Urban Ecological Design: A Process for Regenerative Places

Georgia

Introduction

Urban design is far from a clear area of activity.... Despite its frequent appearance in educational and professional literature, urban design is still an ambiguous term.

—Ali Madanipour

The term urban design was coined in the mid-1950s (Lang 2005) almost coincidentally with its first appearance in academic curricula in the United States. In spite of its long history and the recent increased attention to the field of urban design, the term still lacks clarity. We consider some current definitions and then clearly define our use of the term in this book, which is primarily intended for students, design and planning practitioners, developers, and public officials.

Francis Tibbalds, former president of the Royal Town Planning Institute, collected many perspectives on urban design. Some are undoubtedly questionable and vague, such as lots of architecture, space between buildings, a thoughtful municipal policy, everything that you can see out of the window, and the coming together of business, government, planning, and architectural design. Other definitions are more detailed and plausible. Urban design is the interface between architecture, town planning, and related professions, the three dimensional design of places for people ... and their subsequent care and management, the creative activity by which the form and character of the urban environment at the local scale may be devised, and the physical design of public realm (Tibbalds 1988, quoted in Madanipour 1996, 93).

Prominent protagonists of urban design practice and theory have proposed additional interpretations. The insightful American scholar Kevin Lynch described urban design as dealing with the form of possible urban environments (Lynch and Hack 1984). In Good City Form, Lynch (1984, 290) offered a broader definition of urban design as the art of creating possibilities for the use, management, and form of settlements or their significant parts. Clarence Stein, an American architect and planner who with Lewis Mumford and others in 1923 cofounded the Regional Planning Association of America, described urban design (which Mumford called city design) as the art of relating STRUCTURES to one another and to their NATURAL SETTING to serve contemporary living (as quoted in Strong 1990, 141). Matthew Carmona and Steve Tiesdell define urban design "as the process of making better places for people than would otherwise be produced" (emphasis in original). They also added that urban design is the process by which the urban environment comes about (2007, 1).

British architectural theorist Jeremy Till has argued that time, and not space, should be seen as the primary context in which architecture is conceived (2009, 95). If not primary, then the consideration of time should be put on at least equal footing with space production in urban design.

Ali Madanipour, an urban design theorist and scholar at the University of Newcastle in England, proposes a synthesis that, with greater emphasis on ecological issues, may be the most appropriate for this book. He writes: Urban design ... can be defined as the multidisciplinary activity of shaping and managing urban environments, interested in both the process of this shaping and the space it helps shape. Combining technical, social and expressive concerns, urban designers use both visual and verbal means of communication, and engage in all scales of the urban socio-spatial continuum. Urban design is part of the process of the production of space (1996, 117).

In this book, we advocate for including urban ecology as a basic component of urban design. Urban ecology is more than understanding nature in cities. It also involves the integration of humans and nonhumans in functional and just ecosystems. Understanding urban ecology can help address the twin challenge of climate change and energy use. Buildings contribute approximately 40 percent of the greenhouse gases produced in the United States and consume around 40 percent of the energy (up to around half when building construction is considered). Transportation systems add another 27 percent of the greenhouse gas production and energy consumption in the United States. Urban design can help to shape urban form in a way that requires less travel and the consumption of fewer resources. Natural elements can be added to help mitigate climate change and energy consumption. For instance, trees can both store carbon and shade buildings. Urban ecological research also increases our understanding of animal life in urban areas. Fragmentation of their habitat is a threat to many species. Urban designers can address this problem by providing connections between green spaces in cities. Some urban ecologists also address vulnerable people in vulnerable places.

