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Ecology and Design: Parallel Genealogies
... This chapter will return focus to the origins of ecology and to the ecosystem approach, not only in Odum's work but also in others' development of these concepts. This is important since, in recent years, terms like ecology and ecosystem have become somewhat ambiguous, often referencing definitions more closely associated to historic concepts in the sciences (Benson, 2000;Reed & Lister, 2014;Craige, 2001). Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister, a landscape architect and ecologist, recently wrote that, "Today 'ecology' has been co-opted to refer to almost any set of generalized ideas about environment or process, rendering the term essentially meaningless." ...
... Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister, a landscape architect and ecologist, recently wrote that, "Today 'ecology' has been co-opted to refer to almost any set of generalized ideas about environment or process, rendering the term essentially meaningless." (Reed & Lister, 2014). For design fields like architecture, landscape architecture and engineering, this has had significant impact, affecting overall approach and project outcomes (Reed & Lister, 2014). ...
... (Reed & Lister, 2014). For design fields like architecture, landscape architecture and engineering, this has had significant impact, affecting overall approach and project outcomes (Reed & Lister, 2014). ...
Eugene Odum was an ecological pioneer, writing the discipline’s first textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology, in 1953. Although his work is almost 70 years old, it laid the groundwork for contemporary landscape systems thinking. Since Odum’s time, a lineage of ecological research and theory has helped to define concepts pertaining to ecology, ecosystems, and nature. With these terms in peril of becoming ambiguous, especially in the design arts, this chapter revisits the origins and development of ecologic thinking in order to construct a more critical understanding of nature, and the role of the designer for Building with Nature. One particular experiment by Odum is used as the foundation of concept development. A pond is his reference site and he ‘dissects’ it, using dark and light bottes to illustrate its nuances and the overall ecosystem idea. Three important principles can be derived. First, the ecologist, or the designer, should understand the ‘nature’ of the system, or site, where they are working. Second, nature is formed through functional interactions over extended periods of time. Lastly, through an ecosystem approach, it is shown that systems involve indirect effects. In ecological networks, sites are impacted by forces beyond their immediate boundaries, as well as through other social and cultural systems. Case studies located along the Florida Gulf Coast are used to explain Odum’s and others’ concepts. Florida has developed in parallel with human’s capacity to manipulate their environment. For this reason, it is a useful reference site, illustrating trajectories in ecological thinking.
... New manifestos, declarations of intent, position papers have long insisted on the ti, position papers insistono da tempo sulla urgenza di un "riallineamento" dell'architettura del paesaggio rispetto alle "relazioni di coesistenza tra l'uomo [sic] e il resto della natura" (Balmori, 2010, p. 13); sulla necessità di stringere nuove alleanze con altre discipline, per affrontare la complessità delle sfide ambientali, culturali e sociali in atto, e le loro interrelazioni (LAF, 2016); sull'importanza di assumere punti di vista di altre specie animali e vegetali, andando oltre l'idea di un ambiente progettato solo a misura d'uomo (IFLA, 2023). Si tratta di sfide impegnative che coinvolgono il nostro modo di fare ricerca e di tradurla in azione, attraverso progetti capaci di confrontarsi con l'incertezza e il dinamismo dei sistemi viventi, perseguendo l'adattabilità più che il controllo (Reed, Lister, 2014), entrando nel merito di funzionamenti ambientali messi in crisi dall'urbanizzazione, dai cambiamenti climatici e dagli effetti devastanti di questi cambiamenti (alluvioni, siccità, isole di calore). Per il progetto di paesaggio significa confrontarsi attivamente con altre discipline, tra le quali ecologia, idrogeologia, scienze forestali, scongiurando il rischio di proposte progettuali meramente formali, incapaci di affrontare in modo efficace la perdita di biodiversità, di produrre risultati scientificamente quantificabili e monitorabili a lungo termine. ...
... La complessità di questa sfida richiede oggi più che mai l'impegno a tenere insieme pensiero scientifico, umanistico e artistico, etico, come suggerisce Latour: "We don't know how to represent the place where we have to land after we tried to be modern, so we need urgency of a "realignment" of landscape architecture with respect to the relationships "that enhances the coexistence of humans with the rest of nature" (Balmori, 2010, p. 13); on the need to form new alliances with other disciplines, to address the complexity of the environmental, cultural, and social challenges in progress and their interrelations (LAF, 2016); on the importance of taking on the points of view of other animal and plant species, going beyond the idea of an environment designed exclusively on the human scale (IFLA, 2023). These are challenging issues that question our way of doing research and translating it into action, through projects capable of dealing with the uncertainty and dynamism of living systems, pursuing adaptability rather than control (Reed, Lister, 2014), tackling environmental apparatuses brough in crisis by urbanization, climate change, and the devastating effects that follow (floods, droughts, heat islands). For landscape design, this means actively engaging with other disciplines, including ecology, hydrogeology, forestry sciences, avoiding the risk of merely formal design proposals, incapable of effectively addressing the loss of biodiversity, of producing scientifically quantifiable and long-term monitorable results. ...
In December 2022, the COP15 for Biodiversity approved the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a protocol for the protection of planetary ecosystems that complements the Paris Agreement on Climate Change with the aim of preventing the collapse of the biosphere. A global network of areas with different degrees of naturalness and anthropization, capable of halting the loss of biodiversity and reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is projected to extend over 30% of the Earth by 2030 to be further consolidated by 2050. The agreement raises a multiplicity of issues that landscape design engages: the conservation of species and ecosystems of the biosphere; the environmental requalification of degraded terrestrial and marine areas; the equitable management of ancestral lands and the rights of indigenous populations; the protection of cultural landscapes and the support of local communities; the abandonment of both the unsustainable exploitation of territories and the musealizations and vernacularizations at the service of global tourism; the enhancement of the ecological contributions of degraded, exploited or underutilized areas, on the inhabited margins or in the operational hinterlands of planetary urbanization; the stwewardship of contemporary anthro-ecological systems towards new forms of equilibrium, conventionally defined by the terms of sustainability and resilience. In short, the Kunming-Montreal agreement requires us to imagine new forms and structures for the evolution of urban and rural space and, at once, new areas for the resurgence of nature. In the colossal, collective undertaking envisaged, the trans-disciplinary design of the contemporary landscape seems to have the opportunity to conquer vast fields of operation and a key role that goes beyond both the technical action of environmental engineering and the taxidermy of natural and cultural conservation. The design of the landscape is in fact called upon to implant a new meaning on portions of the planet, tiny fragments hidden in forgotten interstices, vast settlement or productive expanses, logistical corridors or segments of natural systems. This issue of Ri-Vista collects reflections, experiences, and cases, from the local to the geographical scale, in which the landscape design is capable to establish new ecologies and new ecosystemic balances, while transcribing in situ new narratives and new topologies, scenarios of re-signification of places and dynamics between society and nature, and, with that, new meanings of our living on Earth.
