An Ecology for Cities: A Transformational Nexus of Design and Ecology to Advance Climate Change Resilience and Urban Sustainability

Daniel Childers,Steward Pickett,Brian Mcgrath,Mary Cadenasso,J Grove,Victoria Marshall

doi:10.3390/su7043774

Abstract

Cities around the world are facing an ever-increasing variety of challenges that seem to make more sustainable urban futures elusive. Many of these challenges are being driven by, and exacerbated by, increases in urban populations and climate change. Novel solutions are needed today if our cities are to have any hope of more sustainable and resilient futures. Because most of the environmental impacts of any project are manifest at the point of design, we posit that this is where a real difference in urban development can be made. To this end, we present a transformative model that merges urban design and ecology into an inclusive, creative, knowledge-to-action process. This design-ecology nexus—an ecology for cities—will redefine both the process and its products. In this paper we: (1) summarize the relationships among design, infrastructure, and urban development, emphasizing the importance of joining the three to achieve urban climate resilience and enhance sustainability; (2) discuss how urban ecology can move from an ecology of cities to an ecology for cities based on a knowledge-to-action agenda; (3) detail our model for a transformational urban design-ecology nexus, and; (4) demonstrate the efficacy of our model with several case studies.

Highlights

We argue that an integrated design-ecology nexus has the potential to stimulate a new era of sustainable urban development based in novel systems of deliberative decision-making and governance
As did Tanner et al [16], that the best strategy for moving in this direction is for the urban design process to expand beyond the realm of engineers and planners in order to include urban ecologists, landscape architects, and deliberative decision-making and governance
Cities of all forms would benefit from the transformative nexus of ecology and design that we propose here in order to advance climate change resilience and enhance future sustainability

Summary

Introduction

Many sustainability plans tend to have a narrow focus on existing “hard” infrastructures (e.g., transportation, water supply, and sanitary and stormwater treatment systems) and on “low hanging fruit” green infrastructures (e.g., parks and public trees [30,31,32]) These plans have rarely been integrated into the smaller-scale neighborhood approach of contemporary urban design practice [33,34]. Because green and blue infrastructure features take advantage of natural structures and ecological processes, they are surprisingly adaptable to a changing future, and impart resilience to urban systems far more than do inertia-bound gray infrastructures. Green and blue infrastructure are familiar concepts and features of cities These two terms, and color designations, delineate services provided by terrestrial versus aquatic urban ecological features and ecosystems.

Moving from an Ecology of Cities to an Ecology for Cities

A Model for Transforming the Urban Design-Ecology Nexus

Examples of Challenges and Successes

Goodyear AZ USA

Baltimore MD USA

Summary