Challenges for Landscape Architecture: Designed Urban Ecosystems and Social Acceptance

Emma Salizzoni

doi:10.3390/su13073914

Abstract

The creation of new ecosystems within urban contexts has undeniable benefits for city dwellers in terms of increased urban biodiversity and related provisioning of ecosystem services. However, designing new ecosystems in areas with a high population density or which are subject to intensive use may also generate negative impacts on the anthropic dimension and cause social conflicts that, in turn, can undermine the project’s effectiveness. This article focuses on the quite unexplored issue of anthropic “costs” that new urban ecosystems can generate, and on design and management challenges that they open up in terms of social acceptance. Landscape architecture, as a synthesis of ecological, aesthetic, and ethical aspects, seems to be the most appropriate framework for adopting a holistic approach to the design of new urban ecosystems. The article analyzes three Italian landscape architecture projects. All projects adopted spatial measures oriented at fostering perception, understanding, and acceptance of the recreated ecosystems, while preserving them from anthropic impacts. However, these efforts are sometimes jeopardized by a lack of concomitant operational measures, such as stakeholder involvement and site maintenance. Co-existence of delicate habitats and urban functions is thus not utopic but asks that projects effectively integrate ecological sciences, landscape design and management, as well as social-oriented practices.

Highlights

The multiple benefits that biodiversity in urban areas can deliver are widely acknowledged [1], to the extent that designing for urban biodiversity is becoming an increasingly compelling task [2,3]
This article focuses on this second category of design actions and on those projects that envisage the creation of new ecosystems—namely, “designed ecosystems” [4]—within urban or peri-urban areas
These projects are aimed at building specific systems of relationships between biotic and abiotic functions capable of hosting certain plant and animal habitats in highly developed contexts and delivering related ecosystem services

Summary

Introduction

The multiple benefits that biodiversity in urban areas can deliver are widely acknowledged [1], to the extent that designing for urban biodiversity is becoming an increasingly compelling task [2,3]. If anthropic benefits provided by newly recreated urban biodiversity areas are well known and undisputed [5], we cannot forget that, on the other side, the construction of new ecosystems in contexts with a high population density or which are subject to intensive use may generate negative impacts on the anthropic dimension [6] and cause social conflicts. This is a rather unexplored perspective both at the theoretical and at the practical level. This article would like to propose an inversion of the most consolidated points of views by focusing on the anthropic “costs” that the creation of new ecosystems in urban areas can generate and, on the design and management challenges that they can open up in terms of social acceptance

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion