation that can adapt to new temperatures and environments.
There are a wealth of manuals and guides for implementing SuDS, some of which are included at the end of this article. However, their adoption still faces significant challenges. Too often landscape architects are brought into a project too late to affect decisions on land-use within a site, which is crucial to getting SuDS involved. They are also often seen as an overly expensive solution, due to the care required of vegetation, and not seen to have the rigour of more traditional engineering-led methods. Designers have a role to play in helping to change the culture and perception of these kinds of nature-based solutions.
Phil Askew: Design with a long-term mindset by involving communities as stewards of places
Designing with nature is as much about maintenance and care of living-systems for the long-term, as it is about new interventions. How is stewardship fostered and supported through design? Built in the late 1960s, Thamesmead is a modernist estate situated on the river Thames and home to over 45,000 residents. Whilst initially designed in the midst of the car era, in recent years the estate has shifted focus to the importance of nature and sustainable living. For Phil Askew, Director Place-making and Landscape at Peabody Trust, the living landscape is central to the stewardship Peabody provide to the estate.
Principles of long-term stewardship have been embedded into Peabody’s strategy for Thamesmead and has been premised on the idea that living in nature is a fundamental part of human experience, health and wellbeing. This long-term mindset has not only been brought-in through using longer time-horizons within their management strategy (plans are for 30-year time-frames) and by having dedicated resource for management and stewardship of the site, but also through active engagement with local communities. For Phil Askew, empowering people to become stewards of their own places is a key part of the design process.
Peabody have developed this in Thamesmead through a multi-angle approach. In recent projects, they have begun to employ residents as members of their design team, to equitably involve the lived experience, knowledge and wisdom that comes with inhabiting a place. They have also created opportunities for people to engage with the landscape productively through allotments, community orchards and outdoor learning. In addition, allocating resource to hire resident gardeners and outdoor activation learning, helps to provide learning and engagement activities to encourage people to get involved in the landscapes that surround them.
Whilst one of the key challenges many designers working on new developments is short-term business models and mind-sets, Peabody are able to take a long-term view. However, the evidence of the benefits of that approach is clear. Through natural capital accounting, Peabody found that the natural landscape of Thamesmead already brings £10.4 million in benefits to people’s health and well-being, and by 2050 they aim to increase this by 500%. Whilst some of their interventions work on a large scale, these can also be operated at a micro-level of a street or neighbourhood: from creating green courtyards and using SuDS, to establishing volunteer gardening networks and hiring local residents onto design teams.
- A walk with local residents to talk about Thamesmead Green Infrastructure and our strategic document Living in the Landscape
How do designers need to work to create climate resilient places through designing with nature?
The following recommendations on how designers can work to create more climate resilient places emerged from collective discussion with over 50 Design Council Experts as a part of the session.
1) Offer new visions of nature and of living with the planet.
Nature-based solutions, such as SuDS, is often seen as more costly and difficult to maintain than their artificial counterparts. However, beyond cost considerations, ideologies around what people think green space should look like in urban areas can often conflict with climate and biological resilience. Designers can work with communities to imagine new relationships and ways of living with nature, from embracing low-energy living to re-acclimatising people to being outdoors.
- Challenge the brief by starting with a radical vision and pushing hard for regenerative solutions to bring it to the agenda, for instance by using resources such as this film from Design Council.
- Draw on case-studies of best practice to help evidence the benefits of nature-based solutions, and additional resources.
- Use proto-typing, speculative design and other media to create embodied and audio-visual narratives and experiences to secure buy-in for other ways of living with nature.
2) Become familiar with existing evidence and frameworks to capture the benefits of nature-based solutions.
Having the evidence to hand of the benefits of nature-based solutions helps to secure buy-in with clients and funders, and to challenge the brief. Alongside evidence bases such as those captured in Restorative Cities, draw on open-source frameworks, design guides and principles to ensure best practice such as the Building for Healthy Life, Arup’s City Resilience Framework and Natural England’s Green Infrastructure Framework.
3) Embed long-term thinking and stewardship from the outset of a project.
Designing with nature involves long-term relationships with the environments and eco-systems being created, and can often take a long time to realise its full benefits. Whilst often at odds with short-term business and funding cycles, embedding principles of maintenance, stewardship, and care at the start of the project can help secure the long-term legacy of a project. Examples such as Thamesmead and London National Park City demonstrate the importance of involving local residents as stewards of the places being designed, whilst others such has the Forth Valley Hospital demonstrate the importance of building long-term care into the initial brief.
- Dedicate resource to support and empower residents in a place to become stewards of a project, as in Thamesmead or projects like Participatory City.