... The world's leadership, however, is mainly advised by specialists who study only a part of the system at a time". In contemporary interdisciplinary debate Odum's theories are taken as reference by prominent authors, such as Nina Marie Lister (Lister & Reed, 2014) and Pierre Belanger (2016) 4 , for contextualizing land¬scape design praxis in the framework of systemic thinking through ecological models of spatial organiza¬tion suggested by Odum's open-system theories. In this view mankind activities became the main vector between forces that are involved in building and transforming geography, overcoming and often disrupting the threshold of nature regenerative time, sel¬f-organization capability and autopoiesis. ...
... They operate like evolving ecosystems rather than engi¬neering systems and are characterized by complex behaviours associated with nonlinearity, emergence, uncertainty, and surprise. According to Lister (2014) "Ecological thinking remains a powerful lens for understanding complex adaptive systems." Several solutions proposed in the field of landscape design are an hybridization of these two kind of resilience (Fig. 5). ...
In the still dominant perception of a hierarchical order of nature, humans are disturbing ecosystems factors. We should move away from the one-dimensional dichotomy between natural and human interaction towards a more effective representation without nostalgia. The contact between human and natural habitats is close to the idea of maintaining and conserving a certain state of equilibrium, instead of letting natural habitats evolve into new ecosystems. In other words, energy management and the capacity of a system to self-organize (autopoiesis) defnes the difference between human and natural habitats. Where this capacity is not limited, a natural habitat is present. Contemporary landscapes (tourist coasts, reclaimed land, etc.) demonstrate this thesis by highlighting how human intervention is an indispensable factor in their maintenance. It is necessary to provide precise and sophisticated tools capable of synthesizing agents and forces within territorial transformations starting from a global understanding of natural processes. Ecological dynamics must be transformed into project parameters involved within design process. Here a further degree of integration is suggested above the level of simple natural ecosystems, where human is assumed as a key factor in landscape transformation and geography construction. Considering other paradigms that interfere with the same epistemological area, the contribution questions the theoretical and practical implications of rethinking the interaction between natural and artifcial ecosystems within the framework of landscape resilience. This perspective allows a territorial update by increasing the level of compatibility between the evolution of human habitat and the maintenance of natural regeneration times. This articulation, however, requires a reconsideration of landscape aesthetics beyond the beautiful and the consolatory, as well as a fundamental shift in landscape thinking from representation to action.
... Lystra (2014) noticed that cybernetics, the study of complex system control through feedback, has influenced landscape architecture since the 1960s to pay more attention to landscape changes and design processes. Today, ecological design has moved away from a mechanistic model and towards complex adaptive systems thinking (Lister, 2015;Liu & Zhang, 2018;Reed & Lister, 2014). The pursuit of 'resilience', 'adaptation', and 'plasticity' in today's design and design processes demonstrates a conjunction of landscape architecture and complexity science (Mugerauer & Liao, 2012). ...
... As resilience theory shows that ecosystems have many unpredictable evolution paths and no single optimal equilibrium state, ecologists and designers have suggested that landscape design and management be a continuous learning process through creating and testing alternatives and modifying them based on feedback (e.g. Ahern, 2011;Lister, 2007;Markolf, Chester, Helmrich, & Shannon, 2021;Reed & Lister, 2014). Instead of evaluating alternative scenarios with computer models, practitioners prefer a 'learning-by-doing' manner, which conducts 'designed experiments' with 'safe-to-fail' rather than 'fail-safe' design options through implementation in the real world (Ahern, 2011;Felson, Bradford, & Terway, 2013;Kato & Ahern, 2008;Lister, 2007;Moosavi, 2022). ...
Complexity notions, i.e. ideas or methods that incorporate concepts and rationales from complexity science as analogies or models, frequently appear in landscape architectural discourses. However, debates have arisen about the legitimacy and relevance of complexity notions in landscape architecture. Are complexity notions an ephemeral fashion or derived from the inherent needs of landscape architecture research and practice? What role do complexity notions play in the development of landscape architecture? To answer these questions, we conducted a three-phase review of the complexity notions in landscape architectural theories and practices since early 20th century. We concluded that complexity notions in landscape architecture are a long-standing and increasingly significant subject rather than a passing fad. Complexity notions serve as an exploratory system rather than tyrannical dogma. Addressing the increasing complexity of landscapes and inspired by up-to-date complexity theories, incorporating adaptive learning processes is becoming a new paradigm in landscape research and practice.
... Technology has become a crucial driver in the development of modern buildings. Research affirms the progressive shift to technological use as an increasingly critical method to research, plan and implement environmental design sensibilities over several decades of architectural innovations since the 1960s (Curwell et al 2007, Reed andLister, 2014). Fields of technological knowledge such as service engineering which studies, designs and implements the installation of service systems, adds value to building users or occupants, for instance, in introducing green lifestyle features that lowers carbon footprint and brings convenience, such as smart access systems for residential homes and offices, and close-circuit monitoring to boost security. ...
... Studies on infrastructural, material, geophysical and urban ecology show evidence of beneficial outcomes from urban architecture's trans-disciplinary forms. Hence, technological interaction with ecological knowledge and cultural spaces offers a wide scope of cross-disciplinary research and interesting blending of knowledge through critical approaches to create adaptable, resilient and flexible urban systems (Reed and Lister, 2014). ...
