Abstract
The research presented in this paper is a work in progress. It provides linkages between the author’s earlier research under the sustainable land planning framework (SLP) and emergent ideas and planning and design strategies, centered on the (landscape) ecological dimension of cities’ sustainability. It reviews several concepts, paradigms, and metaphors that have been emerging during the last decade, which can contribute to expand our vision on city planning and design. Among other issues, city form—monocentric, polycentric, and diffused—is discussed. The hypothesis set forth is that cities can improve the pathway to sustainability by adopting intermediate, network urban forms such as polycentric urban systems (PUS) under a broader vision (as compared to the current paradigm), to make way to urban ecological regions. It discusses how both the principles of SLP and those emergent ideas can contribute to integrate PUS with their functional hinterland, adopting an ecosystemic viewpoint of cities. It proposes to redirect the current dominant economic focus of PUS to include all of the other functions that are essential to urbanites, such as production (including the 3Rs), recreation, and ecology in a balanced way. Landscape ecology principles are combined with complexity science in order to deal with uncertainty to improve regional systems’ resilience. Cooperation in its multiple forms is seen as a fundamental social, but also economic process contributing to the urban network functioning, including its evolving capabilities for self-organization and adaptation.
Highlights
The research presented in this paper is a work in progress
Urban metabolism is a metaphor that looks at the city as a system, which requires inputs and outputs; if we look at it as an organism, it requires food and other resources, e.g., water, energy, materials, etc. and releases the byproducts of its metabolism to the environment, i.e. waste
I finish this section by stating “Axelrod’s (1984) principles of cooperation (...)—co-operation can get started by even a small cluster of players who are prepared to reciprocate, can thrive even in a world where no one else will cooperate and can protect itself once established—so long as the co-operation is based on reciprocity and the shadow of the future is important enough to make this reciprocity stable” [108]
Summary
Exponential growth of the world population has occurred only for the last 100 years, where it more than quadrupled: 1.6 billion in 1900, 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1975, 5 billion in. In the last decade several concepts, metaphors, and paradigms have been emerging, which can contribute to expand our vision on city planning and design Some of those described below have been approached in earlier publications of the author [24,33,34,35,38,39,40], further developed and or summarized for the purpose of this section: holism and systems thinking; autonomy or self-reliance; urban metabolism; ecological footprint; uncertainty; adaptation; redundancy; the “form and function”. Among these is auto- or self-organization and emergent properties; panarchies, resilience, regime shifts and critical transitions; variability; social ecological systems (SESs); ecosystem services, and landscape as a service matrix; sustainable regionalism; safe-to-fail; and translational research
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