- Use design methods with key stakeholders that can open up engagement with longer time horizons beyond short-term business cycles, such as the Long Time Tools or the Three Horizons Framework.
4) Assemble a multi-disciplinary team with relevant local and ecological knowledge.
Designing with nature requires a deep understanding of local ecologies, communities, and histories to ensure that projects will survive and flourish in the long-term. As was the case in Thamesmead, embracing local wisdom through involving local organisations and communities working for instance in conservation, nature, citizen-science, and birdwatching is as important as involving ecology experts.
- Recognise and draw on multiple forms of knowledge, experience and practice to develop a more holistic understanding around a project.
- Hire local residents or members of the community with place-based knowledge to act as members of the design team.
- Bring in landscape architects and ecologists when choosing the site and developing the brief to ensure the right site and intervention.
5) Nurture your own connection to nature and develop knowledge and skills in nature-based design.
In his work on Designing Regenerative Cultures, the regenerative designer Daniel Christian Wahl notes the importance of first understanding why designing with and for nature is important to you in your work. Without a deeper connection, it is easy to lose sight of the wider entangled value a project has on people, the planet and future generations. Some design curators, such as John Thackara, are exploring how we can foster transformative experiences of nature, which can also be used with project collaborators. Alongside this, many professionally accredited design disciplines offer CPD in sustainable and regenerative design practices.
Designing with nature can play a key role in helping us to create climate resilient cities; create connections between communities; and in re-introducing biodiversity into our urban areas. However, creating the conditions for nature-based solutions to flourish in urban areas will also require us to re-design the deep-code of planning, regulation, policy, and cultural perceptions of nature. Whilst these are significant barriers, we shouldn’t forget the role that nature-based interventions can play in helping to make this possible. As projects like Frith Valley Hospital show, they can be opportunities to re-imagine the frameworks and regulation that surround our cities. But more immediately, they are interventions that can allow us to create new relations between people and place, and to re-imagine what a regenerative and resilient city might be.
Further reading and resources on designing climate resilient places
Arup, City Resilience Toolkit, 2018. Developed as a part of the City Resilience Index, this toolkit includes approaches for cities to explore and evaluate their own resilience.
Centric Lab, Nature as Healthcare, 2021. A recent report highlighting the major role that Nature plays in supporting our health within urban environments, and the need to shift our relationship to the natural world to recognise our interdependencies.
Defra, Cost Estimation for SuDS, 2015. Developed by Defra, this report aims to capture the costs of developing and maintaining SuDS based projects and provides evidence to support decision-making around implementing nature-based solutions.
Donut Economics Action Lab, Toolkit, 2021. Founded by economist Kate Raworth, Donut Economics Action Lab publishes a range of online templates, videos and learning materials for involving communities in environmental economic thinking.
Design Council, Design for Planet Festival: Resilient Places, 2021. A panel discussion with Sowmya Parthasarathy, Kees Dorst, Anthony Dewar and Simon Jones.
Future Ecologies, Nature by Design Podcast, 2020. A series of discussions exploring ecological restoration and design.
Homes England, Building for a Healthy Life, 2020. A practical guide structured around 12 key considerations for developing healthy and resilient places, developed by Homes England.
Julia Watson, Design by Radical Indigenism, 2020. Produced by The Long Now Foundation, in this video architect and theorist Julia Watson demonstrates the importance that indigenous wisdom and lo-tek solutions can play in addressing global warming and bio-diversity collapse.
National Park City, London, 2019. An example of a city-wide strategy that aims to involve communities in their natural environment, embedding values of care and stewardship through creative programming.
Natural England, Green Infrastructure Framework and Map, 2021. Recently launched in BETA, Natural England’s new Green Infrastructure Framework provides principles for commissioners and designers to develop better green infrastructure. It includes a rich open-source map of green and blue infrastructure across the UK.
The Long Time Project, Long Time Tools, 2020. Developed by Bea Karole Burks and Ella Sartmarshe, the Long Time tools are hands-on activities and guides aimed at policy-makers and commissioners to encourage long-term thinking in decision-making.
UN Environmental Programme, A Practical Guide to Climate-Resilient Buildings and Communities, 2021. A practical guide on creating climate resilient buildings and communities for government officers and those leading building projects.
Further reading and resources on sustainable urban drainage systems from Kevin Barton
Greater London Authority, Sector SuDS Guides
With thanks to our speakers and respondents and Peter Massini, Richard Cass, Phil Askew, Sheena Raeburn, Kevin Barton and Professor Jennifer Roe.