Many parallels exist between urban design and urban ecology. Both involve making connections and revealing relationships. Both are fields of studies searching for an integrated approach between different disciplines. Urban ecology requires an integrated framework to assess the environmental implications of alternative urban development patterns and to develop policies to manage urban areas in the face of change (Alberti 2008, xi). Urban design is an integrated discipline traditionally allied with architecture and city planning (Lang 1994). Ecology involves the reciprocal relationships between all organisms with other organisms as well as with their environments. Marina Alberti (2008, xiv) argues that cities are hybrid phenomena—driven simultaneously by human and biophysical processes. These phenomena cannot be fully understood just by studying their component parts separately; thus urban ecology is the study of the ways that human and ecological systems evolve together in urbanizing regions (Alberti 2008, xiv). Urban ecological studies synthesize the diverse dimensions of urban systems dynamics into a coherent theoretical framework. Within these frameworks, urban planners and designers can find tools and aids for analysis, policies, and designs. At a minimum, the designer may begin with the precautionary principle—that is, first do no harm to the environment or to people. Furthermore, the designer helps to mitigate human impacts on the natural environment. More ambitiously, the designer helps to orchestrate our relationships with other living organisms in the built environment.

The concept of viewing cities as ecosystems has been around for some time. It received a considerable boost when the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) established two urban Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) projects in 1997. Previously, LTERs had been located in remote places with little human settlement, from islands off the coast of Maine to the interiors of Alaska. Ecologists lobbied the NSF for two urban LTERs, which were established in Baltimore (http://www.beslter.org) and Phoenix (http://caplter.asu.edu). These two LTERs have stimulated urban ecological research in other regions, notably in the Puget Sound of the Pacific Northwest (Alberti 2008).

This research is yielding helpful knowledge for urban design. For instance, we now know that black asphalt contributes to the urban heat island in Phoenix (Baker et al. 2002). Black asphalt does not reflect light, and it stores heat. In addition, asphalt covering parking lots and streets contributes to rapid stormwater runoff and water quality degradation. The Phoenix LTER has helped to quantify the urban heat island over the metropolitan region. Researchers have also demonstrated how urban nighttime temperatures remain higher than surrounding natural deserts. Urban design offers many potential solutions, such as using light-colored asphalt, porous paving, and increased plantings.

Many jurisdictions require projects to undergo environmental impact analysis. Urban ecology can help inform such analysis. In addition, it can help designers understand the ecological footprints of their projects (see Chapter 3, Knowledge).

Ian McHarg was one of a long line of theorists and practitioners to ponder the relationships between the city and nature. He wrote: In the history of human development, man has long been puny in the face of the overwhelmingly powerful nature (McHarg 1963, quoted in Steiner 2006, 2). According to McHarg’s protégée Anne Whiston Spirn (2011), an American landscape architecture and urban design scholar, the practice and theory of the ecology of human settlements—which she calls ecological urbanism—has a long history and deep traditions in Western culture. Hippocrates, in the fourth century B.C., described the effects of airs, waters, and places on the health of individuals. Vitruvius (first century B.C.) described, in chapter 5 of the first book of On Architecture, the ideal site of a city according to its orientation toward the sun, the winds, and the climate. Leon Battista Alberti (in his Ten Books on Architecture, published at the end of the fifteenth century) emphasized the disasters suffered by cities that disregarded the power of nature.

This long lineage of thinkers about the interdependence between human settlements and nature crossed the Atlantic from Europe to North America and back during the past several centuries. For instance, George Perkins Marsh, the author of Man and Nature (1864), proposed the role of human beings as co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the damaged fabric (35). Along with Marsh’s influential work, pioneer landscape architects, such as Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Eliot, as well as regional planning theorists, such as Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes and Americans Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye, promoted and advocated the importance of understanding nature and the complex interaction it plays with human beings and their artifacts, whatever they are: buildings, landscapes, cities, or regions (Luccarelli 1995; Palazzo 1997; Ndubisi 2002).

McHarg’s seminal work Design with Nature (1969) deepened the ways to understand the role of nature in the creations of people—that is, buildings, places, and spaces. To recognize the relationship between nature and design, McHarg asserted, it is essential to understand the city as a form, derived in the first instance from geological and biological evolution, existing as a sum of natural processes and adapted by man. It is also necessary to perceive the historical development of the city as a sequence of cultural adaptations reflected in the plan of the city and its constituent buildings both individually and in groups ... this enquiry is described as an investigation into the given form—the natural identity—and the made form—the created city (175). The ecological view, according to McHarg, shows the way for the man who would be the enzyme of the biosphere—its steward, enhancing the creative fit of man-environment, realizing man’s design with nature