Sustainability principles impact green building infrastructure design, planning and construction decisions. The influence of social perceptions in transforming notions of green architecture and sustainable designs as desirable are also interesting contexts for urban design researchers in addressing environmental impacts. The aim of this paper is to discuss a breadth of available literature on architectural sustainability, and the many effects of urbanisation. Few scholars have attempted to frame qualitative discussions of sustainability perceptions with regards technological interaction with built environments. Research utilises two green building design frameworks to analyse differences between sustainability perceptions of innovation and environmental design aesthetics, namely technological innovation interaction with architecture, and architectural design interaction with nature. Findings from case studies of three examples namely The Port of Portland, The Pompidou Centre Paris, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s First Unitarian Society are deconstructed using qualitative approach to demonstrate that while architectural interaction with nature is viewed as ideal characteristics, green building design innovations with technological interactions play a larger role in influencing social perceptions towards sustainability. Findings suggest that green buildings should encompass a wider range of aesthetic-based designs, from passive ventilation to lighting systems and materials, but in order to sustain positive stakeholders’ perceptions, social benefits and education among green building policymakers, designers and architects is crucial. Recommendations on how to cultivate a balance in pragmatic, cost-conscious approaches, including interactions with technologies, will be discussed in conclusion.
... Depending on thermal and climatic conditions, vernacular architecture in northern regions adopts design strategies to increase heat gains and with materials and methods which reduces indoor heat losses or insulate for warmth (Frampton, 1983). For southern regions with temperate, arid climates, passive cooling tactics promote natural ventilation through plantings of evergreens and deciduous trees, dispersing solar radiation, heat and light equally, and allowing thicker walls to be built to shade against strong sunlight (Mihaly, 2013;Reed and Lister, 2014). ...
... In this regard, eco-landscape architect James Wines (in Preston, 2007: p.18) should be noted. He believes rational principles that address effectiveness of green architecture are important motivators to foster environmental responsibility, but aside from promoting "mechanistic" benefits of thermal glass, photovoltaic cells and green walls, ecological designers should engage stakeholders in seeking more critical input on how to adapt, appropriate as a cost-effective function of green spatial and interior designs (Reed and Lister, 2014). ...
Environmentalism as the overall concept of ecological architecture is defined as the inter-relations between people, and how built forms affect the surroundings through design, reflecting the impact of technology, human principles of living with nature, and of social connections in communities. Modern ecological designs have smart solutions in planning climatic zones, with optimised natural lighting to lower energy use, and reduce wastage. Passive thermal comfort methods and spatial alignment of buildings to sun orientation have brought the ideals of organic architecture full circle since the “sparse and scarce” principles of technological design limitations guided vernacular urbanism over time. Today’s modern buildings, abstracted from mass-produced designs, are shaped to trends and tastes, bringing attention to the artificial materiality of architectural forms and the hidden costs of innovations. To understand the relevance of sustainable strategies in developing critical regionalism, this paper reviews the scope of ecological architecture principles application for temperate climates, and examines the viability of strategies as passive cooling, thermal comfort and greenery-based ventilation. Through case study discussions of two Malaysian eco-architectural designers, Ken Yeang and Kevin Mark Low, it will also be argued that the spirit of nationalism and cultural regionalism can be integrated effectively into urban built forms.
... Forman joined Steinitz at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where landscape architecture and regional planning students could benefit from new GIS technologies to quantify the new scientific meaning of landscape for design (Forman and Godron 1981, 733). Several decades later, working with designers at Harvard, Forman developed an influential book illustrating ecological principles of landscape architecture and land use planning through simple diagrams (Dramstad et al. 1996), from which architects and designers developed the new theories of "infrastructure urbanism," "landscape urbanism" and "ecological urbanism" (Allen 1999;Waldheim 2006;Mostafavi and Doherty 2010;Reed and Lister 2014). ...
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly being adopted to address climate change, health, and urban sustainability, yet ensuring they are effective and inclusive remains a challenge. Addressing these challenges through chapters by leading experts in both global south and north contexts, this forward-looking book advances the science of NBS in cities and discusses the frontiers for next-generation urban NBS.
... Forman joined Steinitz at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where landscape architecture and regional planning students could benefit from new GIS technologies to quantify the new scientific meaning of landscape for design (Forman and Godron 1981, 733). Several decades later, working with designers at Harvard, Forman developed an influential book illustrating ecological principles of landscape architecture and land use planning through simple diagrams (Dramstad et al. 1996), from which architects and designers developed the new theories of "infrastructure urbanism," "landscape urbanism" and "ecological urbanism" (Allen 1999;Waldheim 2006;Mostafavi and Doherty 2010;Reed and Lister 2014). ...
... Landscapes are imagined to evolve with recursive and process-based strategies over time, instead of as a onetime construction. Projects such as the Fresh Kills and Downsview Park competitions in the early 2000s weres examples of this design paradigm (CZERNIAK 2001, REED & LISTER 2014. Since then, many scholars have incorporated a broad range of ideas and concepts from both sciences and humanities to diversify and develop that paradigm. ...
This paper introduces ELUA, the Ecological Laboratory for Urban Agriculture, a collaboration among landscape architects, architects and computer scientists who specialize in artificial intelligence, robotics and computer vision. ELUA has two gantry robots, one indoors and the other outside on the rooftop of a 6-story campus building. Each robot can seed, water, weed, and prune in its garden. To support responsive landscape research, ELUA also includes sensor arrays, an AI-powered camera, and an extensive network infrastructure. This project demonstrates a way to integrate artificial intelligence into an evolving urban ecosystem, and encourages landscape architects to develop an adaptive design framework where design becomes a long-term engagement with the environment.
... Landscapes are imagined to evolve with recursive and process-based strategies over time, instead of as a onetime construction. Projects such as the Fresh Kills and Downsview Park competitions in the early 2000s weres examples of this design paradigm (CZERNIAK 2001, REED & LISTER 2014. Since then, many scholars have incorporated a broad range of ideas and concepts from both sciences and humanities to diversify and develop that paradigm. ...
