Abstract
Rapid urbanization in many parts of the world has increasingly put the environment under pressure, with natural landscapes cleared to make way for built infrastructure. Urban ecosystems, and the services that they provide, can offer nature-based solutions to the challenges of urbanization. There is increasing interest in better incorporating ecosystems into urban planning and design in order to deliver greater provision of ecosystem services and enhance urban liveability. However, there are few examples of built or proposed urban developments that have been designed specifically with ecosystem services in mind–partly because there are few modeling tools available to support urban planners and designers by informing their design workflows. Through using Singapore’s latest nature-centric town as a case study, this article assesses the impacts of nature-based solutions in urban design on ecosystem services performance, through a spatially explicit modeling approach. The proposed future scenario for the nature-centric town was projected to result in substantial declines in the provision of all ecosystem services, as a result of the removal of large areas of natural vegetation cover. However, the future scenario compared favourably against three older towns that have been constructed in Singapore, showing the best performance for four out of six ecosystem services. This simulation exercise indicates that designing towns with ecosystem services in mind, and incorporating nature-based solutions into urban design, can help to achieve enhanced performance in providing ecosystem services. The models developed for this study have been made publicly available for use in other tropical cities.
Highlights
The world is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate, with the United Nations projecting that 68% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas by 2050 (United Nations, 2018)
The proposed Tengah redevelopment was modeled to result in reduced ecosystem service provision in relation to retaining runoff, reducing air temperatures, absorbing PM10 particulate matter, reducing road traffic noise, and protecting soil from potential soil erosion (Figure 6)
It was not possible to compare the accessibility of nature spaces to the public quantitatively using the models, because the region of Tengah is currently inaccessible to the public and has been for several decades
Summary
The world is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate, with the United Nations projecting that 68% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas by 2050 (United Nations, 2018). Through designing greener urban areas with contrasting types of green spaces, it may be possible to provide nature-based solutions to some of the challenges of urbanization (Depietri and McPhearson, 2017; Babí Almenar et al, 2021). Despite the significant impact that urban designs have on the ecosystem services provided by a landscape, efforts to design urban areas with ecosystem services performance in mind have often been inadequate or overlooked (Heyman et al, 2019). Even in cases where urban designs have attempted to improve ecosystem services, a lack of simulation tools has prevented quantitative feedback between ecologists and architects, to determine whether such designs are likely to perform as intended (Andreu and Oreszczyn, 2004). There is a need to evaluate the effectiveness of new, “nature-based” urban design scenarios in contributing to ecosystem services performance (Richards et al, 2019)
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