Promoting Partnership between Urban Design and Urban Ecology through Social-Ecological Resilience Building

A closer partnership between urban design and urban ecology can yield new knowledge with the predictive advancement of both fields. However, achieving such partnership is not always a straight-forward process due to different epistemological departures. This chapter provides a rudimentary background of the fields of urban design and urban ecology and familiarizes readers with some epistemological characteristics that are useful to consider in all forms of partnership activities between designers and ecologists. Social-ecological resilience offers a useful framework for inquiry of particular relevance for urban transition at a time when global societal challenges of massive biodiversity loss and climate change require urgent attention and where wicked environmental problems require creative urban tinkering. Such a framework could open up for more dynamic research approaches with a greater potential to bridge the gap between design and ecology that has tended to be dominated by relatively static design approaches in the past, ignoring a more non-linear understanding of the interconnectedness of social and ecological systems. The chapter ends by focusing on some important determinants for cooperation and dealing with ‘Research Through Design(ing)’ as a viable methodology for transition to urban sustainability.