This paper introduces ELUA, the Ecological Laboratory for Urban Agriculture, a collaboration among landscape architects, architects and computer scientists who specialize in artificial intelligence, robotics and computer vision. ELUA has two gantry robots, one indoors and the other outside on the rooftop of a 6-story campus building. Each robot can seed, water, weed, and prune in its garden. To support responsive landscape research, ELUA also includes sensor arrays, an AI-powered camera, and an extensive network infrastructure. This project demonstrates a way to integrate artificial intelligence into an evolving urban ecosystem, and encourages landscape architects to develop an adaptive design framework where design becomes a long-term engagement with the environment.
... Time becomes an important factor and landscape is considered process rather than result. For example, the entry by James Corner, Stan Allen & Nina Mari Lister adopted an that complexity can be created through ecological processes (REED & LISTER 2014a, 2014b. CHARLES WALDHEIM (2006) used "strategies of indeterminacy" to conceptualize adaptive management framework, and designed a landscape system that can evolve so landscape practices in the 1990s to 2000s. ...
Taking on a historical lens, this paper traces the development of cybernetics and systems thinking back to the 1950s, when a group of interdisciplinary scholars converged to create a new theoretical model based on machines and systems for understanding matters of meaning, information, consciousness, and life. By presenting a genealogy of research in the landscape architecture discipline, the paper argues that landscape architects have been an important part of the development of cybernetics by materializing systems based on cybernetic principles in the environment through ecologically based landscape design. The landscape discipline has developed a design framework that provides transformative insights into understanding machine intelligence. The paper calls for a new paradigm of environmental engagement to understand matters of design and machine intelligence.
... Based on the new paradigm of ecological research that has moved away from the deterministic and reductionist understanding of nature as a static entity and embraced complexity, dynamism, and probability (REED & LISTER 2014a), the landscape discipline has applied ecology as a powerful tool to design for indeterminacy and emergence (WALDHEIM 2006). For example, in the entry for the Downsview Park competition in late 1990s, James Corner, Stan Allen and Nina-Marie Lister proposed a framework of processes and strategies that could allow for emergent ecologies so that the natural systems can evolve over time and become more complex (CZERNIAK 2001, REED & LISTER 2014b. In other words, to learn means to develop new relationships between different things. ...
There have been theory-based endeavours that directly engage with AI and ML in the landscape discipline. By presenting a case that uses machine learning techniques to predict variables in a coastal environment, this paper provides empirical evidence of the forthcoming cybernetic environment, in which designers are conceptualized not as authors but as choreographers, catalyst agents, and conductors among many other intelligent agents. Drawing ideas from posthumanism, this paper argues that, to truly understand the cybernetic environment, we have to take on posthumanist ethics and overcome human exceptionalism.
... Design is envisioned as a series of actions that intentionally induce spatial alterations with the aim of putting in place a clear form of evolution [20,22,68]. ...
Moving horizon was born as a doctoral investigation that moves across research and design dimension. It explores the relationship between landscape design and soil transformation, focusing on the mutual effects and potential disciplinary developments aiming at structurally linking the two fields. Soil is one of the most complex biomaterials on Earth in continuous exchange with the terrestrial systems. The starting assumption is that the soil is a condition of inherent shifting in landscape evolution both in physical and semantic relationship. The value of soil as an element of planning and design lies in handling live and dynamic physical matter. From being ‘background’ for the built environment, the soil transformations become the ‘foreground’ both in landscape design praxis and in theoretical implications, by embedding the soil as a ‘palimpsest’ in reading and writing the landscape. The framework produced by this assessment has been condensed in ten propositions, collected in form of a landscape manifesto. A first application of moving horizon approach has been developed and tested in the Ravenna Climate Change Adaptation Plan (Italy), by identifying a planning procedure capable of integrating territorial adaptation measures to climate change through an approach based on understanding and transforming the soil as a fundamental material of this process.
... "A relatively new science, its modern roots emerged in the early 20th century with the work of Frederic Clements and Henry Gleason, American botanists who studied the interactions between plant communities, and Sir Arthur Tansley, a British botanist and zoologist whose research on the interactions between plant and animal communities and the environment led him to coin the term "ecosystem" in 1935(Reed and Lister, 2014) ...
This paper proposes an approach to teaching and learning that reflects the idea that to undergo systemic change we need to learn from and with living systems. I reflect on two projects that illustrate small steps towards this emergent practice and draw upon theories that may help to frame this ecological approach. Drawing these frameworks and design education projects together helps to understand education for sustainability as embedded in productive learning relationships, involving thinking reflectively on our messages and actions. According to the UNESCO Policy Brief (2018) Education is a crucial element of a sustainable development agenda and needs to be holistic and transformational. These practices of taking education outside of the classroom are illustrated through examples of project-based learning in a Communication Design degree at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin New Zealand in partnership with local environmental groups, and aim to be both holistic and potentially transformative. Examining the projects in this way helps to see the requirement for empathy including and beyond human-centred design, an understanding of the systems in which the student projects sit, and acknowledging te Ao Māori, an indigenous worldview unique to New Zealand.
... Although seeking order in ecosystem design seems improbable because of constant actor-relationship shifts, we argue for SME ecosystems to identify a more nuanced approach in understanding ecosystem configurations. Since human actions and choices partly affect the reconfiguration of ecosystems (Reed and Lister 2014), SME decision-makers are in a good position to shape their innovation ecosystem structures. ...
This article explores open-source visualization tools to enhance the understanding of small- and medium-enterprise (SME) ecosystem structures. Ecosystem approaches are becoming important in business strategy and innovation where organizations are heavily relying on inter-firm resources to innovate. Consequently, the traditional firm-focused business models face challenges, making it difficult for interconnected and diverse actors to co-create across firm boundaries. This challenge is even worse for manufacturing SMEs, who often lack the tools to make sense of their innovation ecosystem structures. We carried out a rich ethnographic investigation in three cases in the United Kingdom: the ceramic artist ecosystem, the 3D printing bureau ecosystem and the FabLab ecosystem. From the initial thematic analysis results, all actors highlighted the difficulty in understanding ecosystem networks. The following ecosystem attributes were identified as essential in understanding SME ecosystem structures: clusters and bridges, tie size, structural holes, role structure and interactivity. In this article, fourteen open-source visualization tools are tested to compare how well different tools reveal the six ecosystem attributes. Our findings demonstrate that open-source visualization tools have different affordances, most of which are useful in revealing ecosystem attributes. Results show that most visualization tools help aid the understanding of SME ecosystem structures. This study contributes new knowledge on the scarce subject of designing and managing ecosystems, presenting a unique approach to explore and understand ecosystem configurations. The study identifies limitations in open-source visualization tools and offers the design management community a set of recommendations for further development of visualization tools to support decision-making.
