Abstract
The research presented in this article adopts an urban sociology perspective to explore the relationship between spaces designed with biophilic principles and people’s pro-environmental values and behaviors. The research hypothesized that biophilic design and planning promote connectedness with nature and are positively related to pro-environmental and more sustainable values and behaviors. The contemporary city asserts the need for new paradigms and conceptual frameworks for reconfiguring the relationship between the urban environment and the natural environment. In order to understand whether biophilic design, planning, and policies can meet the global challenges regarding the future existence on earth of humans, focus groups were conducted to investigate how people’s relationship with the built-up space and the natural landscape is perceived, and to what extent the inclusion of nature and its patterns at various levels of urban planning meets people’s expectations. The results suggest that biophilic design and planning can be considered a useful paradigm to deal with the challenges that are posed by the city of the future, also in terms of sustainability, by reinterpreting and enhancing the human–nature relation in the urban context.
Highlights
Since the 1990s, there has been growing awareness of the world as a single, integrated—yet fragile—system, and of the fact that most of the planet’s inhabitants live in cities
Even though they originated from the architectural determinism that shaped the relationship between sociology and urban planning since the 1960s, the biophilia hypotheses mark a change in perspective: this is both because they are based on a reconnection of humans with nature, and because they contribute to defining the contents of the green turn that characterizes the contemporary city with regard to the interventions on the urban fabric, i.e., of a theoretical and empirical approach in which the individual becomes the centerpiece of space and shapes it on the basis of his/her needs and city demands
In order to explore the relationship between spaces designed with biophilic principles and people’s pro-environmental values and behaviors, a qualitative investigation was conducted through 10 focus groups, each with between 8 and 14 participants aged between 35 and 75
Summary
Since the 1990s, there has been growing awareness of the world as a single, integrated—yet fragile—system, and of the fact that most of the planet’s inhabitants live in cities. Population growth and the consumption of natural resources are having an enormous impact on the environment. At this rate of growth, it is difficult to imagine that we can maintain the consumption and production levels of cities, without reformulating them to align with sustainable levels. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built” [1] In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built” [1] (p. 122)
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