... In this perspective on urban resilience, transformation is a term that is generally used for modifying the planning process to have more flexibility and adaptability in response to multiple feedback loops. Improving capacity for transformation in institutions (governance), communities, economies, and environments has been discussed in the context of risks and vulnerabilities (Reed & Lister, 2014), and has been reflected in different sectors and plans (Mandeli, 2019;Salomon et al., 2019). Transformation is understood in the urban planning context as the ability to facilitate transitions along various alternative pathways to gain long-term sustainability (Brunetta & Caldarice, 2020;Olazabal, 2017). ...
Green Infrastructure (GI) planning firstly developed as an integrated approach to ecological and conservation planning. Then it has advanced and used in several disciplines such as urban and reginal planning and landscape architecture. This diversity has promoted a range of planning initiatives and widespread its usage while make it difficult to define and operationalize GI planning. However, this is a planning strategy that has the potential to promote urban landscape planning by providing a holistic understanding of the dynamics of socio-ecological systems. GI planning, by producing a variety of ecosystem services, and having proactive multi-function and multi-discipline approach in planning, enhances our ability to deal with climate change in urban scale. Significant advances in GI planning have recently been made in integrating adaptation objectives in plans. However, in incorporating urban GI planning strategy to urban adaptive planning to cope with disasters, many challenges remained linked to integrate these two strategic planning in urban ecological planning with opportunistic response, more than only simple unintegrated defensive strategy. This research tries to take a step in this direction and seeks to investigate what constitutes GI as a strategy, and through this strategy how it can be possible to offer an integrated approach in urban planning practice. Then it investigates what are the key concepts and principles of urban adaptive planning, and how urban adaptive planning can be made operational in urban GI planning practice. In this essay, a transdisciplinary framework for adaptive urban GI planning is proposed to integrate science and professional practice. It includes adaptive strategies from climate change adaptation and ecological planning in a structured form to simultaneously support different type of responses in planning and improve transformability and flexibility in planning and practice.
... Another entry for the Downsview Park Emergent Ecologies [15] from the collaboration between James Corner Field Operations, Stan Allen, and ecologist Nina-Marie Lister can be contrasted with framework, it starts to articulate prototyping outside the meansend equation. ...
This paper maps out a new paradigm of prototyping that acts as an alternative to the model-making paradigm. By juxtaposing the cybernetics movement with landscape design, the authors have mapped out a development in landscape discourse that mirrors the movement of cybernetics in the 20th century and early 21st century. The early deterministic and linear understanding of systems dynamics is replaced by an emergent and open-ended view. Taking on a framework of emergence, the authors highlight a special type of model that does not fit within the conventional modelpredict-
control framework. Rather than models that represent another living system, these models are living systems in themselves with autonomy and lives. This special type of model can be understood as prototypes. Prototyping replaces model-making and exhibits three distinctive qualities: 1) A prototype has a life of its own, which
serves as the basis for design and creativity; 2) The real usefulness of a prototype lies in its undefined identity rather than its defined and direct application; And 3) the identified quality provides a wide range of possibilities, thus changing our relationship with the future from chance and prediction to anticipation and hope.
... Time becomes an important factor and landscape is considered process rather than result. For example, the entry by James Corner, Stan Allen & Nina Mari Lister adopted an that complexity can be created through ecological processes (REED & LISTER 2014a, 2014b. CHARLES WALDHEIM (2006) used "strategies of indeterminacy" to conceptualize adaptive management framework, and designed a landscape system that can evolve so landscape practices in the 1990s to 2000s. ...
Taking on a historical lens, this paper traces the development of cybernetics and systems thinking back to the 1950s, when a group of interdisciplinary scholars converged to create a new theoretical model based on machines and systems for understanding matters of meaning, information, consciousness , and life. By presenting a genealogy of research in the landscape architecture discipline, the paper argues that landscape architects have been an important part of the development of cybernetics by materializing systems based on cybernetic principles in the environment through ecologically based landscape design. Landscape discipline has developed a design framework that provides transformative insights into understanding machine intelligence. The paper calls for a new paradigm of environmental engagement to understand matters of design and machine intelligence.
... Based on the new paradigm of ecological research that has moved away from the deterministic and reductionist understanding of nature as a static entity and embraced complexity, dynamism, and probability (REED & LISTER 2014a), the landscape discipline has applied ecology as a powerful tool to design for indeterminacy and emergence (WALDHEIM 2006). For example, in the entry for the Downsview Park competition in late 1990s, James Corner, Stan Allen and Nina-Marie Lister proposed a framework of processes and strategies that could allow for emergent ecologies so that the natural systems can evolve over time and become more complex (CZERNIAK 2001, REED & LISTER 2014b. In other words, to learn means to develop new relationships between different things. ...
There have been theory-based endeavours that directly engage with AI and ML in the landscape discipline. By presenting a case that uses machine learning techniques to predict variables in a coastal environment, this paper provides empirical evidence of the forthcoming cybernetic environment , in which designers are conceptualized not as authors but as choreographers, catalyst agents, and conductors among many other intelligent agents. Drawing ideas from posthumanism, this paper argues that, to truly understand the cybernetic environment, we have to take on posthumanist ethics and overcome human exceptionalism.
... However, since best-practice-solutions tend to be delimited to technical innovations in the building sector (e.g., devices for energy-, water-and heating-measuring), they are sometimes irrelevant for the urban landscape scale. As Lister has argued [40] the business' understanding of "scaling up" is not applicable to natural forces. With the growing knowledge of urban ecosystems [41] we have thus far only partly understood how natural functions and artifact functions can perform together (without jeopardizing the natural in a long-term sense). ...
This article brings together the concepts of land and landscape, tightly linked in urban transformative situations, but rarely used for the purpose to strengthen strategic planning for sustainability. They are investigated as a combined base for land use deliberations, in early phases of planning processes, in practices of different scale, especially in a European context, drawing on planning and landscape policies generally agreed upon, as well as the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This article argues for taking into consideration the landscape as experienced human habitat, in relation to the understanding of land as both a common resource, and as pieces of property. This is motivated partly by the more or less global political trend and the turn from state interventions to individualistic capitalism (calling for new methods to solve common challenges), but also by a changing planning profession, increased collaborative planning processes, increased significance of public space as a scarce resource in densified cities, the need for holistic perspectives in sustainable urban development and the need for unifying concepts for urban and rural land at a local and regional scale. A new concept “around-scape” is suggested, in order to make visible the subjective binding between available perceived resources and spatial transformation.
... Indeed, the cultivation and fruition of socioecological potentials in the face of complexity and uncertainty is a common thread that unifies the principal subjects of this article. As landscape and urban planners grapple with the problems and opportunities that now beckon, Geddes' (1915) admonition to "survey before plan" is apropos (Meller, 2005, p. 174), as are "sense-and-respond" management approaches (McDaniel, McCully, & Childs, 2007), and adaptive, interdisciplinary planning, design, and research (e.g., Ahern, 2011;Reed & Lister, 2014;Sullivan, Frumkin, Jackson, & Chang, 2014), that draws upon "ecological wisdom" (Young, 2016) and cultivates new relationships between people, place, and cosmos (Corner, 1997). Of equal importance is a willingness to reconsider the status quo; and as Buchanan (2012bBuchanan ( , 2012c notes and Geddes envisioned, connect the placemaking professions with transcendent meaning and purpose. ...
Patrick Geddes is a significant figure in the landscape and urban planning canon. In addition to situating cities within a regional context and advancing a socioecological understanding of urbanization, he viewed cities as the principal artifact of, and theater wherein, human culture evolves. This expansive view of cities may be one of the more challenging aspects of Geddes' legacy to assimilate. Working during a late 19th and early 20th century period when the limitations of modernity were becoming increasingly apparent, much of Geddes' aspirational thinking can be seen as an effort to create what he described as a "larger modernism." In this regard, Geddes can be counted amongst those whom we portray as integrative holistic thinkers, people whose worldview draws them toward meaning-making narratives and frameworks that include the many dimensions of the human condition. Today, a new generation of holistic approaches called "metatheories" - and "integral theory" in particular - provides an orienting lens through which to review, assess, and potentially extend the work of Geddes in the 21st century. Towards that goal, this article first provides an introductory primer to some of Geddes' noteworthy "thinking machines" as well as integral theory. We then assess correspondence between the two, focusing on Interdisciplinary Holism; Evolution, Development and Complex Systems; Human Agency and Ethics; and Spirituality. A closing discussion addresses prospects for future research, and suggests that the holistic, evolutionary, and generative orientation of our principal subjects may have particular relevance in an anthropogenic biosphere characterized, in part, by significant environmental challenges and the concentration of humans in cities.
... Ecological urbanism calls for city planning that is both multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary and proscribes that designers exploit ecological knowledge to produce environmentally sustainable urbanism (Mostafavi & Doherty, 2010;Steiner, 2011). Influenced by new ecological paradigms of dynamic and unpredictable nature and ecosystems theory (Pulliam & Johnson, 2002), ecological urbanists suggest that the modern challenge of landscape planning is ''leading the sciences, humanities, and design culture toward a more rigorous, robust and relevant engagement across the domains of ecology and design" (Reed & Lister, 2014). ...
“Sustainability” has been a prominent goal in environmental and spatial planning over the past three decades. A diverse array of initiatives have been proposed and implemented with the aim of facilitating human economic and social development, while mitigating or even reversing associated environmental damage. These initiatives vary in their definitions of sustainability, their targets for planning and management, their bureaucratic structures, and other characteristics. As such, a universally applicable “how-to” manual for realizing the goals of regional sustainable development remains elusive.
... Ecological urbanism calls for city planning that is both multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary and proscribes that design exploit ecological knowledge to produce environmentally sustainable urbanism (Mostafavi and Doherty, 2010). Influenced by new ecological paradigms of dynamic and unpredictable nature and ecosystems theory (Pulliam and Johnson, 2002), Ecological Urbanists suggest that the modern challenge of landscape planning is "leading the sciences, humanities, and design culture toward a more rigorous, robust and relevant engagement across the domains of ecology and design" (Reed and Lister, 2014). ...
Sustainability " has been a prominent goal in environmental planning over the past 30 years, especially in rural regions. Planning scholars and practitioners have contributed to this trend by proposing, developing and implementing frameworks for spatial development that aim to facilitate human economic and social development, while mitigating or even reversing the environmental damage associated to development. A broad diversity of frameworks has been developed, and they have both unique and overlapping features. This work explores the myriad ways in which planners understand sustainability and how they implement it at various spatial scales. Drawing from the theoretical and professional literature and from case studies around the world, we develop a classification system for spatial sustainability frameworks based on three scales of aggregation: typologies (the most general category), models and individual case studies. We develop five axes that define the prominent differences in characteristics of spatial sustainability framework typologies. These are: 1) the " top-down – bottom-up " axis, defining who initiates and maintains the initiative; 2) the " ecology – socioeconomic " axis, defining the disciplinary approach that determines relative importance of the various priorities; 3) the " subject-specific – holistic " axis, defining the focal object/s of the initiative; 4) the " local – regional " axis, defining the spatial scale of the initiative; and 5) Urban or open space orientation. We suggest that the axes of comparison can assist communities to define and implement their spatial planning goals, while addressing diverse and sometimes competing interests, and conclude by discussing implications for planners. In particular, sustainability planning can be tailored according to the particularities of the socio-ecological system.
Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan regions in the world. Around 18 km away from Dhaka, Purbachal satellite city was planned in 1995 to solve the ever-increasing need for housing. Purbachal is the largest planned township in Bangladesh, with an area of over 25 square kilometers. Historically a low-lying wetland, Purbachal has gone through a rapid transformation in past decades. This study investigates the transformation of wetland areas
in Purbachal New Town using Supervised Classification for Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) Change and Water Flow and Watershed Analysis. The study Investigates whether the new developments in the Purbachal New Town followed a natural topography or was drastically modified from its natural conditions. The result shows wetlands around the new town have been filled in to create new developable land. As a result, the existing water flow patterns drastically
altered, making the satellite city susceptible to flooding. By combining geospatial modeling with impact simulation, the study demonstrated a feedback process that facilitates the development of sustainable design strategies. The study's outcomes will guide the formulation of an alternative city planning process aided by Geodesign tools and the establishment of a systematic urban planning approach for this region guided by the natural land transformation analysis to create cities where people will be able to live in harmony with nature.
In the intense urbanization of fast-growing cities in developing countries, preservation of surface
water has consistently been neglected. Overall, rapid urbanization increases impervious surface and decreases natural land surface, resulting in ecological degradation; bringing surface water back
into a city will improve its ecology. One means of restoring surface water is to reintroduce lost waterbodies or waterway connections. This paper will discuss a hypothesis regarding the process of reviving a lost waterway through landscape design, namely that reviving a lost water channel
through transforming a vehicular road into a waterway can bring nature back within the city. Dhaka City was chosen as the study site for this idea-based proposal. First, a physical survey was conducted and the road to be transformed was categorized into several sections based on land use,
activities, and appearance on both sides of the road. The ArcGIS flow accumulation tool and watershed tool were used to determine a proposed depth for the waterway. The design proposals are particular to each road section. An overall design concept was developed, and several functions
are proposed based on site surveys to support the existing transport system. In addition to restoring nature, the potential outcome of this idea-based experimental proposal may help address the growing demand for water in the urbanized area of the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Este artigo tem por objetivo explorar definições sobre criatividade para, em seguida, destacar a dimensão social do ato criativo individual enquanto experiências do ser-ao-mundo (être-au-monde). O texto se inspira em reflexões interdisciplinares para discutir a profunda relação dos seres humanos com o mundo, a cultura e os outros indivíduos. Conclui com a compreensão de que a criatividade é uma das forças motrizes da natureza e da própria apropriação do mundo pelos seres humanos.
In Italia il "consumo di suolo" è definito come «una variazione da una copertura non artificiale a una copertura artificiale». Circoscrivere il suolo ai soli parametri di permeabilità e uso risulta troppo prescrittiva e debole in termini di visione nel land management e nei processi di pianificazione territoriale. Il rischio di questo approccio prettamente quantitativo e standardizzante è quello di interpretare il territorio in forma parcellizzata e astratta, senza inglobare le specificità contestuali ambientali che sono alla base del mantenimento dei servizi ecosistemici, obiettivo ultimo della limitazione al consumo di suolo inteso come matrice ambientale e risorsa non rinnovabile. In conseguenza alla complessità dei fattori da valutare, la pianificazione dovrebbe aprirsi a un rapido aggiornamento del concetto, assimilando apporti afferenti da discipline come la geologia, l'ingegneria, l'ecologia del paesaggio e tradurli in parametri progettuali che possano combinare gli standard urbanistici con le metriche del paesaggio, garantendo coerenza con gli obiettivi iniziali. Lavorando sull'effettivo stato di salute del suolo, rappresentato da aree che dal punto di vista normativo non vengono considerate tali, si cerca di avviare una riflessione sulla riforma di un concetto che riteniamo fondamentale per le sfide della pianificazione e della progettazione del paesaggio nel prossimo futuro. Parole chiave: paesaggio, land use, design
As ecological design gradually goes beyond environmental protection or resource conservation towards an activity of creating and managing complex systems, researchers and designers have been increasingly looking for design methods from complexity science. Currently, complexity theories have been widely applied in generating complex forms and establishing design process models. Some designers have
further integrated complexity theories with design culture through metaphors. In such context, this article attempts to explore application of ecological design methods under a perspective of complexity science. This article describes a conceptual design for Hulunbuir nomadic landscape, which reveals potential relationships between multiple factors and helps define design strategies with a kind of datascape. The design process draws on complex system design methods featuring a bottom-up process through nested hierarchies
and tries to apply an alternative selecting framework and a feedback-learning system for a more tangible implementation and management.
p>“Atlas breve de la vida, hacia el paisaje-escuela” una raicilla, que dejará emerger los autores guía para la revisión teórico-práctica de la investigación: “El paisaje como experiencia de transformación cultural. Paisaje escuela y campus universitario”. Se basa en: Atlas Mnemosine (Warburg), Rizomas (Delleuze & Guattari), Tiempo (Hawking) y en Nebulosas (Berenstein y Da Silva). Pretende mostrar al hommo sapiens como especie, parte integral e indivisible del paisaje, con aportes culturales (positivos o negativos). Como seres con conciencia podemos afirmar que “Somos paisaje”, y por tanto buscamos explorar y colectar medios para minimizar la degradación del paisaje, que sería nuestra propia degradación.
Ese habitar de Heidegger, en el que estamos incluidos, podría también referirse a las relaciones de afecto con ese espacio construido, habitado, en la “topofilia” de Gastón Bachelard. La topofilia como espacio vivido, imaginado, defendido, amado. Porque ser te hace cuidar, al preservar o regenerar el paisaje se está cuidando el propio ser. El habitar de Heidegger, el proteger de Burle Marx y Stoneman Douglas, el accionar de Beauvior, el vivir de Thoureau, el aprender por la experiencia de Dewey y desde el placer de Epicuro; son experiencias que se asocian en el “Atlas breve de la vida”. En él encontramos paralelismos en descubrimientos, estudios, transversalidades de ideas, en fin, nuestra vida es todo un enmarañado de raíces que se entrecruzan y comunican entre sí, como lo hacen los árboles.</p
The paper aims to highlight the interrelation between ecological studies and urban planning, in particular with regard to the Brussels case, given both its pioneer works and the current revival on urban metabolism. As early as the ‘70s of the last century, in continuity with the organic concept of the XIX century metropolis (the regionalism of Geddes), the ecologist Duvigneaud studied Brussels as an ecosystem. His approach integrated a scientific and socio-natural understanding of urban metabolism. Afterwards, further studies on urban metabolism have flowed into industrial ecology, the study of the material and energy circulation, narrowing the scope of investigation on urban space and nature. More recently, there has been a strong return on the debate of the Brussels urban metabolism. In order to boost the regional economic and social development as well as to meet the urban environmental challenges, new regional programs and plans are asking the urban projects to integrate a strong metabolic perspective. However, it remains to better understand how and to which extent the discipline of urbanism can actually draw from urban metabolism studies, and, in turn, what it can bring to the research field. In answering this question, we look back in particular to the influences and relations between ecological studies and urban design and planning in the recent history of Brussels. On the one hand, the results show that, despite the rising interest in the subject, until now, design and planning practice, in Belgium, seems to have little learnt from urban metabolism studies, showing few significant contributions to the discipline. On the other hand, it clearly emerges that stronger socio-natural perspective is needed in order for urban design and planning to steer the transformation of the city towards a more resilient urban metabolism.
China’s post-economic reform industrialization, mass-migration and accelerated urbanisation has had an impact on cities that is unprecedented in scale and in speed. Either expressed by expansion patterns of industrial-driven peripheries, planned new towns or high-densification of city centres, urbanisation is defined by a profound transformation of urban space and prior socio-spatial orders . Largely impacted is the basic socio-spatial unit of the city - the urban community (xiaoqu or shequ) - often destroyed and relocated, and which have been the homes of people and traditionally the organisers of social relations in China . Communities are centred spaces - as centring is the making of space into a place . China aims to build a new society, based on the neighbourhood unit, that can be more autonomous, responsible, and essentially more stable . In a context where both society and space are on the move - how can planning assist centring space thus creating communities? This paper is a qualitative study that explored the history of a long-established community case in Shanghai’s inner centre – showcasing the present pressures of urban renewal and realities of spatial decay, overcrowdedness and relocation uncertainty. It argues for the importance of socio-spatial permanence, which requires the action of planning collaborating with community managers that is presently fragmented and lacking both diagnosis and communication.
Keywords: urbanisation, urban community, space and place, Shanghai.
The Green Heart is an agricultural area situated in the center of the Randstad, a metropolis in the Western Netherlands. Like the rest of Holland, it is a constructed landscape. The region is facing twin challenges: the need to make room for water as a strategy to deal with climate change, and the fact that the liberalization of the European dairy industry will make it exceedingly difficult for small family farms to compete in the global market. Certain places retain a historical, urban or cultural significance that transcends their physical or ecological properties; in its embodiment of the Dutch pastoral, the Green Heart has become such a landscape. The pastoral myth has very real ramifications for the identity of the Randstad, and must be carefully negotiated in any intervention that attempts to change the image or form of the Green Heart. This thesis investigates how new natures can be constructed within the myth of the pastoral, through a study of this Dutch lowland landscape and a design proposal that encompasses the landscape and the architectural scales. The "Blue Heart" is both a strategic intervention that reinterprets additional water as an economic boon, as well as a building typology that enables farmers to capitalize on this new nature.
Cambridge Core - Ecology and Conservation - Land Mosaics - by Richard T. T. Forman
Certain remarkable similarities can be found between the concerns of ecologists and planners. Like complex urban systems, ecological systems appear to be characterized by four distinctive properties. These include their functioning as interdependent systems, their dependence on a succession of historical events, their spatial linkages, and their non-linear structure. Both systems appear to have considerable internal resilience within a certain domain of stability. However, programs such as insecticide spraying or urban renewal, that disturb the complex balance of either system, can generate unexpected and undesirable results. Use of an ecological framework for planning suggests new principles based more on recognition of our ignorance than presumption of our knowledge about the systems in which we try to intervene.
With a recent media-fueled transition from a scientific to a political perspective, biodiversity has become an issue of ethics and ensuing values, beyond its traditional ecological roots. More fundamentally, the traditional perspective of biodiversity is being challenged by the emergence of a post-normal or systems-based approach to science. A systems-based perspective of living systems rests on the central tenets of complexity and uncertainty, and necessitates flexibility, anticipation and adaptation rather than prediction and control in conservation planning and management. What are the implications of this new perspective? This paper examines these challenges in the context of biodiversity conservation planning. The new perspectives of biodiversity are identified and explored, and the emergence of a new ecological context for biodiversity conservation is discussed. From the analysis, the challenges and implications for conservation planning are considered, and a systems-based or post-normal approach to conservation planning and management is proposed. In light of the new perspectives for biodiversity, conservation planning and management approaches should ultimately reflect the essence of living systems: they should be diverse, adaptive, and self-organizing, accepting the ecological realities of change.
Community ecology and ecosystem ecology seem to have existed in different worlds. Levin (1989) suggests that the gulf between the two is the consequence of the different historical traditions in each. Community ecology, for example, emerged from basic studies, where generalized patterns were sought in the natural interactions among the biota. From the outset, the goal has been to deduce general and simple theory. On the other hand, many of the modelling approaches developed to understand ecosystem dynamics emerged from specific applied problems, where not only biotic but abiotic and human disturbances transformed ecosystem function. That tradition, therefore, is often more complete, but at the price of producing a collection of complex specific examples from which generalization is difficult.
Presents a conceptual framework that can help focus treatment of the contrasts between global and local behavior on the one hand and between continuous and discontinuous behavior on the other. Since that framework describes different perceptions of regulation and stability behavior, it provides the necessary background for a 2nd topic, which concerns the particular causative relations and processes within ecosystems, the influence of external variation on them and their dynamic behavior in time and space. A 3rd topic synthesizes present understanding of the structure and behavior of ecosystems in a way that has considerable generality and organizational power. A 4th connects that understanding to global phenomena on the one hand and local perception and action on the other. -from Author
Infrastructural Urbanism
- Stan Allen
Prolegomena to a New Urbanism
- Sanford Kwinter
Do Landscapes Learn? Ecology’s ‘New Paradigm’ and Design in Landscape Architecture,” Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium Series in the History of
- Robert E Cook